Hindsight is twenty-twenty. This article describes a method to avoid catastrophe in the future by asking what if we already failed.
Hindsight is twenty/twenty.
You had your big launch with fireworks, the band, and great expectations. In a few weeks you get the preliminary results, and they were … let me put it this way: less than ideal. I’ll leave it there so no feelings get hurt. Now it is the time to face it. In a heroic effort, you call for a project postmortem. To understand what went wrong, and why, and how, and when, and where… oh my! The meeting room has many faces that shout “I knew it!”
Imagine you had this meeting, the one that everyone is speaking with hindsight, months before the project launch. I know you had gazillions of status meetings, discussed things, and asked questions – you had all the meeting time in your hand to figure this one out. No one brought up these points before.
Um, maybe you weren’t asking the right questions. Or rather, you weren’t setting the right context. In most organizations that have a “winning culture,” talking about failure is almost blasphemy. It is like going to a service, and in the middle of a sermon asking what if the scripture is wrong. We are talking about a culture that glorifies success and winning. Promotions, bonuses, paychecks all tied to winning or how you spin anything into it.
However, let’s think about it. Roll back time six months: what if you called a meeting with all the project stake holders and more as you see fit? No, this is not a status meeting; you are not doing round robin calls. You gather everyone six months before the launch and ask them one question:
“Imagine we are eight months in the future and we learned that our project has failed abysmally. Now please write one paragraph about why we failed according to you – the most important reason you choose – however unlikely it may sound.”
Then you may ask for more reasons. You may collect them and discuss the ones people find important. And more importantly how you can avoid them… Now you have reduced the probability of the future failure – or at least you may have a plan B handy if that occurs.
This is called “Project Pre-mortem”. As the name implies it is a “before the fact exercise”. Based on a research by Mitchell, Russo, and Pennington in 1988 [1] and the concept of “prospective hindsight”, it was defined by Gary Klein in his 2007 Harvard Business Review article [2]. In the 1988 research Mitchell, Russo, and Pennington found that assuming the outcome has already occurred and working backward to its possible causes provides significantly more insights in making decisions about the future. Moreover it is more useful to reveal obscure or rare causes of the outcome.
There are many ways how you do it, but in principle it is more or less as I described it above. Based on important findings before the end of the last century and early in this one, we learn more from failures (ours or other’s) than successes, and avoiding failure is a far better evolutionary strategy than aiming for success. This is not replacing success or winning on the pedestal with failure or doubt, but part of replacing how we look at our approach to strategy with one inspired by evolution.
Classical “winning approach” defines a vision of a future state or a goal at point B. It also defines where we are now or the point A. Then we define a detailed method to reach from point A to B then set out. We may reach point B or not. If we reach there, we party. If not… do a postmortem –if we still survive. Or we may just pretend that we are at point B (we defined there any how) as it happens in many organizations.
Evolutionary approach is a bit different – we stay in strategic mode continuously. In other words we modify our actions as patterns emerge. We keep things that work, extinguish ones that don’t. We develop ourselves in a manner that makes us resilient; at any time we are aware of what’s going on, and at any time we know how to get ourselves out of trouble. This approach aims for resilience rather than robustness.
Premortem is a great tool to introduce resilience into projects bringing in the option of failure, ways to avoid it, and increasing the awareness for weak signals of trouble. Also for enterprise knowledge management and organizational learning premortem (and also postmortem) provide immense information about the patterns of the organization and signals to monitor (like what are the common weak signals of projects failing within the company?). In a postmortem you may hear about the after the fact big reasons to fail but in a preportem you may learn about those early signals that emerge before we sense the failure.
[1] Mitchell, Deborah J., J. Edward Russo, and Nancy Pennington. “Back to the future: Temporal perspective in the explanation of events.” Journal of Behavioral Decision Making: 12/1988; 2(1):25-38
[2] Klein, Gary. “Performing a Project PreMortem.” Harvard Business Review: September 2007:18-19.