Reduce project risk before they start, with pre-mortems

Gary Klein, a cognitive psychologist and author of Seeing What Others Don’t: The Remarkable Way We Gain Insights, was featured on the Freakonomics podcast episode Failure Is Your Friend. The episode is the second of a two part series, investigating how we think about failure and how, in many cases, failure can just what you need to free up better opportunities.

We’re all familiar with a post-mortem—now that the patient is dead, what when wrong? And hopefully, how can we prevent that from happening again? In a pre-mortem, a team imagines themselves into the future. A horrible future, one six months (or so) down the road where the project has absolutely, completely, and utterly failed. No hope for rescue and no escaping the truth: the project is dead, failed, and over. In this mindset, the team then writes out why that happened. What caused the project to fail? 

Klein’s “pre-mortem” method for assessing project risk really resonates with me:

KLEIN:  I need you to be in a relaxed state of mind.  So lean back in your chair. Get yourself calm and just a little bit dreamy. I don’t want any daydreaming but I just want you to be ready to be thinking about things. And I’m looking in a crystal ball. And uh, oh, gosh…the image in the crystal ball is a really ugly image. And this is a six-month effort. We are now three months into the effort and it’s clear that this project has failed. There’s no doubt about it. There’s no way that it’s going to succeed. Oh, and I’m looking at another scene a few months later, the project is over and we don’t even want to talk about it. And when we pass each other in the hall, we don’t even make eye contact. It’s that painful. OK. So this project has failed, no doubt about it.

Now, for the next two minutes—and I’m gonna time this—for the next two minutes, I want each of you to write down all the reasons why this project has failed. We know it failed. No doubts. Write down why it failed. I keep a strict clock because we don’t want to chew up too much time on this. But I see that everybody is writing and I say there’s 20 seconds to go, and they’re writing faster because they’re trying to get everything in. And now, five seconds. And then, okay, finish the sentence and pencils up.

Klein calls this exercise prospective hindsight, and it helps generate explanations for future events, as if they have already happened. Some research suggests the shift in perspective can improve a team’s ability to predict the reasons for future outcomes by 30%. 

As a facilitator, these project failure reasons are gathered, grouped into similar causes, and then discussed as a group: how realistic are they? Can we rank them? What can we do to reduce the risk?

The pre-mortem is liberating:

• everyone is unified in exploring risks
• no one is being singled out for not being a good ’team player'
• by asserting the counterfactual truth — this project has failed! — team members can voice concerns they normally might not be able to bring up.

Since learning this technique, I’ve used pre-mortems at the start of many projects. It’s an easy-to-execute, fresh approach to risk management.