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Transcript
You’ve probably seen the shows where they do post-mortems on people after they die so that they can see the cause of death, when it happened, all of those things to help the detective solve the crime.
I know in the show Endeavor that they’ll often meet the medical guy, I don’t remember the actual title for that position, but they will meet that guy at the scene of the crime and he’ll give his estimated time of death and probable cause of death. But he only goes so far because he wants to wait till he does the post-mortem to get all the details he can, and then he’ll call them to whatever that room is called, he’ll call them to that room and give them all the details which can help them solve the crime.
In business or nonprofits or any type of organization, it can be wise to do something similar. If you have a project decision, it’s done, you do a post-mortem on it, or a debrief on it, to talk about what happened, what went well, what didn’t, what can you copy in the future and do in the future because it was good, and what changes you need to make or do differently to make things better next time.
While that’s useful, it can also be a good idea to do a pre-mortem. A pre-mortem in the shows would be like them discovering how someone would be killed and then stopping it before it happened. And for many of those shows, of course, that would make the episode really short, but that’s kind of like what it would be.
Premortems in organizations
In a business or organization, it would be when you’re making a decision or making a plan, direction, goal that you’re pursuing, that you’re looking at what can cause death to that project or goal or decision. What can cause harm? What can make it fail? What are the challenges that we’ll face? The issues that could happen?
You look at those before you make the decision so that you can then work to fix it before it happens.
There’s different ways to do it, but one way is that you gather your team together and certain aspects can be individually, some can just be all as a team, however you want to do it, but you get your team together, you would say it’s six months from now, or however long that would fit your timeline, it’s six months from now and this decision has failed. What caused it to fail? You would all write down your stuff.
You could have everybody write their ideas individually, then bring it together, however you choose to do it. But you would get those lists, get all the information, and then you would look at all the different causes that you think may make this decision, our project, our goal, fail.
You may look at the probabilities of certain happening if you know what the probabilities may be.
But you look at the list, and then you start working, okay, this might happen, so let’s work on ways to prevent it.
Preventing issues before they happen
For example, if you’re releasing a product and you rely a lot on blogger reviews, and you know, if you get negative reviews, it will hurt your product release greatly. Knowing that, then you can do steps to prevent that.
You may do test groups and see what their opinions are beforehand before you send it to a large group, or you may reanalyze your product to make sure it is top notch. Whatever it may be, you would work to make sure prevent that issue of getting those negative reviews.
Setting up tripwires
You could also set tripwires. If you know when something happens and one of the pitfalls may be on the way or one of the causes of failure may happen, then when this event happens, you know to start taking this step.
For example, if your customer return rate hits over a certain percentage, then that’s your tripwire, then you take a certain action that you planned beforehand you will take when you hit that event, if it happens.
So you can plan different tripwires for different events that might happen that might be linked to a certain cause of failure.
However you choose to do that, pre-mortems can be helpful in preventing negative things that could happen on your decisions, projects, goals, et cetera.
Something to think about and seeing how you can implement. Hope it helps. See you next time.
