You will be able to run Gary Klein's pre-mortem with a team before committing to a plan.
Hafiz, from lesson 6.1, has decided the Tampines lease is a one-way door and deserves care. His team has spent two weeks on the plan: the fit-out, the menu, the hiring, a launch promotion. At the final meeting he asks, "Any concerns before we sign?" There is a short silence. Someone mentions the parking. Everyone agrees it is minor. The meeting ends with the plan approved.
Six months later the outlet is struggling, and in the post-mortem three people say they had doubts about the foot traffic on weekdays. None of them said so at the time. Asking "any concerns?" at the end of a planning meeting almost never surfaces them, because by then the team is committed, the boss looks keen and raising a doubt feels like being negative. The pre-mortem is a way around that.
The pre-mortem comes from the psychologist Gary Klein, who described it in the Harvard Business Review. A post-mortem asks why something failed after it has failed. A pre-mortem asks the same question before you start, while you can still do something about the answer.
The method is simple. When the team has a plan it is close to committing to, the leader says something like: "Imagine it is a year from now. We went ahead with this plan, and it has failed badly. Take a few minutes and write down every reason you can think of for why it failed."
Klein's instruction is to treat the failure as having already happened, not as something that might happen. The wording matters. You are not asking "what could go wrong?", which invites cautious, general answers. You are saying "it went wrong, explain why", which invites a specific story.
Klein built on research into what is sometimes called prospective hindsight: imagining that an event has already happened makes it easier for people to come up with specific reasons for it. Once the failure is treated as a fact, the mind starts looking for causes, the way it does after any real event.
The bigger effect is social. In a normal planning meeting, voicing doubts can feel disloyal, especially to a senior person who championed the plan, or in a workplace where questioning the boss in public is uncomfortable. Many people in Singapore offices know that feeling well. The pre-mortem changes the task. The leader has asked everyone to find reasons for failure, so finding them is now doing the job well, not being difficult. People who would never say "I don't think this will work" will happily write "weekday footfall was too low because the office crowd works from home on Mondays and Fridays".
Kahneman, who discusses the method in Thinking, Fast and Slow, points out that it also pushes back against the groupthink that builds up as a team gets close to a decision. Lesson 5.2, Anchors and confirmation, showed how hard it is to look for evidence against a view you already hold. A pre-mortem makes that search the whole point of the meeting.
The order of steps matters, because it protects the quieter voices.
First, everyone writes their reasons alone, in silence, for a few minutes. Nobody speaks. This stops the most senior or most confident person from setting the direction, which is the anchoring problem again.
Second, the group shares reasons one at a time, going round the table or round the call, each person giving one reason per turn until all the lists are exhausted. The leader writes them up where everyone can see. Going one at a time means everyone gets a turn, and a junior person's best reason is heard before the discussion moves on. On a video call with some people in a room and others remote, go round by name so remote participants are not skipped. Lesson 5.4 of Communicate at work, Get heard when you are remote and others are in the room, covers why that matters.
Third, look at the full list together and pick out the reasons that seem most likely or most damaging. You will usually find several that nobody had raised before.
The whole thing takes around fifteen to thirty minutes. You can also run one alone, on a personal decision, by writing the failure story for yourself.
The list is only useful if it changes something. For each of the most important reasons, decide one of two things.
Either change the plan. If the most likely failure is weak weekday footfall, Hafiz could negotiate a shorter first lease, adjust the opening hours, or add a weekday office catering service before launch.
Or set a warning sign to watch. Some risks cannot be fixed in advance, but you can decide now what early signal would show it is happening and what you will do. "If average weekday sales are below our break-even figure for six straight weeks, we review the opening hours and the menu." Writing the trigger in advance makes it much easier to act on later, because the decision has already been made with a clear head. It is also a defence against the sunk cost trap from lesson 2.3, Sunk costs and other traps in your own head.
Hafiz's pre-mortem produces eleven reasons. The three that most people rated likely were weekday footfall, a delayed fit-out pushing the opening into a slow month, and difficulty hiring a manager for the outlet. He changes the plan for the first two and sets a warning sign for the third.
Think of a plan you are close to committing to, at work or at home, ideally one where nobody has yet said out loud what worries them. That is the plan to bring to the activity below.
Run a fifteen-minute pre-mortem on a current plan, alone or with your team, and list three changes it suggests.
Junxiong-WFG Organisation is an authorised representative of AIA Financial Advisers Private Limited (Reg. No. 201715016G).