premortem

“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.”

“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, …”

“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 …”

“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. …”

“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, …”