Run a Pre-Mortem Before the World Does It for You
The best laid plans of mice and men go oft awry” - Robert Burns.
Every CEO I coached this week had one thing in common: their Q4 plans were off track and they were scrambling and stressed. Demand contractions, unexpected competitor moves, or a key exec departures meant the world was changing faster than their plans could keep up.
We live in a VUCA world: volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous. Many leaders still believe they can plan their way out of chaos. They can’t. What they can do is prepare to adapt when the plan meets reality.
How? By planning for failure before it happens.
The best leaders run a pre-mortem: They imagine their plan has failed spectacularly, then work backward to uncover why. It’s one of the simplest and most powerful ways to strengthen strategic thinking before surprises hit.
Run This in Your Next Leadership Meeting
Set the stage. “It’s six months from now, and our plan failed. What went wrong?” Give people 5 minutes to write down every reason they could think of in private.
Tip: Instead of asking “What COULD go wrong”, ask “We absolutely failed. What DID go wrong?”. This increases the number and quality of reasons people generate.
Encourage folks to be specific (“market contraction” becomes “demand craters and our cost structure limits pricing flexibility.”).
Examples of pre-mortem failures:
The product weakness we’re worried about occurs with a key customer and becomes a PR nightmare.
We rush the product to market without sufficient testing, and our customer sues us when it discloses client data.
The project’s senior leader leaves halfway through, and no one is able to take over.
Our biggest competitor launches their product innovation a month before we do, and corners the market.
Surface all possible causes. Invite one unique failure from each leader. Write them down where everyone can see.
Group and prioritize. Cluster risks by theme: market, execution, people, or external shocks. Have them team vote on the top three most likely and/or damaging risks.
Design safeguards. For each risk, identify:
Early warning signals — What would tell us this is happening?
Preventive action — What can we do now to reduce likelihood and impact?
Contingency plan — What will we do if it happens?
Turn insights into decisions. Adjust your plan (e.g., invest more in reducing tech debt, build in more time for hiring, revisit vendor contracts, increase budget buffers) based on what you’ve uncovered.
One of my CEO clients ran this exercise before a big product launch. The team spotted a dependency on a risky partner that could have delayed their go-live by weeks, and fixed the issue in advance. That one meeting probably saved them millions in lost revenue.
Research and Rigor
Daniel Kahneman talks about how individuals miss hidden traps of overconfidence, overestimating their abilities and the accuracy of their predictions (Kahneman & Daniel, 2011). Gary Klein introduced the pre-mortem to counter this bias: once teams commit to a strategy, they underestimate the ways it could fail (Harvard Business Review, 2007). His research found that imagining a project’s failure as if it already happened makes people more honest and specific about risks.
Unlike traditional risk reviews, which tend to reward optimism, a pre-mortem encourages healthy skepticism. It reduces overconfidence, makes it easier for people to share concerns, and improves everyone’s ability to notice early warning signs. Your team becomes more flexible and better-prepared for risks.
When viewed through the lens of Amy Edmondson’s work on psychological safety and Richard Hackman’s research on team learning, the pre-mortem also becomes a practice that builds both foresight and trust. It boosts your team’s collective intelligence and signals to boards and investors that you’ve stress-tested your own assumptions. A one-hour pre-mortem can prevent weeks of rework and all the stress that comes with it.
Invitation to Action
Try a pre-mortem this week. You’ll wind up with better plans, a more alert team, and fewer “no one saw this coming” moments. A pre-mortem won’t make the world less VUCA, but it help you respond with greater confidence when it is.
Extra Credit
Ask your team: How might we make pre-mortems a part of our culture and systems so they improve continual team learning and reflection?
Let me know: How do you and your teams stay clear and adaptive when the world refuses to stand still?
Photo credit: Belinda Fewings on Unsplash
#decision-making #risk #leadership #coaching