Your Project was a Failure — but why?
Your prediction is probably wrong. Find out why before you start.
There is a trend that has been around for a while in areas of management, it is called the pre-mortem. First spoken about by Gary Klein in a 2007 HBR article he introduces the concept of asking your team to diagnose what went wrong when their project spectacularly failed — before they’d even launched.
Different from a post-mortem (or after-action review), which uses all the evidence to work backwards and find the medical cause of death. A pre-mortem uses the whole teams gut-feeling, intuition, and withheld reservations to identify weaknesses in the execution plan.
If this is done right your team can either design out those flaws and strengthen areas of weakness, or they can develop strategies to cope with the identified failure points. But how do you run a pre-mortem? Let me tell you.
Predicting the Future
Humans are notoriously bad at predicting the future. We are overly optimistic, we believe that the things that have happened previously are a complete set of what could happen in the…
