About PreMortems

My favourite workshop is rooted in pessimism - but saves the day.

I love PreMortems workshops and I try to host sessions in every project or business I am involved in.

For the uninitiated, a Pre-Mortem is kinda the opposite of … well you’ve surely heard of a post-mortem. We all benefit from the knowledge we get from a post-mortem, but in the case of failed business initiatives, we’ve lost time, resources and opportunities in that failure.

The idea of a pre-mortem is to try to run through the failure-analysis process before the project/product/venture actually fails.

In other words premortems (and their cousins inversions) do not try to help you succeed, but instead help you avoid failure.?

How does it work? You gather a team that's working on the project, ideally with some members outside of the team as well. You describe the initiative in question and get the team to imagine it failed and give them some time (say 20-30 mins) to write down as many ideas as they can about why it failed. You get the team back and you visit the list together. Purpose of this is not to critique, or to give any answers to the voiced concerns. Just to take them all in.

Why do it?

Avoid groupthink: The Bay of Pigs Invasion in 1961, authorised by JFK, was a failed attempt to overthrow Fidel's government in Cuba, leading to significant embarrassment and heightened Cold War tensions. The decision-making process was marred by groupthink -? Kennedy's advisors echoed each other, overestimating the plan's chance of success. Following the debacle, Kennedy became far more focused on risk mitigation, encouraging open debate and diverse viewpoints to avoid similar failures in the future (evident in his handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Encourage Open Communication: Nobody wants to be a party pooper. When a team/leader is excited about a project, it’s hard to voice concerns. Premortems ASK YOU to voice concerns, so team members feel comfortable speaking out.

Improve Contingency Planning: By anticipating potential issues, teams develop contingency plans and allocate resources more effectively to mitigate risks.

Enhance Decision-Making: The insights gained from a premortem can inform better decision-making, helping to refine the product, adjust launch strategies, or even reconsider the launch altogether if significant risks are identified

Doing a PreMortem with Filisia

The team at Cosmo by Filisia is working on a new product, so I jumped at the opportunity to do a PreMortem and introduce the tool to members of the team.

Here's how our doom-and-gloom party went down:

In just half an hour, we came up with 79 reasons our new product could fail. The pitfalls made us wonder: Will our existing sales channels work for this new product? How will it affect our brand? How does it affect pricing of our existing products? Is our hardware up to the challenge? What resources do we need to create? How will we compare against competition? Is this worth doing at all? and many more.

Diversity dividends Our new team members from India brought fresh perspectives that our Europe-based team hadn't considered ?? ??.

From gloom to Action Plan - After the session I gathered the different concerns, clustered them in themes and had a first stab at risk weighting. I've been giddy about the product so it was a pretty sobering exercise. Next up will be doing the risk weighting with the team and coming up with assumption-testing and mitigation strategies.

Premortems are fun and lead to stronger propositions, with fewer surprises and less drama. I definitely recommend them.