Conduct a Pre-Mortem

Story maps aren’t the only way to help us see our own assumptions. Gary Klein, a cognitive psychologist and author of several books on decision-making, flipped the idea of a post-mortem on its head. Post-mortems are after-project reviews where participants assess what went wrong and what could have gone better. Sprint retrospectives are a type of post-mortem. Pre-mortems, on the other hand, happen at the start of the project and are designed to suss out what could go wrong in the future.

Pre-mortems are a great way to generate assumptions. They leverage prospective hindsight—a technique where you imagine what might happen in the future. A pre-mortem encourages you to ask, “Imagine it’s six months in the future; your product or initiative launched, and it was a complete failure. What went wrong?” As you generate reasons for why your product or service might fail, you are exposing assumptions that your idea depends upon that may not be true.

The success of pre-mortems, however, hinges on one key factor—phrasing the question as if the outcome is certain. In our case, that means we have to consider that the product or service did fail, not that it might fail. Deborah Mitchell, Edward Russo, and Nancy Pennington, collaborating psychologists at the University of Pennsylvania, Cornell University, and the University of Colorado, found the technique was effective at generating better explanations only when prospective hindsight was paired with a certain outcome.⁵⁰