The only risk tool you’ll ever need: do a pre-mortem now

One delay on a project doesn’t scupper it. Unless you’re in the business of train travel. When work further down the line affects your own team’s flow, and it’s happening unknown to you, and new technologies don’t quite fit within the old system, you can very quickly pay a hefty price. And yet, you could have avoided all of that pain, by asking one simple question.

As summer ends, we enter the inevitable phase of transport-related headline stories here in Blighty. The trainspotter in me enjoyed reading John Bull’s dissection of the Christmas travel woes incurred as a result of otherwise ‘normal’ festive engineering works a couple of years ago. For those outside the UK and insulated from this local news, thousands of trains and tens of thousands of passengers experienced horrendous delays and cancellations at one of London’s key railway stations as a result of engineering works running over. And it’s an almost annual occurrence, with lessons for anyone leading a project or organisation.

Bull’s post outlines a series of poor management and leadership decisions, mostly based on the challenge of predicting likely scenarios in the hours and days ahead. Leaders in every walk of life face similar prediction challenges.

But as I read this I wondered where my own red flag would have appeared. What about you?

Many of these issues are related to the “second horizon” of implementing a great idea.

The Three Horizons

The First Horizon is where you seek out the problems worth solving.

The Third Horizon is where you then design a large number of potential solutions to the problems you’ve found.

The Second Horizon is where you ask: “How will we do this?”

If you’re wanting big audacious ideas in your team, it is at this point, the Second Horizon, that you might undertake an activity, such as the ‘pre-mortem’, to test for potential failure points. But, if you’re in a more cautious environment, the pre-mortem can be applied at the very beginning, during the problem-selection process of the First Horizon (“which problem is least likely to get our innovation programme shut down from day one”).

What is the pre-mortem? It’s one question. That’s it:

“This is a great idea: now what are all the things that could wrong with it?”

A pre-mortem should lead to a discussion, not a report — leave that to the risk analysis Prince2 types. It should be quick, and a routine that you get into any time a new idea is proposed. It should be verbal — a discussion had in front of the whole team, not hidden in the leadership suite. Only by keeping the format of a pre-mortem light, will you gain the confidence of the team around you that this is not, in fact, a method for killing off great ideas early.

Strategies like the pre-mortem are detailed in my book: How To Come Up With Great Ideas And Actually Make Them Happen. It kind of does what it says on the cover.

This is a version of a blog post originally published at edu.blogs.com on January 26, 2015, amended to add context.