Premortems are a great idea that will get people to mock your vocabulary

Your first day out of MBA school, full of zeal and new vocabulary

The single biggest problem you’re going to face is looking your colleagues in the eye and saying “I think we should premortem this!” After you’ve overcome the self-loathing from saying such corporate jargon, premortems can be powerful tools (and quite fun).

The “premortem” idea comes from Gary Klein and should sound familiar to anyone who has tried postmortems. When you’re getting close to a significant decision, are concerned about overconfidence, and want to increase the chances of success, invert the meeting with these words:

For the next 15 minutes, I want us to imagine it’s November and the project was a total failure. Why? What unraveled? How did it implode?

Following that, you’ll almost certainly need to be the first person into the breach, so be ready with a contrarian idea to start things off. Pick anything that pops into your head that would be too insubordinate or minor to raise as a “real rejection.” The moments after that should be the reward for having built an internal culture that favors candor.

The whole exercise often begins as if it were a game for finding unspoken, latent, or silly flaws that may or may not materialize in the future. While this may seem like a waste, within a few minutes people are typically identifying very creative, and often very challenging, problems in the approach you were so confident in only moments before. By creating a space where your most paranoid employees are actually valued rather than snubbed and where power dynamics are temporarily silenced, they can help you collect input from both supporters and detractors. By the end of the exercise, you should have a meaningful list of potential roadblocks, some of which will be solvable challenges and some of which can be discarded.

Premortems also appear in the wonderful “Thinking, Fast and Slow”, which is full of examples of how to overcome the flaws in our human firmware .

Some groundrules I’ve found helpful:

• Set clear expectations — every bizarre idea about potential flaws is welcome, but not every problem will be avoided
• Make it safe — the best (negative) ideas will only emerge with imaginative thinking and that will only happen if people do not feel vulnerable
• Avoid defensiveness — reinforce that no one should feel threatened by others ideas because they haven’t even happened yet
• Constrain the time commitment—limit the discussion to 10 or 20 minutes to make it clear that this is just a stage in the decision-making process, not a descent into endless delay
• Target collective agreement — while it’s easy to think premortems are only a good fit for Really Big Decisions, they’re often most effective for the decisions where there has been anomalously little debate (because premortems fight groupthink and latent silence/apathy)