Putting Pre-mortems Into Practice Worksheet
Hopefully, conducting post-mortem sessions is a regular practice for you and your team. If not, I encourage you to start. Yes, post-mortems take time, but they will improve you, your team, and your future efforts.
- A meeting you may be less familiar with is a pre-mortem session. These occur before you start the event, project, or initiative. Pre-mortems provide you and your team a chance to step back and reflect on your efforts, but they do it in a proactive manner to explore what might cause your efforts to fail. Participants work to answer:
- What are our goals for the event, project, or initiative?
- What might cause us to fail (e.g., resources, processes, structures, customers, schedule, etc.)?
- How can we address potential issues before they arise?
This week’s tool and video will help you and your team to conduct pre-mortems. Proactively listen to your team members’ concerns, ask questions to understand issues better, and ultimately make intelligent decisions about handling potential pitfalls. Identifying and addressing a problem before it becomes a problem will give your team great satisfaction, increase morale, and empower people to do it again.
This week’s tool:
Conduct a premortem session
Patrick Leddin, PhD is a speaker, global leadership consultant, and The Wall Street Journal bestselling author of The Five-Week Leadership Challenge. Patrick is an Associate Professor at Vanderbilt University with a thriving leadership blog and podcast, and 25-years of leadership experience. He offers an unparalleled mix of academic rigor and real-world experience.