Premortems - New Generation Mantra to Success

Premortems - New Generation "Mantra" to Success

With time as leaders, we have all become "experts" in learning from our mistakes. That's the classic question we ask anyone "What did you learn from your failure ?" & as long as we think we have learned from our failures we believe we have done our part and have better chances to succeed in future.  But does that happen, not for me yet :). The hard reality of a dynamic and everyday changing landscape around us is that neither the problems would be the same nor would the mistakes , so graduating from a school of failures is not anymore alone a recipe to success in future. 

So what do we do, stop learning from our mistakes :), definitely not ! We will continue to make mistakes and get better always learning from them, however in the generation which I call as the "Working Backward Era" your failures has to be Informed failures. You really should be able to predict your failure objectively and be able to plan ahead to avoid and/or manage the failure.  It's like doing a pre-mortem rather than a postmortem to diagnose a disease rather than curing the disease.

Your new "Key" to success 

Doing a pre-mortem of a business strategy, an architecture choice, a change request or an organizational decision is your new mantra to predict failure and as part of the discovery device checkpoints / mitigation steps to minimize chances to failure. In next section we will talk about how to do a pre-mortem -

Doing a Pre-Mortem

Pre-mortem is about fore playing disaster well before it happens, think about worst case and all possible ways in which things could go wrong. Learning back from my Amazon days, we use to do what we call as COE (Cause Of Error) documents for all business impacting incidence, and ask five WHY's,  the idea is to keep narrowing down on the root cause until you get to the root of it. If i take the same analogy to the concept of pre-mortems, its about answering the five HOW's, which is ask your self "How this plan could fail ?" "How could this decision go wrong? " and keep doing it multiple times which will force you to think of all critical reasons where the decision could get wrong.  

I have been practicing this as an important framework for a few years now for all of my critical decision making and i was impressed with the critical thinking and increased deep dive in embraced with my teams. We got lot better !!