Hi, I’m Chad Moore. You’re receiving this email as you signed up for my Newsletter, called Presence.

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Hi, I’m Chad Moore. You’re receiving this email as you signed up for my Newsletter, called Presence. I appreciate you being here and reading! I’d love to hear from you, send a reply if you want to chat.

Visual Tools for Focus - The Premortem

A Premortem useful technique for individual creative people, or teams to build some defense around a new initiative, project, or feature.

Many people and teams hold Postmortems. To examine a project after its been complete. To learn from it, and adapt for the next projects.

A Premortem flips this idea.

The premise of the Premortem is this: Right before you begin a project, have a meeting with yourself or your team and pretend it’s near the end of that project.

It’s is a complete disaster
An epic failure
Embarrassing
The literal Worst Project Ever
It’s so bad you do not want your name associated with it.

Ask everyone to write down some potential reasons why it’s so bad.

I like to do this with Post-its on a wall. Or something like Mural or Miro. But whatever works for you, as long as it’s visible

Read them aloud, one by one.

Even if it’s just you, verbalizing these can be powerful.

For each ask Why did this happen?

This is more than Risk Analysis. It’s a chance for everyone to be heard, and for discovery that wouldn’t be possible otherwise. These are things that you may not want to admit, or no one on the team wants to say. These things can be painful. This technique moves them from the end of the terrible project, where it is too late and there is a lot of friction. It moves them up to the start, where you can plan, explore, or mitigate the reasons why.