Adopting the Premortem Technique to Enhance Your Career

There is a good chance that you have witnessed a gathering of your co-workers after the unfortunate demise of a high-potential project or goal. Odds are you played a part in gathering the remains of a venture through statistics, polls, surveys, and listed out all of the reasons why your project didn’t go the way it was supposed to. It’s a common practice for project groups to analyze failed projects in order to prevent the same outcome for the next one.

The comparison of this post-failure evaluation to the medical procedure postmortem (or an autopsy), inspired behavioral economist and psychologist, Gary Klein, to create what he titled the premortem technique, in which a group or individual assumes that a project has already failed before it is even put into motion in order to predict and potentially eliminate potential for failure.

Klein uses research from the Wharton School, Cornell, and the University of Colorado to support his reasoning. The Journal of Behavioral Decision Making report, “Back to the Future: Temporal Perspective in the Explanation of Events,” reveals that the use of “prospective hindsight” (or evaluating eventual circumstances that may or may not occur) increases the likelihood of predicting the future by 30 percent.

Fortunately, prospective hindsight is a technique that can be adopted no matter what career path you are on or how supreme your aspirations are, and can be easily incorporated into your development plan.

How to Dissect a Project Premortem

Whether you are working in a group or independently, it is a good idea to start by setting aside some time before the project is in full-swing to test out the premortem technique with these three key steps highlighted by Klein in his 2007 article “Performing a Project Premortem”:

Step 1: Be “all-knowing”

Pretend you foresee that this project will absolutely fail. It could be because of one obstacle or several, and it’s up to you (and your group if you have one) to figure out what the obstacles are. Klein suggests that everyone involved should take five to ten minutes to silently write down any and every reason they can think of as to why the project will hypothetically fail.

Maybe one person feels the campaign budget is too small, but didn’t want to cause a stir by mentioning it before. Perhaps the woman sitting next to her expects the marketing strategy is too weak and her group’s product won’t meet a wide enough audience. Across the table, her co-worker is busy writing down his tenth reason why the project failed, including something as detail-oriented as there was not enough coffee at the sales presentation.

Step 2: Share what you’ve envisioned

If you are in a group, have everyone share the number one reason for failure from their list. According to Klein, each reason should be recorded for further evaluation by the project manager and the members of the group should be instructed that they are not to repeat answers.

If Sarah mentions a lack of support from funders as her top pick, which was also Anne’s number one reason, then Anne will have to peruse her list for a unique response. This will ensure that every possible threat to the project’s success is covered.

Step 3: Evaluate and strategize

Whether as a group or privately, the project manager should assess the final list of potential reasons for failure and rework the project plan accordingly, says Klein. However, identifying flaws should not be the only focus during this process. It is just as important to discover the strengths of the project and the premortem technique is a great way to accentuate strong points as well. Let’s say everyone in the group has shared an obstacle they see preventing success, but none of them saw anything wrong with the technological resources available—highlight that factor as one of the project’s best features. Encourage members of the team to focus on the positive aspects of the project in order to keep the momentum moving in the right direction.

If you are involved in a group project, the premortem technique extracts feedback from each individual involved and encourages “devil’s advocate thinking,” as Klein put it in an interview for the McKinsey Quarterly (without animosity. It’s important to break through barriers of shyness or fear to gain perspective from everyone to fully uncover every weakness in a project.

While working independently, be sure to spend even more time brainstorming to come up with as many different angles as possible to ensure that your positive energy and intuition continue to flow. If you have to, schedule a few short brainstorming sessions as opposed to cramming all of your ideas into one long session to fully maximize your list. Take advantage of conceptualizing during different moods, and in different environments to tap deep into your intuition, especially when you are feeling a lack of confidence in your goal.

Klein acknowledges that the premortem technique works well to fight overconfidence in a project as well. By envisioning the failure of a project you eliminate the potential blinding that inhibits project managers who are overly invested in, or passionate about a project to the point where they cannot possibly imagine how their plan will not succeed, and are in turn blindsided by failure, if that happens to be the end result.

The premortem strategy is cheap, easy, effective, and it’s worth a try. Use premortem for reports, presentations, product development, resume crafting, preparing for an interview, or asking for a promotion. Next Monday, see how many times you can use the premortem technique for all of your tasks at work to dramatically increase your success rate and visibility, and, in the long run, dramatically enhance your career.

By Kayla Turo