Cobra Effect · Decisions and strategy
The pre-mortem
Imagine the project has already failed, then ask why, before it starts.
6 cards, read aloud in 2:29, with a test and sources.
It is a year from now, and the project has failed. Badly.
That is the first sentence of the meeting. Not might fail. Has failed. You have two minutes. Write down every reason why. Then we go round the table, and everyone reads one.
Gary Klein described the exercise in 2007.
He is a psychologist who spent decades studying how firefighters, nurses and soldiers make decisions under pressure. He noticed that project reviews happen after the corpse is cold. A post-mortem tells you what killed the patient. The patient does not benefit. So he moved the autopsy to before the launch.
It rests on a strange finding about imagination.
In 1989 three researchers asked people to explain a future event. Some were asked why it might happen. Others were told it had happened, and asked why it did. The second group found about 30% more reasons. Certainty, even pretend certainty, unlocks something that maybe leaves shut.
That is the pre-mortem. It works because it changes who is allowed to speak.
In an ordinary planning meeting, raising a risk sounds like doubting the team. In a pre-mortem, finding a risk is the assignment. The quiet engineer who saw the flaw now has permission, and a reason, to say it. The plan’s champion is asked to bury it, and gets to see where the ground is soft.
Daniel Kahneman called it one of the best ideas he had heard.
Plans are made by optimists, in rooms where optimism is loyalty. Pushing a plan uphill, the last thing anyone wants is a list of how it dies. The exercise takes fifteen minutes. The list it produces is usually the most honest document the project will ever have.
Run one before your next plan is fixed.
Say the failure out loud as a fact, with a date. Two minutes, in silence, everyone writes. Go round the table until the reasons run out. Do not argue with any of them yet. Then pick the two or three you can do something about this week. Your future self is trying to send a message. This is how you let it through.
Sources
- Performing a Project Premortem, Gary Klein, Harvard Business Review, 2007. The original one page article. The method, the reasoning, and why it beats the ordinary risk review.
- Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman, 2011. Chapter twenty four, The Engine of Capitalism, is about optimism in planning, and ends with Kahneman’s endorsement of Klein’s exercise as a partial cure.
- Pre-mortem, Wikipedia. A short summary with the 1989 prospective hindsight study by Mitchell, Russo and Pennington and the links to Klein’s other writing on the method.
Nearby ideas
- Groupthink. How close, loyal teams talk themselves into bad decisions.
- The planning fallacy. Why projects nearly always take longer than we plan.
- Inversion. To find the path to success, first ask what would guarantee failure.
- The prisoner’s dilemma. Why two sensible people can both choose the worst outcome.
- The Overton window. Ideas move from unthinkable to normal before politicians touch them.
- Satisficing. Good enough, chosen quickly, often beats the endless hunt for best.
- Schelling points. Without talking, people meet at whatever stands out.
- Two-way doors. Decide reversible things fast, and save care for what you cannot undo.