Pre-Mortem Meetings
It’s a healthy practice to take a quick pause before you leave your quarterly or annual goal-setting meetings and ask “What are all of the ways we could fail?” While this could be seen as a morbid activity, it is also one of the smartest things your team can do to proactively remove the big risks and ensure you’re on the path to progress. Here’s how to conduct a pre-mortem meeting:
Step 1: Come to the Meeting with Fresh Eyes and Energy
We suggest that your team take a quick break after finishing your goal-setting meetings and come back with new energy. Maybe you even switch where everyone is sitting (if in person) in order to change the dynamic in the room.
Step 2: Make a Master List of Potential Failures
Take a look at your OKRs and then surface absolutely everything that could possibly go wrong. Think big and small and make a master list of potential ways you could fail. Could your cell order get delayed? What if 2 people on the team get COVID? What if that one microscope stops working?
Here are some strategies to help your team let the failure juices flow. Sometimes people are worried about how they might come across in a meeting like this and hold back. It can be helpful to create opportunities for role-playing or anonymity until your team has a significant amount of psychological safety with each other:
Give everyone post-its and have them write everything that comes to mind and put them up on a wall (if in person).
Create an open Google doc and have everyone dump ideas anonymously on the page.
Go systematically through the OKRs and write down everything that could go wrong for each goal.
Ask 2 or 3 people in the room to wear the “Negative Nancy” hat and point out why everything might fail. Consider even buying ridiculous hats for role-playing.
Step 3: Group the Failures into Buckets
Are several of the potential failures related to equipment, people, or timing? Think about how you can organize your rough brainstorm into groups. What do you notice? Is one particular group larger than the others? How might you systematically reduce risk in that area?
Step 4: Rank the Failures
Take a look at the potential failures and have everyone on the team pick three that they think would devastate team progress.
Step 5: Select the Top 3-5 Failures
Total up your individual votes for “top fails” and have a discussion, identifying the top 3-5 risks your team is likely to face this quarter. How likely are these to happen?
Step 6: Create a Plan to Mitigate Those Top Failures
Come up with an action plan for what you are proactively going to do to ensure these situations don’t happen. Or, if it’s absolutely impossible to plan ahead, think about a clear set of decisive steps someone specific on your team will take if any indicator emerges that this circumstance may be emerging as a reality. It’s always better to be over-prepared than frantically putting out very big and scary fires.