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Mental Time Travel

One of the questions I often ask business owners as they make decisions about how to invest their time and resources is:

Imagine we’re having this conversation in the future, and you failed to achieve this objective. What’s most likely to have stopped you?

This mental time traveling exercise can help business owners set more realistic targets and avoid future problems. For example, if you know you want to overhaul your website – but you know you have a major project due for a client, and you have a history of putting off writing marketing copy, and you have vacation booked…. You can easily see what might lead to failure.

It doesn’t mean you can’t succeed, but you might need to adjust your plan – in that example, the business owner might want to engage an external resource to do some of the heavy lifting, find an accountability buddy to keep their writing on track, and carve out a couple of time blocks on their calendar well in advance.

How a Premortem Can Increase Your Odds of Success

Thanks to Annie Duke’s excellent book Thinking In Bets, I now have a name for this line of questioning. She calls it a premortem, or a detailed plan of what failure would look like. Where a postmortem takes a result and looks back to learn from what happened, a premortem takes an imaginary failure and looks back to see what could have been done differently.

Visualizing failure is a strategy that’s at odds with the usual advice to visualize success, harness positive thinking, and somehow manifest your desired result. Don’t get me wrong – having a positive vision of the future that’s pulling you into action and keeping you motivated is essential. But taking a few minutes to visualize failure dramatically increases your odds of hitting your target.

This Week’s Takeaway

Take the most ambitious target you’re currently working toward. By when do you expect to achieve it? Imagine yourself on that exact date, having failed to reach your goal. What mistakes did you make? What circumstances limited you? And how can you adapt your current plan to increase your odds of success?

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