“Projects fail at a spectacular rate.
One reason is that too many people are reluctant to speak up about their reservations during the planning phase.
By making it safe for dissenters who are knowledgeable and worried to speak up, you can improve a project’s chances of success.”
How can you use pre-mortems to plan better?
#WHAT
Pre-mortems – Working backwards from a negative future.
Imagine a headline – “we failed to meet our goal”
It challenges us to think about things that can go wrong which we would otherwise have missed.
#WHY
We generally are biased at estimating a positive future since it feels good.
A premortem imagines the opposite — failing to reach your goal — and asks “how did that happen?”
#HOW
If a company wanted to double market share in 3 years – the headline would be ‘Company failed to achieve the doubling of share’
Members of the planning team now imagine scenarios – delays in new products, loss of key executives or competition shifts…
And come up with plans to tackle them
This is something one could apply across one’s career and in planning your lives.
This is from this brilliant book ‘Thinking in bets’ – Annie Duke!
Can you think of scenarios where a pre-mortem could have helped a project you were leading?
#reviewswithranjani
#onleadership