Quotes About Premortem

There's also the "premortem," in which the team is told to assume a course of action has failed and to explain why—which makes team members feel safe to express doubts they may have about the leader's plan. But the superteams did not start with leaders and norms, which created other challenges.

The premortem has two main advantages: it overcomes the groupthink that affects many teams once a decision appears to have been made, and it unleashes the imagination of knowledgeable individuals in a much-needed direction.

suppression of doubt contributes to overconfidence in a group where only supporters of the decision have a voice. The main virtue of the premortem is that it legitimizes doubts.

If you had a navigation app for your goals and decisions, it would work like a premortem and a backcast and its output would look like the Decision Exploration Table. You've identified two broad categories of future events (those within and outside your control) that could decrease or increase your chances of failure or success and made an educated guess about their likelihood. You now have a good map of what might lie in the path on the way to your goal.

a technique called "failure mode and effect analysis" (FMEA), a precursor to the premortem that has been used for decades in the military and government.