Don’t Wait to Postmortem the Plan-

-When you can Pre-mortem now.

You have a plan.  Imagine it’s three to five years in the future and your plan failed.  Start with three questions:

1.  If this goes wrong, why will it have failed?

2.  What should we be talking about?

3. Why aren’t we talking about it?

This is different from risk-assessment.  Risk assessments often focus on external factors.  Do your risk assessment, but do the pre-mortem because it forces you to focus on the internals –team dynamics, communication, organizational culture, etc.  Those three questions can spawn myriad additional questions that need to be navigated.  

Ultimately, for the pre-mortem to work, everyone must want success more than they want to avoid discomfort.  

If you want to test drive the concept, try pre-morteming one of your own personal plans or goals.  What comes up?  Let me know how it goes.

Credit to “The Curiosity Shop” podcast hosted by Brene Brown and Adam Grant for introducing this concept to me.  In the Marine Corps, we called a version of this “wargaming*,” but I like the pre-mortem's internal focus even better.

Find a Way,

Ryan

* “Murder-boarding” was an unofficial term I heard more senior officers use to describe the schoolhouse critique of a peer’s plan.  If that doesn’t flag how a culture views feedback, I don’t know what does.