So, you got out of bed this morning without falling and breaking your neck. Congratulations. You drove to work without crashing your car, and you got a cup of coffee without burning your hand. Again – congratulations! Things are going pretty well today, huh? And for the most part, they typically do. Which brings me to an important point: The fact that things typically do go well in our lives creates a cognitive bias in our brains that things will continue to go well, which essentially creates a state of inherent optimism in humans. This inherent optimism, when coupled with a ubiquitous “can do attitude” that is often praised as a positive leadership trait, can leave us open to failures that we don’t see coming. The Pre Mortem Process is an intriguing way of identifying potential failure paths by purposeful- ly prompting a team to see the future from a different perspective. By acknowledging our inherently optimistic human nature, this process can help leaders ensure important projects don’t get derailed by unanticipated issues, or have potential complications
minimized by a “can do” attitude.
If you are leading an important project or mission you have a responsibility to ensure it is successfully accomplished; in fact your job may depend on it, or more importantly, the safety of those involved. As stated above, inherent optimism leads to a cognitive bias that prevents us from fully evaluating or even recognizing potential failure paths. Being optimistic is not a bad thing, but being optimistic does present a hidden risk that a smart leader must learn to manage beyond the standard Risk Manage- ment Tools. Isn’t it true that everyone is often “good with risk” until that risk is realized? And in support of that, I put forth a single word – Failure.
Failure. It’s a harsh word. It’s painful to fail. Being told “You Failed” elicits a human response that generates a gut reaction that physically and emotionally changes the way you look at a situation. Think flashing blue lights in your rearview mirror. Even when you only think you may have failed, your mind reacts as if you did fail and it has a noticeably unpleasant effect. Focusing on failure is counter to the typically optimistic attitude and “Can Do” spirit that is highly desired and expected of leaders. But it is specifically this instinctive reaction to failure that we can leverage to enable success.
So, how do we do that? By conducting a “Pre Mortem.” Throughout business, industry, and the military, we are all familiar with the use of a post mortem, critique, or “Failure Review Board” to identify the root causes of a failure, setback, or problem. The “Pre Mortem” is conducted in a similar fashion, with one significant difference – it is conducted BEFORE any failure occurs.
A few years ago I learned of the “Pre Mortem Process” as published by Dr. Gary Klein in a Harvard Business Review article (HBR 85,9 (2007) p18-19), and through discussions with Professor Ed Hess (University of Virginia Darden School of Business) who has also written extensively on the topic. In this process, an organization works to identify possible failure paths ahead of time, with the intent of identifying necessary risk mitigation steps to preclude the bad event from occurring in the first place. The Pre Mortem provides a way to leverage the sense of failure to identify potential risk areas that have not been fully evaluated or considered. It turns optimism on its head and allows – even forces – dissenting opinions by giving the team permission to not be optimistic, as they identify potential risk areas. The objective is to imagine you have failed, then identify the potential causes, and accordingly implement appropriate measures to avoid its actuality.
How to do it: Bring your project team together and provide a dire scenario that is counter to your objective. In a business setting, you could say, “We needed to deliver certain components per our contract and we failed, miserably, and the Company is now several months behind schedule and losing money every day.” Or, in a military setting, “The new missile we are building exploded on the launch pad and killed 10 people,” or “The new operational flight software caused the plane to crash on its test flight.” Let that sense of failure sink in to the group, and it will. Then, ask, “How could we have gotten here?” Let the team list all possible causes, without trying to solve each one, in a free-form discussion without criticism. Then begin reviewing the list and deciding whether there is some truth to the potential failure path. Rank them in order of importance and discuss what mitigation steps are either already in place or may need to be put into place if you deem the risk high enough. It is guaranteed that you will find potential failure paths you didn’t think of, but should have.
Though this is a fairly simple process, it is important to under- stand that the Pre Mortem does a couple of things. First, the Pre Mortem removes biases as discussed above and helps us see potential risk issues in a more realistic light as the group purposefully removes themselves from an optimistic perspective. Being optimistic is good leadership, but leaders owe it to the organization to force an alternate viewpoint. Junior personnel who may be hesitant to tell the boss they don’t like the plan, will be more inclined to raise a potential issue in this type of scenario.
Second, it also helps prepare leadership to look for leading indicators of failure. If you haven’t ever considered a specific failure path before, your brain is not ready to receive indicators and early warning signs that things are going wrong. If the brain has worked through some scenarios of doom, then, if the precursors to the failure scenario actually start to occur, they will be noted more easily.
In summary, conducting a “Pre Mortem” is a different and vital step that is demonstrably missing from a thorough planning process. Good planners often ask: “What can go wrong and what are we going to do about it?” The key difference here though is the team’s imagining that a bad event actually happened. That is when our minds perceptively change to be more open to the possibility and potential causes of failure. And that twist creates a paradigm shift that takes us out of our typical bubble of inherent optimism and allows us to mentally see and feel the negative event as if it did occur. What happens then is that people will come up with a new set of issues, problems, solutions, and areas to look at. And it is precisely those new areas to look at that may keep us from having to attend an actual critique. It can help us avoid the most common comment during a critique or post mortem, which is, “this problem seems obvious now, why wasn’t it identified earlier?”
As a Submarine Officer and Flag Officer in the US Navy with
10 years of acquisition experience I routinely interacted with senior executives of many of our largest defense contractors. In many discussions, I regularly brought up the Pre Mortem process and have found that only a few executives have heard of the concept. Every one of them became interested in the topic and many have implemented the principles in their company. In a high stakes business dealing, or military operations setting, it is vital that we adequately consider all outcomes in an unbiased way. By training leaders and organizations to make better informed decisions, they can ultimately prevent hearing – “You Failed!” I think the Pre Mortem Process is a great tool to do just that.
