In business, many projects fail. One key reason for these failures is employees’ reluctance to voice their reservations in the planning phase. But imagining the worst before the project even begins is a good way to spot flaws and remedy them. That’s the goal of the pre-mortem – a useful team exercise you can run to give your project the very best chance of success.

Do you dream of founding your own company or starting a major project at work? If so, you probably already understand why it’s important to draw up a watertight business plan or execution plan. One key step is to methodically list all the key factors that will help make your company a success.

Just like an elite athlete, you have a plan to reach your goal and a precise execution timeline. Above all, you think the most important step is “visualising” your future success. Optimism and self-confidence really can help you reach your goals, provided you don’t get carried away!

Optimism and self-confidence can help you reach your goals, provided you don’t get carried away!

Business plans and cognitive bias

If you’re a regular reader of myLIFE, you know that the human brain is a fantastic storytelling machine. We love to convince ourselves that reality is more flattering to us or less anxiety-inducing than it really is. We often believe in a reality that exists only in our head. This can derail the implementation of a business plan or the writing of an execution plan.

Overly optimistic people can easily fall victim to confirmation bias, causing them to only seek out information that confirms their convictions and ignore anything that contradicts their worldview. Unchecked optimism or confidence can also lead a project manager to underestimate the budget, overestimate incoming cash or misjudge how long it will take to see the project through to completion.

Most company founders and project managers know they need to create a benchmark in order to test the strength of their execution plan against real-world data. It’s clearly a sensible idea, but we mustn’t forget that a benchmark can be biased too. Have you heard of omission bias? It entails excluding – consciously or otherwise – any evidence that conflicts with our perspective. For instance, we might only select company case studies that support our plans and not include, or even really consider, why similar projects failed.

Omission bias can also convince us that a gap in the market must be a great business opportunity, and we might not stop to think that a lack of competition might simply mean there’s no demand for our product or service.

We have to force ourselves to envisage the worst to come up with ways to avoid it.

The pre-mortem: forcing yourself to engage in “mental contrasting”

How can we avoid succumbing to the various forms of cognitive bias discussed above when drawing up a business plan or execution plan? We have to force ourselves to envisage the worst to come up with ways to avoid it. This is called “mental contrasting” and it consists in envisaging the greatest obstacles that might stand in your way in order to confront and overcome them before they even arise. Forcing yourself to consider an opposing view helps to counteract excessive optimism and confidence.

For the exercise to be effective, you have to picture not just the causes of the failure, but the failure itself. You can think of it as a role-playing game, starting with a fictional situation in which your project has failed. Your role is to pinpoint what led to this failure. The pre-mortem method is one way of engaging in this mental exercise.

The pre-mortem was invented by the psychologist Gary Klein and has now been adopted by everyone from major listed companies to military training academies. Unlike a post-mortem, this is a forecasting rather than a fact-finding exercise. In a medical context, a post-mortem or autopsy allows healthcare professionals and family members to ascertain a patient’s cause of death. Everyone benefits – except, of course, the patient. In the context of founding a company or completing a project, the idea behind the pre-mortem is to take action to improve your project and ensure its viability at the outset, instead of conducting an autopsy once it has failed.

The pre-mortem involves making improvements and ensuring your project’s viability at the outset, instead of conducting an autopsy after it has failed.

Unlike a typical critiquing session where team members are asked what could go wrong during a project, a pre-mortem involves imagining that the “patient” has already died. The team’s task is to work out what went wrong.

Benefiting from doubts

Imagining the project has failed and asking ourselves what went wrong offers advantages that other risk analysis methods do not. Specifically, the pre-mortem method completely changes the group dynamic and encourages doubt. Here, somebody who critiques the project is seen as helping everyone understand, rather than a naysayer.

Somebody who critiques the project is seen as helping everyone understand, rather than a naysayer.

So there’s no need to worry about offending your manager when the PM asks for critiques. In a pre-mortem, successfully diagnosing the cause of death is rewarded. The best contributors are those who raise potential problems nobody else has spotted.

This method has been shown to deliver tangible results. The pre-mortem helps teams identify potential problems at an early stage and increases their ability to correctly identify key factors that explain future results by around 30%. Research also shows that pre-mortems reduce overconfidence among teams a lot more than other critique and risk analysis methods. Lastly, the method helps to foster a culture of openness where people can discuss hard truths without repercussions and employees who dare to raise issues are rewarded.

All it takes is seven steps and 30 minutes

One of the many advantages of the pre-mortem is that it’s very quick. A well-run session should only take 20 to 30 minutes. All you have to do is follow these seven steps:

1. Prepare. Ensure every team member has in-depth knowledge of the project in question.

2. Imagine the failure. Invite everyone to imagine the scenario, announce that the project is dead and prepare to try to identify the causes together.

3. Identify the major reasons for the failure. Every team member takes two minutes to write down why they think the project failed. Then, everyone takes turns listing what they view as the causes. The various causes are written up in a summary table so that they can be discussed and clarified.

4. Use the “impact-reversibility-probability” triple filter to consolidate the list. Ask everyone to examine the list of problems, then take two more minutes to identify the seriousness of each potential issue and possible corrective action. Every member then assesses the problems in terms of probability, impact and ease of prevention.

5. Resolve the issues. Consider possible ways to tangibly reduce the likelihood of failure.

6. Review the initial plan. Rework the initial business plan or execution plan and adjust it based on the problems identified and the corrective action envisaged.

7. Conduct a periodic review. Regularly review the new plan to ensure you have an up-to-date list of potential problems.

For the exercise to work, you need to make sure team members feel comfortable raising major issues so they won’t deliberately avoid discussing sensitive topics. Make sure you complete the exercise within the suggested short timeframe to foster a spirit of intellectual curiosity within the group. Lastly, make sure there isn’t one person doing all the talking – starting with yourself! A pre-mortem is a group exercise, relying on our collective ability to identify and resolve problems. Time to get to work!