Tom Jasinski is a boardmember (departing at the end of August after serving for six years) from New York:
To Assure Success, Predict Failure
In Organization Design we spend a lot of time evolving, integrating, and perfecting our concepts, techniques, and practices in pursuit of the well-designed organization. But how do we know our designs will work? Often, we rely on formative and summative evaluations to test how a solution is developing or whether it is performing as intended. But this only helps us look back.
How do we look into the future to see whether something might work? One way is to assume that it won’t, using a pre-mortem analysis. Unlike the classic “post-mortem” analysis techniques, a pre-mortem asks designers and stakeholders to pause before launching a design solution, place themselves a year or two into the future, and pretend that their elegant, well-crafted design has completely and utterly failed. Then, the team asks “why did it fail?” This discussion yields candid, unbiased, and often bold insights into why failure occurs—without the pressure of accountability, potential embarrassment, and other defenses that can arise in a post-mortem analysis. At MetLife, we recently performed a pre-mortem just before we launched our new Investments organization. We imagined it was July of 2014 and our shiny new perfect organization design had failed. The discussion yielded 18 reasons that the design failed! But then we found 18 actions that would mitigate or help prevent this failure. This technique, unlike retrospective evaluation, gives permission to fail in a safe environment (because nothing has failed yet) and can help ensure success.
For a good primer on the pre-mortem technique, see this Harvard Business Review article: http://hbr.org/2007/09/performing-a-project-premortem/ar/1
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