Exercise
Premortem
Before you commit — to a hire, a strategy, a launch — imagine it has already failed and work backwards from the wreckage.
Use it whenever optimism is quietly doing the risk assessment: an offer about to be signed, a big strategic bet, a launch date everyone is excited about. Declaring failure as a fact — not a possibility — gives people permission to say what they actually fear.
How to run it
Assume it failed
Set the scene as fact, not hypothesis.
“It's twelve months from now and this went wrong. What happened?”
List the failure modes
Everyone writes independently first, then share. Independent lists surface the quiet doubts.
Rank by likelihood
Order the list. If it is a strategic bet, add magnitude and plot it on the Opportunity & Threat Map.
Mitigate the top two or three
Each top risk gets a mitigation or an early-warning signal you will actually watch.
Everyone premortems projects; almost nobody premortems a hire. Before a senior hire starts, run it with their manager: "If this hire fails, how did it fail?" — "He couldn't turn his network into pipeline." "Her lack of people experience meant the team drifted." Rank them, then watch for them during onboarding.
Source / credit
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