What could possibly go wrong?
Find out in a pre-mortem workshop
So, you’re planning an amazing new thing—maybe a project, partnership, or new product. Let’s call it your new initiative. Now, imagine you launched it and it failed. That’s the premise for a ‘pre-mortem’ workshop.
This workshop typically lasts a couple of hours, during which you work backwards from imagined-but-plausible failure scenarios to identify how to prevent them.
The first step is to assemble a diverse group with different perspectives on the initiative, but who are all familiar with the plans. Let them know that they are now ‘in the future’ and the initiative has failed. Either at this stage or in the meeting invite, it can be helpful to point out that this exercise is not ‘negative’ but rather an inventive method for mapping risks and how to avoid them.
The participants then spend some time, silent and solo, noting down the possible reasons for this future failure (ideally on sticky notes, one failure per note). It might take them a few minutes to get into the ‘in the future’ headspace. Encourage people to be specific about the failures and to assume that everything that can go wrong, has gone wrong.
Next, everyone shares their reasons for failure, each person reading out one reason (but not repeating any that have already been stated) and continuing around the group until all the reasons (the sticky notes) are on the wall. Once these are shared, the group organises the reasons into clusters or categories, noting which failures are:
externally driven or beyond the team’s control (new competitor, tech failure etc)
somewhat or completely within the team’s control
From among the failures where the team has at least some control, the team picks the 6-8 most likely reasons for failure. This pick can be made by discussion or by dot voting, or by a decider, if one is designated (more on dot voting).
In the next steps the team focuses on how these failure scenarios can be avoided. One way to approach this step over the course of an hour or so, is to go through the 6-8 likely failures in rapid fire, one by one. For each likely failure:
give participants 1-2 minutes silent and solo to jot down ideas for overcoming the failure
share and discuss these ideas for 6-8 minutes
move on to the next failure and repeat
At the end, the group can identify which teams, individuals or functions seem to have a role in preventing the failures. The leader for the initiative can then take the insights from the pre-mortem and begin instituting actions to prevent failure.
Have you every tried a pre-mortem? What initiatives do you have going right now that could benefit from one?