My favorite underappreciated tool: The Pre-Mortem.
Starting up design or innovation projects are usually times of great hope and optimism. Finally, you’re going to solve that nagging problem or to allow yourselves to explore beyond what you usually do. In typical projects things often sail through smoothly until suddenly they don’t. That’s one of the reasons I love to use Pre-Mortems: Right at the beginning I like to temper that optimism with some constructive negativism, done in a fun and engaging way.
The Pre-Mortem is simple: At the start of any project, you gather your team to think up real or imagined reasons why this project is going to completely fail. We usually don’t like to ponder failure. In fact, there are trains of thought and process that eschew this completely (like positive visualizations or even Appreciative Inquiry that encourage us to only think of good things).
In pre-mortems allow, no encourage, everyone to wallow in the lugubrious. It’s rather straight forward:
· At the start of the project ask your team to imagine a multitude of ways why the project will end in failure. Give them enough time to work alone to get past the usual suspects and to dig into some non-obvious reasons. Lack of time or alignment are the typical real and imagined causes of project deaths but not the only ones.
- Once everyone has come up with several reasons on their own, start working together to group similar ideas.
- Start discussing and prioritizing the pre-mortem causes. And continue to come up with new reasons for failure.
- When done, try to imagine how you’re going to save the patient, that is — your project. Working individually again, come up with “cures” or solutions to avoid the failures.
Even if this sounds like a downer it is actually fun and even liberating. It generates similar energy to negative brainstorming but even more since you have license to criticize your own internal foibles and processes.
The whole point of the Pre-Mortem is to try to anticipate and defuse potential challenges that you might meet later on. If you believe you will have challenges getting support from managers, start raising that flag now before you get going. Or if the challenge is that there will be no structure to support the piloting or implement your solution, start lining that up early, early, early so you don’t waste six months waiting for a decision and thus lose your team.
In my experience, the Pre-Mortem gives you clear-eyed and realistic picture of the path ahead. If you go on a trek through the jungle, you better be good at imagining all the things that can possibly go wrong. Your design and innovation trek is no different.
I first stumbled across the Pre-Mortem in the great book Gamestorming. You can read more about it here.
And while we’re on the subject, let’s not forget the Post-Mortem! You know, when you actually take time to review your work or project and honestly assess what happened. Everyone does that regularly, right?
Despite best intentions post-mortems almost never happen even though this might be the best continuous learning approach we have available. Typically, people and teams skip over this claiming that they “don’t have time.” I don’t buy that excuse; it doesn’t take that long. Instead, I think that there is an aversion to critically assessing the choices one has made during a project.
But Post-Mortems can include both internal and external factors. One of my favorite tools to use for Post-Mortems is the Retrospective and is as simple as can be.
Retrospectives have three columns:
What worked well?
What worked less well?
What do we want to do differently next time?
The beauty of this is that it allows space for both positive and negative. Think of the first column as appreciative inquiry — what do we do well that we want to do more of? Think of the second and third column as design thinking — what’s not working and how do we fix it?
Run your Post-Mortems like you do your Pre-Mortems:
- Ask people to fill in the first two columns individually.
- Then, together, group similar ideas or reflections.
- Also, together, start filling in the last column (do differently) and prioritize your results.
Then comes the most difficult part — someone needs to capture the results in a document and bring it to the next project kick-off! It blows my mind when I see teams go through the Post-Mortem process only to let it gather dust on some digital shelf. Now that you’ve done the work, make good use of it.
There are templates for Retrospectives in both Mural and Miro
You can even run a retrospective as a type of Pre-Mortem before a project.
Both the Pre-Mortem and the Post-Mortem, when you get right down to it, are forms of self-insight. Which is probably why I love them both.
When it comes time for design and innovation, make sure to release your inner Medical Examiner. Try to save the patient (e.g., your project) before it dies.
