Premortem

“There's also this psychologist by the name of Gary Klein, and he realized that finding out like this Pre-mortem and exercise elite teams now run before, you know, big launches. So why, if the project was to fail, what would have happened? If this was to not wo…”

“It's beautiful because when people are coming close to a decision, it becomes Difficult to raise doubts or to raise questions. People who are slowing the group down when the group is nearing a decision are procedures really, you know, it's annoying, you know, …”

“What you find with pre-mortems, this is actually work. I actually did this work with Marie Schweitzer and Linnea Gombe, who are both at Penn. Then when you have people do pre-mortems it generally doesn't actually change their plan very much, or it changed thei…”

“So I typically think of like pre-mortems as something that feels like a big departure from current strategy or something that's a lot of investment or that you believe has a lot of high potential in terms of visibility or risk or pipeline generation. For thing…”

“And the other one, I mean, the other technique is known as a premortem, which you're probably familiar with, which is we pretend we made the investment. It's now a year from now, or two years from now, and this investment's turned very sour. It's very bad. We'…”

“If you do a premortem right, you will not have to do an ugly postmortem. You might still do a postmortem to learn, but odds are very high that it is not going to be a bad postmortem.”

“The way the premortem works is it reverses the usual dynamic of these meetings. Often at the end of a meeting, somebody will say, all right, we're done. We're just about done with the meeting. Does anybody see any problems? Nobody wants to identify a problem. …”

“One of the mistakes is that they just frame it wrong from the beginning. They'll say, okay, we should do a pre-mortem. So what can go wrong? It's not an issue of what can go wrong. We're dealing with a crystal ball that has showed that the plan has failed. We …”

“I learned from Fareed, who was director of growth at Slack, that premortems are far more effective than postmortems.”

“As soon as you make an investment, you need to do premortem, and you need to say, what are the ways that this investment can go wrong?”

“And the premortem legitimizes that sort of dissent and that sort of doubt. Not only legitimizes it, you know, it rewards it. And so that's a very good idea. I don't, you know, I don't think that it's going to prevent people from making mistakes, big mistakes, …”

“When we did this for a number of projects in my company, one minute was leaving people frustrated, because people were still writing when they said time is up. When we tried three minutes, a lot of people would be finished, and they'd be twiddling their thumbs…”

“And the reason for that is people don't know how candid to be, and the leader is going to set an example. And if the leader picks something that's frivolous or trivial, that tells people not to take it seriously. So it's really important for the leader to come…”

“We see premortems fail when the person who's facilitating will say something like, okay, we've seen the plan, let's do a premortem, what could go wrong with the plan? That's the wrong approach. What can go wrong with the plan? That's a typical critiquing appro…”

“On the other hand, with a pre-mortem, The contest is to see who can come up with the most clever and worrisome issues that haven't been discussed at the time, so the whole incentive system changes, and now people, people are competing with each other to come u…”

“I ran a pre-mortem a year ago on a project we were going to launch. 27 people in the room. Wrote 27 things down on the first pass. Five of them were path critical. Of those five, I'd only thought of one.”

“Premortem should take no more than a half hour, Maybe 20 minutes. If it goes for an hour, that's too long. So there's a virtue of keeping it really brief, because that compresses the energy rather than dissipates it.”

“Listing pros and cons are just cons. Reduced confidence, but the premortem reduced confidence more than any of the other techniques we measured.”

“So I think this idea of doing these premortems are really important because it shifts what it means to be a team player into something where you're willing to explore the way that things can go wrong.”

“When you do a premortem, now you've changed what it means to be a team player, right? Like the people who are going to get pats on the back are the ones who come up with the most creative reasons for failure.”

“What we have found is that creative thinking, once you're fully committed, It lets you take a step back and identify things that, from a different perspective, maybe you didn't do, identify earlier on, and what it also does is it gives you a sort of checklist …”