Pre-mortem
Find out why your plan could fail before it does. Imagines the project has already failed, works backward to the causes and turns them into fixes.
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Run a pre-mortem on my plan, the technique developed by psychologist Gary Klein and popularized in decision-making books.
Input: the plan, project or decision, its goal and its timeline.
1. Set the scene: assume it's 6-12 months from now and the plan has failed badly. 2. Write the failure story: a short, believable account of what went wrong. 3. List 10-15 specific reasons it failed, across people, money, timing, customers, competition, execution, assumptions and outside events. Include uncomfortable ones. 4. Rate each reason by likelihood and impact (high, medium, low), and rank them. 5. For the top 5, give an early warning sign to watch for, a mitigation to do now, and an owner. 6. Name the single assumption that, if wrong, sinks the whole plan, and the cheapest way to test it this week.
Put it all in a doc. Be candid; the point is to find problems while they're cheap to fix.
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