Word Of The Moment: Pre-Mortem

[from Analyzing Failure Beforehand]

“A pre-mortem in a business setting comes at the beginning of a project rather than the end, so the project can be improved rather than autopsied,” Mr. Klein explains in The Harvard Business Review.

In the pre-mortem, company officials assume they have just learned that a product or a service they are about to introduce has “failed spectacularly.” They then write down every plausible reason they can think of to explain the failure. The list is then used to eliminate potential flaws before the new idea is actually introduced into the marketplace.

I really like this technique, and I plan to use it more explictly in future client engagements.