The Value of a Pre-mortem Session with the Management Team
Author: Amnon Danzig,
LPBI Group, Business Development Team
What is the Value of a Pre-mortem Session with the Management Team?
When an executive thinks about innovation and growth strategies he/she should hedge themselves against potential failures. One of the recommended tools for it is a Pre-mortem Session with the Management Team.
A Pre-mortem Session with the Management Team is a tool that utilizes the prospective hindsight concept. Prospective Hindsight is an approach to “look forward by looking backward.” One assumes that you have already reached the point of a few years from the Present, and tries to figure out why certain events and processes had took place.
A Pre-mortem Session with the Management Team is analogous to a human postmortem analysis. In medicine, postmortem is used by medical doctors to understand why they failed after the patient passes away.
Gary Klein (“Performing a Project Premortem”, HBR September 01, 2007) took the postmortem concept one step further and adapted it to managerial situations, hence the Pre-mortem methodology for business management had emerged. Daniel Kahneman (Thinking, Fast and Slow, 2011) made this analytical approach more popular due to its inclusion in his last book .
My personal version of A Pre-mortem Session with the Management Team is the following:
After you finalize your project plan, and everything is ready for kick-off, gather your management team and all the core people that were part of the development of the company’s knowledge base of the project under analysis.
- Suggested is a Friday evening, just one hour before the end of the workday.
- Clear all mobile devices: laptops and smart phones
- Distribute beer,
- supply a sheet paper and pencils
Here is your pitch:
“Ladies and gentlemen, today is a date three years into the future. You announce that the project has failed. Furthermore, it puts our company at risk. Period.
- Now you have a budget of seven minutes and one bottle of beer.
In full voice you tell the Team, please, write the chronology of this failure; all the things that caused this dramatic failure. Let’s start.”
- After seven minutes, gather the papers and thank the participants.
You then take the papers and read them carefully at home. Read and reread until you fully grasp all the new insights your colleagues have shared with you.
At a glance, this process encapsulates the entire body of knowledge of the project’s shortcomings and drawbacks:
- You pose and ask: what are the causes of this dramatic failure?
Next Monday morning, you gather the same group: sheet of papers and pencils for each participant. No beer…
You ask them to articulate the project evolution, taking into account what they wrote on Friday evening. Give them one hour. Collect the papers and thank them.
Now you have a fine springboard to re-examine the project. What is the reason to do that?
- It is pretty simple: while preparing new projects under your strong leadership, all the doubts, critics, annoying facts and unpopular standpoints are moved to the side.
- Your team can develop group thinking, which is could be very risky while preparing the knowledge base for the new project.
- In a Pre-mortem session with the Team, you facilitate even negativism about the project, or parts of it.
Daniel Kahneman said in few lectures that executives find this extremely beneficial to them.
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