The Power of Imagining Failure (premortem)

Imagine the project you're working on has failed. What could have gone wrong?

Let’s do a simple exercise to find out the threats and weaknesses of your project.

Imagine a time in the future that your project has failed. Whatever your goal was, it has failed. Now take your time and come up with 10 reasons why it has failed.

As soon as you have those reasons, you know what you should work on to succeed in the future. Prioritize them, analyze the impact and probability of each reason, put actionable plans, and start doing them.

This strategy is called pre-mortem, or premortem.

The premortem is a managerial strategy in which a project team imagines that a project has failed (unlike a session where teams discuss what might go wrong) and then works backward to see what potentially could lead to the project's failure.

This technique helps you identify all the possible threats and weaknesses that can cause failure, analyze the likelihood and the impact of each threat, and take preventive actions to protect the project from failure.