How a Pre-Mortem Ritual Saves Me From Myself
I remember being a kid and hearing my mom tell me that her #1 most hated word was “Project”. It had nothing to do with work for her; it was because I grew up in the 90’s — an era of dioramas, take-home activities, and poster board galore. “Project” meant as much homework for her as it did for me.
Fast forward a couple decades, and “Projects” are my job. Clearly, I loved “the project”.
But the types of projects in technology and product development are not made on poster board (though I like to think my creativity has shifted to PowerPoints). Our projects are often lengthy, with conflicting priorities and stakeholders with different goals.
Early in my career, I was running a project that I was personally excited for, but professionally worried about. We were rolling out a new consumer feature that had a significant amount of pushback from within the organization. It was strategically right for us, but there were valid concerns from compliance, retail banking teams, risk management, information security, and my own leadership.
In prior projects, I had found myself struggling with how our cross-functional team handled blockers. When we encountered a compliance issue, the team would react as if the project was dead in the water, but I didn’t agree. This kind of push-and-pull left me looking for a way to set a foundation for what we expect to happen during the course of a project.
“A Post-Mortem is Good for Everyone but the Patient — They’re Already Dead”
In the early 2010’s, I came across a concept called the “pre-mortem”. The pre-mortem is a concept that takes the post-mortem evaluation — a typical retrospective in fields from healthcare to project management — and moves it to the start of the project.
At its core, a post-mortem brings cross-functional stakeholders together to review what went well, what could have been improved, and what the team learned from the experience.
But the post-mortem is performed once everything has happened, which leaves the team with virtually no action items they can take to fix it, only lessons learned for next time.
The Pre-Mortem does something similar as the post-mortem, but at the beginning of a project with the purpose of identifying potential risks before they occur. In my experience, you’ll be happiest that you did the pre-mortem not at the time you do it, but rather weeks or months later.
That’s because in the moment that you hit that blocker that you called out as a potential risk in the pre-mortem, you’ll be able to clear the air by highlighting it and saying “We knew this could happen — it’s expected, and we know how to handle it.”
Here’s the path I follow to create a pre-mortem:
Bring the team together and re-align on goals.
Imagine the project failing. What happened to cause it? Did you encounter a blocker? Did business factors come into play? Was there a change in strategy?
Identify the root cause of the failure. Yes, it hasn’t happened yet, but if you can imagine the failure happening, keep pulling at that thread and answer why it would have happened.
Create your mitigation plan. You already have enough on your plate, so keep it simple. While your head is clear now, write down a bullet or two about how you would handle the failure.
Using a pre-mortem empowers your team’s diverse stakeholders to share their thoughts & viewpoints before the project begins. This technique can help ease concerns and avoid having negative thoughts simmer under the surface.
Thanking my “Past Self”
I began using the pre-mrotem technique on some select projects where I knew we had a difficult mountain to climb. It’s not a tool for every adventure, but I found it useful to unite a team.
But it’s not just a team activity — it can benefit your own reflection when you hit the home stretch and reflect on your accomplishments (or if we’re being honest, the would’ve, could’ve, should’ve thoughts). This time of year I always start to feel a bit of anxiety creeping in.
Is my team on track to accomplish our goals? Are we building things that are adding value? What about all the things we’ve encountered that made us pivot along the way? Could we have made different decisions?
I use the pre-mortems I wrote earlier in the year to answer those questions and ease some of the intrusive thoughts — as it happens, the pre-mortem is as much for me as it is for the rest of the team.
