Premortem not autopsy

Most projects do not die suddenly. Most projects fail slowly, politely and with very nice meeting minutes.

The timeline slips a little. One department says, “We thought they were handling that.” Legal needs two more weeks. Finance has a different definition of success. The data team is overloaded. The vendor integration turns out to be far more complicated than the cheerful sales demo promised.

And then, somewhere around week seven, the project team discovers that what they had called alignment was really everyone nodding at the same time while imagining different destinations.

This is why I have come to appreciate a discipline called the premortem.

David Bethoney, the former president of The Muse, points out that the most successful projects he has seen often had one thing in common. The team conducted excellent premortems before the work began.

The idea was developed by psychologist Gary Klein in 2007 and later popularized in Harvard Business Review. A premortem brings the project team together at the start and asks them to imagine the project has already failed spectacularly.

Then the team asks one simple question: Why did it fail?

The premortem works because most people are better at explaining what happened than predicting what might happen. Researchers Deborah Mitchell, Jay Russo, and Nancy Pennington found that when people are told an outcome has already occurred, even in the future, they generate more reasons to explain it than when they are merely asked to predict risks.

The brain, it turns out, is not always a futurist. It is more like a detective arriving late with strong opinions. So instead of asking, “What could go wrong?” which usually produces safe and forgettable answers, the premortem says, “It is one year later; this project failed. What happened?”

Suddenly, people become more honest.

The quiet engineer says, “We have never integrated with this vendor’s system before.” The operations manager says, “The timeline assumes everything works the first time.” The HR person says, “The people who must use this tool were never consulted.” Someone from finance says, “We are measuring savings, but product is measuring feature parity.”

And the room begins to see what it should have seen earlier.

This is leadership gold.

Bethoney identifies three common reasons projects fail.

The first is unrealistic timelines. Many schedules are built on the fantasy that everything will go right the first time. This is adorable, but dangerous. The plan assumes immediate approvals, available resources, cooperative vendors, calm stakeholders, and technology behaving like a well-trained golden retriever.

Reality usually behaves more like a cat with access to the keyboard.

The second reason is that other teams become an afterthought. A project team makes a plan and assumes legal, finance, engineering, sales, marketing, or operations will be ready exactly when needed.

But those teams have their own priorities, deadlines, and emergencies. Dependencies ignored at the start become delays later.

The third reason is that stakeholders have different definitions of success. This is very common.

Everybody smiles during the planning meeting, but one executive wants speed, another wants savings, another wants quality, and another wants customer delight. All are worthy goals, but if no one resolves the tension, the project becomes a corporate buffet where everyone brings a different dish, and nobody brings plates.

A good premortem exposes all of these early.

Here is how to conduct one.

Start by telling the team: Assume this project has already failed – not that it might fail; it did; our task is to understand why.

This gives people permission to be respectfully pessimistic. Next, ask everyone to write down, individually and silently, reasons for failure. This part is important. If discussion begins too early, people anchor on the first idea, defer to the loudest person, or modify their answer to avoid looking negative.

Silent thinking protects honesty.

Then go around the room and capture one risk at a time. No debate. No defending. No executive speeches disguised as clarification. Just collect the risks. After that, prioritize. Ask two questions: How likely is this to happen? And how damaging would it be if it did?

The goal is not to eliminate all risk: That is impossible. The goal is to identify the five to eight risks that deserve active planning.

Finally, assign ownership. Every major risk needs a person responsible for monitoring it.

Not the team. Someone specific must own each risk. A premortem should not end with awareness alone. It must improve the plan.

If the team identifies risks but makes no changes, they have not practiced disciplined foresight. They have simply held a meeting that looked responsible while leaving the original assumptions untouched.

Before launching the next big project, do not simply ask, “How do we succeed?”

Ask, “If we fail, why would we fail?”

It is far better to do a premortem in the conference room than a postmortem in crisis mode.

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(Credit: Based on insights from David Bethoney’s article, “The Powerful Premortem That You Won’t Regret.”)