premortem

“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 …”

“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.”

“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…”

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

“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…”

“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…”

“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.”

“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…”