A recent episode[1] of the Freakonomics[2] podcast mentioned an interesting little planning idea called the pre-mortem. It is like a post-mortem (or lessons learnt) but done up-front before something goes wrong.
Briefly, the idea is that at the start of a project, of whatever kind, the relevant members of the team sit down and look into their crystal ball. The team imagine that they have reached the end of the project and it has failed, big time, and now have to answer the awkward questions about what went wrong.
The intent, I gather, is to avoid over-confidence, make it OK to think about failure, and get the team thinking early about what could go wrong, and, importantly, what they can do now to avoid the bad thing from happening.
Links
- Freakonomics podcast episode “Failure Is Your Friend”: http://freakonomics.com/2014/06/05/failure-is-your-friend-a-new-freakonomics-radio-podcast/
- Freakonomics website: http://freakonomics.com
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