> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.rootly.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.
# The Best Practice Template
> Rootly's default retrospective template: seven sections built from incident patterns and resilience engineering research, in AI and non-AI variants.
## Overview
Every new Rootly account starts with the **Best Practice** retrospective template as its default. It is not a neutral scaffold — it is Rootly's opinion about what a good retrospective looks like, distilled from patterns across the millions of incidents managed in Rootly and grounded in resilience engineering research.
The template is deliberately short: seven sections, each either pre-filled from incident data or a small, clearly scoped ask. Every section carries inline help text explaining why it exists, and a preamble at the top explains the reasoning behind the structure — so the template teaches good retrospective practice while you fill it in.
It ships in two matching variants: a non-AI variant where dynamic sections render from incident data, and an AI variant where [Rootly AI blocks](/ai/ai-in-retrospectives/overview) draft the narrative sections for you. Both have identical structure.
***
## Why This Is Best Practice
Most shipped retrospective templates are a conventional SRE postmortem shell: Leadup, Fault, Root Cause, Lessons Learned. The Best Practice template deliberately breaks from that shape in three ways:
* **Contributing factors, not a single root cause.** Real incidents almost always have several conditions that had to be true at once — a latent bug, a monitoring gap, a risky deploy window. A single "root cause" is usually just where the analysis stopped, and in practice it drifts toward implicit blame. Asking for factors, explicitly plural, keeps the analysis honest and blame-free.
* **What went well is a first-class question.** Your response capability — the fast page, the responder who knew where to look, the runbook that held up — is worth understanding and reinforcing, not just the failure. A retrospective that only studies what broke throws away half the learning.
* **The timeline is an appendix, not the story.** The auto-generated timeline is the *record*; the retrospective is the *narrative*. Leading with a wall of timestamps buries the thinking. The Best Practice template puts the story first and moves the timeline to the end, trimmed to key events.
Underneath all three is a blameless stance: if "human error" looks like the answer, the real finding is the system that let one mistake matter. The template's structure, help text, and (in the AI variant) generation instructions all enforce that framing.
The template is also deliberately short. Long, ambiguous templates go unfilled at scale — seven sections, most of them pre-filled or tightly scoped, is a retrospective a team will actually complete.
***
## The Seven Sections
| Section | What it asks for | Why it exists |
| :----------------------- | :------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | :---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| **Key Information** | A pre-filled metadata table: incident ID, severity, services, detection source, and key timestamps with time-to-detect and time-to-mitigate. | The facts should cost nothing to capture. The ask is verification, not authoring. |
| **What Happened** | The narrative from the responders' perspective — including wrong first theories and dead ends. | The story of how the team *experienced* the incident is where the learning lives, and dead ends are data, not embarrassments. |
| **Impact** | Who and what was affected, for how long — quantified and unspun. | An honest impact statement anchors the rest of the document and may be shared externally. |
| **Contributing Factors** | The conditions that had to be true for the incident to happen — explicitly plural. | Replaces root cause and 5-whys framing. Multiple factors keep the analysis honest and blame-free. |
| **Learnings** | What went well and what was learned — capabilities worth reinforcing and hidden assumptions exposed. | Resilience comes from understanding what worked, not just what broke. |
| **Follow-Up Actions** | Owned, dated, prioritized actions, rendered from the incident's action items. | Unowned, undated items quietly expire. |
| **Appendix: Timeline** | The auto-generated timeline table, trimmed to key events. | The timeline is the record, not the story — it belongs at the end, as evidence. |
***
## The Two Variants
The template resolves automatically based on your AI settings — no configuration needed:
| Your AI retrospectives setting | Default template variant |
| :----------------------------- | :------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| **Off** | Non-AI variant: Key Information, Timeline, and Follow-Up Actions render from incident data via Liquid; narrative sections are guided by inline help text. |
| **On** | AI variant: identical structure, with [AI blocks](/ai/ai-in-retrospectives/using-ai-blocks) drafting What Happened, Impact, Contributing Factors, Learnings, and Follow-Up Actions from the incident's data, Slack channel, and bridge-call transcripts. |
If the AI toggle flips after account creation, the next retrospective uses the matching variant. Existing retrospective documents are never modified.
### The Blameless Instruction Set
The AI variant ships with its **Instructions for Rootly AI** pre-set to Rootly's blameless generation rules: ground every statement in what actually happened, label confirmed facts versus suspicions, avoid hindsight framing, and refer to roles rather than naming individuals. Every AI block in the template inherits these rules, so the draft your team starts from is blameless by default — not as a policy your team has to remember, but as shipped behavior.
***
## Where You'll See It
* **New accounts and trials** — Best Practice is the default template from day one. Your first retrospective uses it without any setup.
* **The AI template list** — with AI retrospectives enabled, Best Practice is pinned first with a recommendation badge on the **Retrospectives → Document Templates** page. It replaces the previous Standard Incident starter as Rootly's recommendation.
* **Existing accounts** — nothing changes automatically. Your current default, templates, and documents are untouched. Adopt Best Practice whenever you like by selecting it from the template list.
***
## Frequently Asked Questions
Standard Incident was removed from the list of Rootly-provided starters — Best Practice is its replacement, and offering both would send a confusing message about which one Rootly stands behind. If your organization already created a template from Standard Incident, you keep it: nothing is deleted, and retrospectives created from it are unaffected. It only leaves the offered list.
No. The Best Practice default applies to newly created accounts only. Existing accounts keep their current default, their templates, and every existing document exactly as they are. Best Practice appears in your template list as an option to adopt when you're ready.
Yes — duplicate it and edit the copy however you like: add sections, remove them, change the help text, adjust the AI instructions. The original stays available (and pinned, with AI retrospectives on) as the reference version.
The default resolves automatically: the next retrospective created uses the variant matching your current setting. Nothing retroactive happens — existing documents are never regenerated or modified.
***
## Related Pages
Create your own templates with Liquid, data blocks, and AI blocks.
The AI block palette and how to preview a template against a past incident.
The practice behind the template: contributing factors, blameless narratives, and sharing the learnings.