You might be familiar with the concept of a “Post-Mortem.” Or if you have a medical background, since health professionals are using it to analyze and learn what caused a patient’s death. In a business context, a post-mortem is used in the form of a meeting or written report that happens at the end of a project where/when the team examines a project with all its challenges and successes, intending to draw learnings and consequences. The most relevant benefit of a post-mortem is to drive future process improvements and promote best practices to repeat and scale success. However, its biggest drawback is that it only happens either later during the project or at its end.
That’s when the “Pre-Mortem” approach comes into play. Whereas a Post-Mortem can be described as a business autopsy (after the project is over), the Pre-Mortem is more of a preventive health checkup to avoid things going south. In a Pre-Mortem, team members assume that the project they are planning has just failed and then work backward to determine what potentially could have led to the failure of the project or initiative. With the intention to develop anticipative counter-strategies and actions at an early point in time. Therefore, it’s a very effective “looking back from the future” strategy to challenge group thinking and biases, identify problems before they occur, and take preventive actions to protect the initiative from suffering an untimely “death.”
One of my favorite Pre-Mortem techniques, which I often implement in some sort with clients, is “FMEA.” An acronym that stands for “Failure Mode and Effect Analysis.” Although there exist numerous variations, as a straightforward and impactful approach to analyze what could go wrong at every step of a plan, and for each potential failure, you should ask just two questions:
1. How likely is it?
2. How severe would the consequences be?
In a follow-up step, assign a score from 1 to 10 for each variable, and multiply the two numbers to get a total. The highest totals represent the most severe potential failures and should get the most attention.
I’m looking forward to receiving your feedback and continuing the discussion based on your thoughts and comments. If you wonder how best to plan ahead or back, as a leader or within your organization, please feel free to contact me or visit my website at https://andreasvonderheydt.com.
Kind regards,
Andreas von der Heydt, @avonderheydt
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