Pre-mortem

Pre-mortem is a tool that utilizes the prospective hindsight concept.

Prospective Hindsight is a way to look forward by looking backward. You assume you have already reached the point of a few years from now, and try to figure out why certain things happened.

Pre-mortem is a close cousin of postmortem. Postmortem is used by medical doctors to understand why they failed after the patient passes away.

Gary Klein took the postmortem one step further and adapted it to managerial situations, hence the Pre-mortem methodology. Daniel Kahneman made it popular in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow.

My version of Pre-mortem is the following.

After you finalize your project plan, and everything is ready for kick-off, gather your management team and all the core people that were part of the knowledge base of the project. Do it on Friday evening, just one hour before the end of the workday.

Clear mobiles, laptops and other disturbing machines from the room.

Each person gets: one bottle of beer, a sheet of paper, and a pencil.

Here is your pitch:

“Ladies and gentlemen, today is (give a date three years from now). The project has failed. Furthermore, it puts our company at risk. Period.

Now you have a budget of seven minutes and one bottle of beer.

Please, write the chronology of this failure; all the things that caused this dramatic failure. MOVE.”

After seven minutes, gather the papers and thank the participants.

You then take the papers and read them carefully at home. Read and reread until you fully expose yourself to the new insights your colleagues have shared with you.

At a glance, this encapsulates the entire body of knowledge of the project's shortcomings and disadvantages: what are the causes of this dramatic failure?

Next Monday morning, you gather the same group: a sheet of paper and pencil for each participant. No beer…

Ask them to articulate the program, taking into account what they wrote on Friday evening. Give them one hour. Collect the papers and thank them.

Now you have a fine springboard to re-examine the project.

The reason to do it is pretty simple: while preparing new projects under your strong leadership, all the doubts, critics, annoying facts and unpopular standpoints are moved to the side.

Your team can develop group thinking, which is very dangerous when preparing the knowledge base for the new project. In Pre-mortem you give a “license” for this negativism about the project, or parts of it.

Daniel Kahneman said that executives find this extremely beneficial to them.