A Pre-Mortem is a strategic planning activity that imagines a project has failed. This type of thinking helps to identify and mitigate risks early on in the planning phase.
Exploring the worst-case scenario is traced to great Stoic philosophers, like Seneca, who called it the premeditation of evils, “premeditatio malorum”.
What is quite unlooked for is more crushing in its effect, and unexpectedness adds to the weight of a disaster. This is a reason for ensuring that nothing ever takes us by surprise. We should project our thoughts ahead of us at every turn and have in mind every possible eventuality instead of only the usual course of events.
~ Seneca
Adding the Pre-Mortem technique to your planning toolkit will help you project your thoughts ahead, comprehensively assess the challenges to a project and adapt your plans.
I have developed a set of Pre-Mortem worksheets for you to take away. It outlines all of the steps you need to follow and provides a clear structure. Before you finish make sure you subscribe and grab a copy.
👉 Jump to the download link for the worksheets.
Improve Your Planning
One of the biggest challenges to a successful project is the quality of planning. A plan is weaker when it overemphasises a positive outcome. A Pre-Mortem activity helps to balance this outlook by allowing time and space to explore failure scenarios.
If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail!
Benjamin Franklin
However, it is not negativity for its own sake. We are not simply amplifying the negative voices in a group or the whinges.
The structured Pre-Mortem process steps through how to explore each scenario, identify the causes and outlines methods that respond to each potential risk.
Prospective Hindsight
Instead of being reactive to problems, in this activity, you will use the thought experiment: Prospective Hindsight. You might even be able actually to say you are going “back to the future”.
Prospective Hindsight is casting our mind forward into a future time and then imagining what we might have wished we had learned by looking back.
Hindsight is a wonderful thing
William Blake
Prospecting is a powerful imaginative disposition when working with any strategic planning and is something I use frequently.
- “I can imagine a time when we …”
- “It is clear that in the future we might be…”
- “When this is in place the benefits are likely to be…”
Strategic planning is all about prospecting, to imagine a future scenario – what Prospective Hindsight does is explore and recognise the risks and issues that might occur.
When and Who
To gain the most benefit, use the Pre-Mortem exercise with your core team at an early stage of the project planning. Potential risks and issues that you uncover may need time and resources to address.
The Pre-Mortem is a planning activity, and so unsurprisingly, it needs to occur during planning. The outcomes of the task feed into your project planning.
Instead of a post-mortem, when we look back on what went wrong, we establish this reflective practice even before the project has started.
Gather a core team who have a clear understanding of the proposed project plans so far. The outcome should be relatively straightforward and agreed upon; time should be spent exploring the risks, not what the project is about.
Disposition and Mindset
Establishing the right mindset is essential to the success of the Pre-Mortem: open to sharing risks and identifying responses to those risks.
Explicitly discussing the potential failure scenarios is a challenging type of talk. Our positive bias, especially for a project we have invested in, means we don’t like to be deliberately negative.
This deliberate and strategic negativity is a strategic muscle we are not often activating.
The Pre-Mortem also requires us to grapple with increasing uncertainty and ambiguity. This is a delicate balance and might need strong facilitation. Our tolerance for uncertainty is an indicator of our creativity.
Pre-Mortem Worksheets
Works Well With
Below I have outlined a range of other methodologies and mental models that the Pre-Mortem complements.
Playing the Devil’s Advocate
This activity works well with other mental models and planning exercises. Playing the Devil’s Advocate is something many of us have experienced.
It is a subjective version of the Pre-Mortem. An individual takes it upon themselves to imagine that something might go wrong.
The problem with that interjection is that the approach and disposition are often not mirrored by others in the group. A genuine insight might be discarded because others do not want to think negatively or are not ready for more uncertainty.
A Pre-Mortem brings the whole group into that thinking at the same time – that is its strength.
The Tenth Person Rule
The Tenth Person Rule is the deliberate opposition to a decision when everyone else agrees. If everyone else is saying “Yes”, the tenth person (or the last) is ethically bound to say “No”.
This opposition, regardless of personal belief, instigates further debate and challenge. The outcome is more coherent due to that conjecture, even if it remains the same.
The task of the Tenth Man is to explore alternative assumptions and worst-case scenarios…to challenge conventional and received wisdom. The aim is to look at things creatively, independently, and from a fresh perspective, to engage actively with and to reconsider the status quo.
How Israeli intelligence failures led to a ‘devil’s advocate’ role
The Tenth Person Rule was popularised by the film World War Z and had some real connections to approaches within Israeli Military Intelligence.
The Reversal Method
The Pre-Mortem activity works well with this creative thinking method as they both help create a new perspective.
The Reversal Method is a lateral thinking tool that encourages us to change how we think about a problem. In Lateral Thinking, Edward De Bono explains it might be used for the following reasons:
- To escape from the absolute necessity to look at the situation in the standard way.
- By disrupting the original way of looking at the situation one frees information that can come together in a new way.
- The main purpose is provocation. By making the reversal one moves to a new position. Then one sees what happens.
SWOT Analysis
A SWOT Analysis is a standard managerial and leadership model used during planning and review. SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Obstacles and Threats.
The Pre-Mortem focuses its lens on Threats in a much more systematic way than the SWOT Analysis. These two methods would complement each other well.
Running a Pre-Mortem activity could be done to create the outcomes linked and included in a comprehensive SWOT for a project.
De Bono’s 6 Thinking Hats
These parallel thinking processes fit into six key areas. The Black Hat type of thinking is most relevant to the Pre-Mortem exercise. We want Pre-Mortem participants to do Black Hat thinking:
The Black Hat is judgment – the devil’s advocate or why something may not work. Spot the difficulties and dangers; things might go wrong — probably the most powerful and valuable of the Hats but a problem if overused.
What balances the planning process is the use of Green Hat thinking once potential risks are identified. A team would explore new ideas to address the problems identified during the Pre-Mortem.
The Green Hat focuses on creativity, possibilities, alternatives, and new ideas. It’s an opportunity to express new concepts and new perceptions.
Further Reading
- Gray, D. (2011). Pre-Mortem – Gamestorming.
- Atlassian. (2019). How to Run a Project Premortem Exercise with your Team.
- Harvard Business Review. (2007). Performing a Project Premortem.
- Wikipedia. (2019). Pre-mortem.
- Delisle, J. (2019). Pre-mortem: an effective tool to avoid failure.
- UserVoice Blog. (2016). 13 Questions to Ask in a Product Pre-Mortem
- Team, T. and Team, T. (2018). Pre-Mortem and Post-Mortem Analysis | The Redbooth Blog.
- Jager, C. and Grubesic, T. (2015). Plan More Effectively With The ‘Tenth Man Rule’.
- De Bono, E. (1992). The use of lateral thinking. 5th ed. London: Penguin.