Post-mortems, in real life

Some time ago, in one of the blogs on my ‘roll (I think Jenny D or Oh, Snap!), I read a bit about medical postmortems and a desire for such brutal honesty in education on where failures occur and what could be changed. (If you can point me to the blog in a comment, I’ll correct this entry to give proper credit.) According to acquaintance hawklady, the National Weather Service Katrina postmortem (PDF) is another example of professional honesty, this time in a brutally public sense. It’s hard for someone other than a wxgeek to parse out the reflections in the postmortem, but I have to respect the honesty here.