👷🏽 Do this before every project kickoff at your company

3 min read

So here’s the deal.

Most companies and teams now know to conduct a postmortem after a project fails. They ask questions like

• why did this project not work

• why did we miss our deadline

• who dropped the ball (blame game - not good)

But the milk has already been spilled by that point.

Today I’m sharing my secret framework for an even more effective tool you should add to your toolkit - a premortem.

WTF is a premortem?

A premortem is an exercise that typically begins after a team has been briefed on a plan but prior to kickoff.

The team lead will ask their team to “imagine that 3-6 months from now, the project we’re kicking off today has failed. Let’s work backwards and think of what could have gone wrong”.

As a team, everyone contributes to the exercise where potential threats and hurdles to the plan are generated and mitigating next steps are put in place.

Why should you do premortems?

This concept was invented by Gary Klein, a cognitive psychologist, in 2007. Why? Because 👇️ 

I personally initiated and conducted multiple premortems with my team during my ~3 years at Noom and they were wildly successful, both in helping us get ahead of potential problems but also as a great cross-functional collaboration tool.

My favorite framework for a great premortem

I found Shreyas Doshi’s premortem framework 2 years ago and have used it extensively since then.

So what is it? Welcome to the business zoo.

• 🐯 Tiger

An obvious threat that will hurt the business or company if we don’t do something about it.

• 🐱 Paper tiger

A threat you are not personally worried about but others might be. These are usually areas you’re responsible for and know you have under control but might be areas that you know are worrying about.

• 🐘 Elephant

The ‘elephant in the room’ no one is talking about that you want to bring to surface.

How do you structure the premortem meeting?

I found that in the case of big project or launch, 90 minutes was the appropriate amount of time to allow for deep reflection and productive discussions after.

Here is my recommended agenda -

• [10 minutes] Share context and framework for the premortem

  • Introduce the zoo animals - tigers, paper tigers, and elephants to your team
    

• [20 minutes] Reflection

  • Team members list out their reflections (I had people use post-it notes like the picture above)
    

• [15 minutes] Review and upvote

  • Team members review each other’s inputs and each get 5-10 upvotes to add to the ones that they would like to discuss in the next phase
    

• [35 minutes] Discuss top voted zoo animals

  • I found it most helpful to pick at least 2 from each category but you can do more if you have time leftover
    

• [10 minutes] Create a pre-mortem action plan and share with the team. It should look something like this 👇🏽

Takeaway

I highly encourage you to pilot this premortem framework at your next project kickoff and take it for a spin.

If it goes as well as it has for me, I recommend adding it as a solid go-to weapon in your company’s Operating System.

See you next week! 🐯🐘

Tushar

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