There's a lot of talk these days about failing. Failing's good. Fail and fail fast. The idea, obviously, is that it's better to make mistakes early on and learn from them. But why not learn before you make the mistakes?

That's the idea behind the pre-mortem, created by Gary Klein, behavioural economist and psychologist, famous for his work in the field of naturalistic decision-making. It's very simple really. You imagine a time in the future after your business/project/idea has been launched. And in this imaginary future your idea has been a complete failure. “Unlike a typical critiquing session, in which project team members are asked what might go wrong, the pre-mortem operates on the assumption that the ‘patient' has died.”

Now you're probably thinking: Isn't this very negative? Aren't all these business successes started by people who are really positive go-getters who believe nothing is impossible and failure is not an option?

That's true to a degree, but also projects that are a success are also the ones that don't have any little chinks in their armour.

Only 50% of businesses survive the first five years. So it's important to make your idea as good and as strong as it can be.

Again this exercise isn't just for big projects like starting a new business; it could just be a presentation to a client, or even on a personal level like packing for a family holiday. In a way, how parents prepare for trips is a lot better than how many people launch their new projects in the business world. You see, parents are worriers; they imagine the worst. “What happens if it rains all the time” (British-specific holiday), “What happens if the children get hurt?” or “What happens if they find the journey too long?”

Whereas a lot of business people would want everyone to be pumped up and positive about a project, already thinking about how they can scale it; parents think about what could go wrong.

And that's exactly the idea behind the pre-mortem. If you can imagine what could go wrong, you can fix it before it ever happens.

Now you might say, “Well, that's just planning, isn't it?” but it's actually a lot more effective than planning. When you're planning, you are imagining your project in the future, but you have a cognitive bias so you're imagining it as a success. When you're imagining the future of your project, you naturally want it to succeed, so you think of it in a positive light.

Accentuate the Negative

At Pixar they have an idea called “the Braintrust”. In his book Creativity, Inc., Ed Catmull tells how it started out with the five key men who led the production of Toy Story. It has since grown, but its one golden rule is: candour.

Ed says that in the beginning, all the Pixar films “suck”. What the Braintrust does is discuss the current film in a completely honest and truthful way. There are no egos; everyone there is just trying to make the film as good as it can be. It also has no authority, so after each session the director and producer of the film are under no pressure to take on board any of the recommendations. However, they know it's far better to learn about problems from colleagues when there's still time to fix them than from the audience after it's too late.

I'm sure most companies would be happy to have the success that Pixar films have; but unfortunately not all companies are as open and egoless.

But even in an organization with big egos, the principles of Pixar's Braintrust can be recreated with the pre-mortem. Basically, it gives everyone permission to be negative.

Imagining your project was a complete failure has a magical effect. This is especially true in business when you have a group of people involved in the project. It removes the pressure from those who are worried about seeming disloyal by voicing concerns. It actually turns it into a competition to find the most convincing reason why the project should fail. “It's a sneaky way to get people to do contrarian, devil's-advocate thinking without encountering resistance”, says Klein.

This “prospective hindsight” has actually been proven to work. Research by Mitchell, Russo and Pennington1 has proved that imagining an event has already occurred, increases the ability to correctly identify reasons for future outcomes by 30%.

Academic Karl Weick argues that the reason it works is because of a cognitive quirk: we find it easier to imagine the detailed causes of a single outcome than causes of multiple outcomes.

By imagining the project has failed, it really helps us to focus. Instead of asking what could go wrong, you ask what did go wrong. There's a subtle difference that frees up your thinking and will create better results. Nobel prize winner Daniel Kahneman says, “The main virtue of the pre-mortem is that it legitimizes doubt”.

Legitimized Bitching

The good thing with team members really pushing to find reasons why a project failed is they can discover quite obscure reasons that wouldn't have normally been thought about.

Here's an example that Gary Klein gives: In a session held at one Fortune 50–size company, an executive suggested that a billion-dollar environmental sustainability project had “failed” because interest waned when the CEO retired. Another pinned the failure on a dilution of the business case after a government agency revised its policies.

So how do you run a pre-mortem session?

1. Gather your team together and get them to imagine the project you've all been working so hard on, has been launched and has been a complete and utter failure.
2. Give everyone five minutes to write down any possible reason they can think of for this failure, especially the kinds of things they wouldn't normally mention for fear of being seen as overly negative or impolite.
3. Next, the session leader asks each member of the team to read one reason from his or her list. Everyone states a different reason until all of them have been recorded.
4. After the session the project manager or core team reviews the list.
5. A further meeting is held to look at the most likely problem areas and discuss ways to strengthen and improve the project.

And don't just believe because you've been really successful in the past, you will carry on being. You should always put every project under the microscope. That's what Pixar do with each of their films and that's why they are so successful.

Don't be wise after the event – be wise before it!