How to Conduct a Pre-Mortem
“It’s six months from now and our plan to implement a new ERP system/change our compensation structure/develop brand partnerships has failed spectacularly and embarrassingly. How did this happen?”
It’s counterintuitive, but asking this question in the middle of the excitement of a kickoff meeting can be one of the most powerful ways to prevent having to ask it in the middle of a crisis.
Everybody wants to have a failsafe crystal ball – especially when you’re considering putting your and your small business’s limited resources, time, and energy toward a project you’ve already spent months or even years planning. But many tools for analyzing decision-making come after the project has already gone over the cliff’s edge (postmortem analysis or cognitive after action reviews) or seem inauthentic (playing devil’s advocate) or require too much time and preparation to be useful on a regular basis (red teaming).
Enter the pre-mortem. Developed by Gary Klein in the 1980s and used in organizations ranging from fire stations to investment firms, the pre-mortem brings important, path-critical, issues that may otherwise go unnoticed to the forefront before the plan is put into action.
Here are the basics:
Assemble the team. A pre-mortem can happen any time before the project actually leaves the ground. Many organizations choose to do it at the kickoff meeting for a project (done right, it’s really not as depressing as it sounds). The point is to bring together all the people who know about and have a stake in executing a particular plan.
Imagine failure. Ask your version of the question at the top of this post. You’re asking your team to imagine that the project has already failed. This framing is key – the switch to “Why has it failed?” instead of “Why might it fail?” unleashes different risks and pitfalls that might not have been considered otherwise.
And write it down. Give the team two minutes to write down all the reasons they can think of that the plan would have gone wrong.
List the reasons out loud. Starting with the project lead, have each person list one reason the project went wrong. It’s important for the project lead to start because they’re going to set the tone for candor, creativity, and seriousness of the discussion. Then, continue around with “What’s a reason you have on your list that hasn’t been mentioned yet?” This framing requires everyone (senior and junior team members, introverts and extraverts, newbies and veterans) to voice concerns they may have been too scared to bring up before, forces a democratic discussion, and ensures that no one hogs the time or relaxes into silence.
Dissect the findings. What assumptions did we make that turned out to be false? What risks did we fail to identify? What factors were outside of our control? What dependencies did we overlook? What communication breakdowns occurred?
Find the light. Take another two minutes and write down what you – as an individual and as a team – could do to prevent these things from occurring. It mitigates the hangover from all the things that could lead to failure and gives concrete direction to replanning.
Replan. The project lead compiles all this information, sorts through it, rethinks risks, and assigns solutions and deadlines. Maybe there’s another pre-mortem round before the plan goes into effect, or maybe you check in with the first one throughout the project implementation.
What It Takes
There’s nuance to doing a pre-mortem right. The structure matters. Problem reframing helps you find flaws in a plan not by focusing on what might go wrong with the plan but by assuming the plan has already failed. Diversity of opinion, role, and experience is more likely to produce an exhaustive and creative list of potential problems. Trust means people feel they have permission to criticize without fear of retribution. It also promotes openness, which prevents confirmation bias and a reversion to well-trod ground. And a sense of urgency promotes creativity and response spontaneity without stalling out (for reference, steps 1-6 above shouldn’t take more than 30 minutes).
And doing a pre-mortem successfully can have effects well beyond the exercise itself. It reduces overconfidence and brings some humility to the planning process, it changes the culture to be more open to candor from the get-go, it instills new thoughtfulness into the planning process, and it makes the group smarter by providing access to different ways of seeing the world and approaching problems.
We’ve already staked our claim that things rarely go according to plan. And, we still think that’s true. But the companion to that is that planning is valuable. Conducting a pre-mortem takes courage, but it’s also a resource-, energy-, and time-effective way to turn some of the unknown unknowns into known unknowns.