The pre-mortem

Gary Klein · 2007

Assume the plan has already failed a year from now, and have everyone write down why.

Its place in the frameworkTime Core›Contingency Planning

What it does

The reversal does the work. Asking what could go wrong invites loyal reassurance; stating that it did go wrong and asking for the reasons gives people permission to say what they already suspected. In the research behind it, prospective hindsight of this kind substantially increased the number of causes people could identify.

Reach for it when: Immediately after a plan is agreed and before it is committed to — it takes under an hour.
Where it stops: It surfaces concerns; it does not weigh them or fix them. Run as a ritual with no obligation to change the plan, it is worse than not running it.

Gary Klein, “Performing a Project Premortem”, Harvard Business Review, 2007; building on Mitchell, Russo & Pennington, 1989.

Why it sits at Contingency Planning

What happens when the plan slips: where it slips, what absorbs it, what the fallback is, and when the decision to change course has to be taken.

A model is only useful when you reach for it at the right moment. This one answers a question that arises here — so it is filed here, and nowhere else. These are the working areas it serves:

SlippageEstimation research on optimism bias and the planning fallacy, and reference-class forecasting as the correction.
BuffersCritical-chain project management on aggregated buffers, and the argument against padding individual tasks.
The fallback planContingency-planning practice and the lead-time problem that makes late alternatives unavailable.
Decision pointsReal-options thinking on the value of deciding while options remain open.

All of Contingency Planning

What it touches elsewhere

Nothing in a business is decided on its own. A conclusion reached with this model at Contingency Planning lands in these other cores, whether or not anyone follows it there.

Project managementSlippage is a project’s most common failure, and this object is what the project does about it.
Business CoreSupply resilience covers what happens when supply fails; this object covers what happens when time does.
Goal CoreA slipped plan raises the question of whether the goal moves, which is a decision rather than a consequence.
Data CoreSlippage history is data the organisation already has and almost never uses.

Filed at the same place

These answer questions that arise at Contingency Planning too. Where they disagree with this one, the disagreement is the useful part.

Scenario planningSeveral internally consistent futures, written out in detail, instead of one forecast with a margin of error.

Elsewhere in Time Core

These are other people’s models, named here so you can go to the source and use them properly. The Omnigoal is not affiliated with their authors and is not endorsed by them; nothing of theirs is reproduced here — no canvas, no diagram, no wording. Each is described in our own words, with the originator credited, because the framework is a place to put thinking, not a replacement for the people who did it. Model names and trademarks belong to their respective owners and are used here only to refer to the work itself.

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