Imagine this in your mind palace. You are quietly sitting at your desk when, suddenly, an invite to a pre-mortem arrives in your inbox. What is this? Could it possibly be? It is……an invitation to release your inner schadenfreude. To imagine every possible disastrous path an initiative may take. Finally, no more rah rah.
The pre-mortem is one of the great, yet curiously underused, planning tools in business. The premise is quite simple. You teleport yourself into the future (in your mind, time travel is not yet a thing…..) and imagine whatever project or initiative you are embarking on has failed. From there, you work backwards and identify all the possible factors that lead to that failure. Final step, figure out how to prevent them from happening. At least, addressing the significant failure points that were surfaced.
Unlike regular planning exercises, this one encourages people to be fatalistic. And that is why it works so well. Not having to worry about being the person who isn’t on board, who isn’t being a team player. It is a deceptively simple exercise that works best when people feel comfortable expressing themselves and are able to say the thing(s) that are hard to say.