PreMortem

How to Conduct a Premortem

A proven approach to improve strategy execution is to conduct a “Premortem” meeting before we commence a new project. This helps teams make better decisions when planning and scoping their strategic projects (Big Rocks) for the quarter.

Premortems were documented in a 2007 Harvard Business Review article written by psychologist Gary Klein who states, “Projects fail at a spectacular rate. One reason is that too many people are reluctant to speak up about their reservations during the all-important planning phase. By making it safe for dissenters to speak up, you can improve a project’s chances of success.”

You may have seen it happen in organizations where people are shunned for “being negative” or “not a team player” when they point out the downsides of a new initiative. In my experience, this is usually the sign of an insecure leader and/or a dysfunctional team.

Professor Bob Sutton of Stanford states, “Powerful and overconfident leaders often reward people who agree with them and punish those who are brave enough to disagree. The resulting corrosive conformity is evident when people don’t raise private doubts, known risks, and inconvenient facts. The world needs dreamers and their dreams. But dreams of what is possible are best balanced with hard facts and realistic projections about what is probable.”

Robust decision-making and project planning require people on the team to play the role of devil’s advocate. Confident leaders should be willing to say, “Here’s what I am thinking of doing. Help me understand all the risks and trade-offs.”

Confident leaders then listen to what the team has to say and are willing to have their minds changed.

A premortem is a way of formalizing the devil’s advocate function.

At Quarterly Strategic Review sessions, I work with clients to help them choose a small handful of Strategic Projects to execute in the coming quarter. One of my favorite quotes comes from business author Jim Collins who said, “If you have more than 3 priorities, you don’t have any.”

Once clients have chosen their 3 projects (Big Rocks), we name 1 person accountable for each project. The project manager is accountable for making sure the scope of work is robust and achievable, and then managing the project team to complete the agreed scope before the end of the quarter.

After the planning session, as soon as possible within 7 days, I task the project manager to do the following:

  • Select the core members of the project team
  • Conduct preliminary research
  • Schedule a Premortem session to create a robust project scope
  • Have the scope of work signed off by the leadership team
  • Schedule a recurring weekly meeting with the project team to drive strategy execution

How to conduct a Premortem.

Here is my version of a Premortem methodology that works for the size of organizations I commonly work with:

1. Conduct Research

Start by analyzing a reference class of similar projects. For example, if you are implementing new ERP software, conduct research on the average time and cost for a reference class of ERP implementations at companies like yours. Remember, the average is just an average, but reference class forecasting is a solid place to ground baseline assumptions with the real-world experience of other companies who tried to do something similar.

2. First Draft of Plan

Develop a draft project plan with a list of the key tasks or milestones “in scope” with conservative due dates, as well as a list of tasks that are “out of scope” for the quarter. Don’t be too granular, just list the major tasks that (if completed this quarter) would constitute a 10/10 grade for strategy execution.

Make sure you “deal with the monkey first” (identify the bottleneck and solve that problem first).

3. Schedule a Premortem.

Typically, people only consider the best-case scenario and are overly optimistic with their initial due date estimates. This cognitive bias is called the “planning fallacy”. It describes our tendency to overestimate the chances that good things will happen and underestimate the chances of failures, delays, and setbacks.

To prevent this bias from undermining the accuracy of our project plans we conduct a Premortem.

Ask the project team to imagine they have time-traveled 3 months into the future. Unfortunately, the project is significantly behind schedule. There were delays, distractions, and interruptions. People took time off sick and went away on vacation. Everything took longer than expected. Unforeseen issues took us by surprise. Everything that could go wrong did go wrong. Even worse, the results are not what we hoped for. We are disappointed with our achievements when conducting an After Action Review at the end of the quarter.

Ask everyone to individually write down their “worst case scenario”, listing all the things they can think of that caused this project to fail. Set a timer for 5 minutes and get everyone to do this without talking.

Once 5 minutes are up, ask everyone to read aloud what they wrote to the group. Start with the most junior member of the team, go around the room, one after another, and conclude with the team leader. Everyone needs to listen to these stories without making any comments or judgments. Don’t be defensive. Just listen.

Now, as a group, work through these 2 questions one at a time and document your answers:

  • What are all the risk factors that could negatively impact or delay this project?
  • What actions could we take to reduce or mitigate each risk factor?

4. Revise Project Scope & Get Sign Off

Once you have done the Premortem exercise, and created contingency plans to mitigate the risk factors, go back and revise your project scope. Many clients dial back the list of “in scope” tasks at this point to make the plan more realistic and robust.

Once the scope of work is firmed up, present it to the leadership team for stress testing and sign-off.

Due dates are ‘commits’ not ‘hopes’.

Setting due dates for Projects and Tasks is a negotiation. Don’t bully people into accepting deadlines that only take into account best-case scenarios, otherwise, you are setting yourself up for failure. As a manager, it is better to negotiate completion dates you can count on, vs. a date that someone is not fully committed to. Otherwise, we are all deluding ourselves and setting ourselves up for failure.

When coaching clients to set due dates I say to them, “By all means get it done sooner, but due dates are ‘commits’, not ‘hopes’, so give me a conservative and realistic due date that we can all count on.”

You want to be able to praise people for keeping their commitments to the team, and for the project team to feel like “winners” at the end of the planning cycle for achieving the agreed milestones.

Premortem benefits.

The Premortem exercise is designed to create psychological safety and encourage people to actively discuss the worst-case scenario, and not be ostracized for being negative. It reduces the likelihood of people slavishly agreeing to unrealistic expectations just to please the boss.

According to the Havard Business Review, conducting a Premortem at the beginning of a project generates better decisions, more accurate project forecasts, and much more robust implementation plans.

In summary, a premortem helps us to implement big rocks by setting our project team up to succeed right from the outset.

It sounds simple, but it requires discipline to ensure the process is followed.

***

Until next time…
Stephen