Building Better Futures
It is said we learn more from our failures than our successes.
A great example of this are postmortems. When someone dies, doctors perform a postmortem. A systematic search into the root causes of the patient’s death.
Now with your projects you do not want to wait for them to fail learn the lesson of failure. You can understand what cause failure right at the beginning. It begins with a switching to a future mindset.
Conduct a premortem at the beginning to avoid the postmortem at the end.
Here’s your quick meeting tip.
Imagine a time machine shows up and takes you 2-3 years in the future. When you arrive, news of your project’s failure is everywhere. The headlines of your favorite news source. The covers of your favorite magazines. And because you have a time machine. You have perfect hindsight into this failure. You have a chance to find out before it happens.
You can find out now what will cause your project to fail.
With this knowledge, take an 8 ½ x 11-inch sheet of paper. Draw two plus signs on it.
From this future mindset, In the eight corners capture what others are saying about your failure.
What critical things were not done?
What non-critical things did you do?
What problems Remain?
What new problems emerged?
What did others do that caused you to fail?
What wrong assumptions did you make?
What did you do to cause failure?
What did you not do to cause failure?
When done, create similar worksheets for your team. Share them. And let everyone answer the same questions. Remember this is a search for identifying common problems.
With this future mindset see what others on your team see. Build a common premortem from across your team. This creates a lighthouse. A means to warn you of danger ahead. It is as if the future is giving you a chart to success.
Your also have a valuable tool for avoiding disaster. A tool to enable everyone to speak up when your project is steering towards the rocks of failure.
You have a premortem. A gift from the future. It is a guide for avoiding disaster.