Originated by Gary Klein (Performing a Project Premortem, 2007) on the prospective hindsight work of Deborah J. Mitchell, J. Edward Russo, and Nancy Pennington (1989).
Before launch, has each team member privately imagine the project has already failed and write why, then pools the stories to expose risks that enthusiasm was hiding.
When to reach for it
Right before committing to a high-stakes launch, acquisition, pivot, or major hire, when the team is enthusiastic and nobody wants to play the skeptic.
How it runs
- Schedule it before the commitment is made.
- Set the scene: a date, and a failure that has already happened.
- Have each person write the story of the failure alone.
- Pool the stories without names and cluster the causes.
- Decide which risks to fix now, watch, or accept.
Where it sits in SOLVE eX
Go to the source
- Performing a Project Premortem, Harvard Business Review, September 2007, 2007
- Back to the Future: Temporal Perspective in the Explanation of Events, Journal of Behavioral Decision Making 2(1), 1989
- Thinking, Fast and Slow, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011