We've all sighed ruefully and said, "hindsight is 20/20" after a failure.
The pre-mortem is Gary Klein's method for accessing hindsight before you start. It helps any team spot the gap between "our plan makes perfect sense in theory" and "here are the twelve things that will actually derail us in practice."
Klein's trick is that you put yourselves in the future, knowing that the project failed and diagnosing why. This surfaces all sorts of tacit knowledge about why it might have failed – gut feelings that people otherwise tend to push out of their minds. People tend to be more comfortable explaining than predicting, so your brain naturally surfaces many more problems than when you're asked "so what might go wrong?".
Even more importantly, you disrupt false consensus. A pre-mortem makes it safe for people to share their hidden fears and doubts, without being labeled negative.
They're great. And yet — although they probably won't admit it — most teams avoid pre-mortems.
We think the biggest reason is that doing a pre-mortem feels a bit like going to the gym. Lots of people kinda know they should, but it feels like a lot of faff, and they're sure as hell not going to enjoy it when they're there. And anyway, they're too busy today – the new fitness regime can always start tomorrow.
We've tried ignoring these frictions and anxieties and running pre-mortems anyway. Like when you drag a friend along with you to the gym on a Friday night, and they end up sitting on the end of the treadmill gazing at the glistening beige delicacies on their takeaway app of choice. And then the next time you suggest hanging out after work, they're mysteriously "busy" ...
But what if you could get all the benefits of doing a pre-mortem without anyone noticing they're doing one?
Instead of making a big hoo-ha about it and dragging your team into a windowless hall that's foggy with sweat and fear, full of kettlebells labelled PRE-MORTEM 50KG, you can slip the spirit of a pre-mortem into the work that people are already happy and interested in doing. Yes, you can get the same benefits through the sort of work that people naturally gravitate towards.
In the words of Dave Trott: "You don't start from what you want people to do, you start from what people want to do." (article)
You can get exercise by dancing Lindy Hop (that's what we do). Or doing chess boxing. Or bog snorkelling or extreme ironing. Or literally anything else involving a raised heart rate that doesn't make you detest every microsecond of your existence. Some people even like football, apparently. You don't have to drag yourself to a gym to get the benefits of exercise.
So one way we get the benefits of a pre-mortem without the struggle is with our Time Machine exercise, which slips a pre-mortem in alongside lots of positivity and fun around goal setting. When you take your team on the time trip, you don't just look at things going realistically (and depressingly) wrong – you also look at things going incredibly well. By comparing the full range of plausible outcomes, everyone gets a richer understanding of collective goals for a project, and a clear picture of different people's fears.
We wrote about this dynamic in Fear-Driven Development, and share the instructions for running your own Time Machine workshop (it's a card from Innovation Tactics.)
Time Machine is great for when you can gather your team together formally. But our Multiverse Mapping method is even more stealthy because it works in any regular planning or working session – or even 1-on-1.
Multiverse Mapping is a way to plan a project by describing the result in terms of a user's behaviour. And it sneaks in a load of micro-pre-mortems without announcing them. Because at every step in the chain of behaviour, the user (or another system) might not do what we need them to. When we make that possibility concrete, people's brains automatically start generating reasons why it would have happened. Capture those reasons and you've got yourself a micro pre-mortem.
This simple trick triggers that valuable tacit knowledge sharing and creates a safe structure for sharing doubts while doing something most teams genuinely love: solving problems, coming up with ideas, making progress … Risks and uncertainties emerge naturally without you having to play everyone's least favourite role of Corporate Doomsayer.
As an intrepid multiversonaut, Ahmed, told us:
"I decided to introduce Multiverse Mapping in stealth mode, applying it with individual devs without telling people what it is. The outcome was great. We had developers suddenly change their complete approach to product decisions and spent way less time in thoughtland, and more time testing with users."
Learn Multiverse Mapping: multiversemapping.com
The trick in both cases is to avoid announcing the pre-mortem, or appealing to virtue. Instead find a way to make potential failure modes visible, tangible and relatively unthreatening as part of an activity people want to do anyway. Then you let narrative-generating brains do the rest of the work.
You'll surface those gut feelings people were sitting on. You'll spot that dependency on legal review that would have exploded the project in week 8. You'll trigger a developer to check that new API today, while you can still adapt the plan.
And most people won't notice they've been doing exercise because they were too busy enjoying the dance.
