Running the Pre-Mortem

A facilitator, a head of design and a COO are conducting a pre-mortem at an offsite in Seattle, imagining that their new strategy completely failed.

Running the Pre-Mortem

True or false?

Steve is facilitating the pre-mortem session in Seattle.

• True
• False

Laura believes the strategy failed because of poor engineering sprints.

• True
• False

Patrick argues that the strategy failed because it was never actually funded.

• True
• False

The team decides to ignore the budget issue and focus on brand positioning.

• True
• False

Laura agrees to take on the follow-through owner role for the budget brief.

• True
• False

Listen again and complete the sentences

• Steve: Right, let's move to our pre-mortem session now that we've finished the ____ . Imagine it's eighteen months from today and our design expansion strategy has failed completely. We've lost our enterprise clients and missed all targets. Let's hear your devil's advocate takes on why.
• Laura: I'll start. What worries me is whether we relied too much on divergent thinking without forcing early convergent thinking. We explored twenty design directions for the dashboard, but we couldn't ____ before the engineering sprint started.
• Patrick: Well, if you want my honest view, the strategy failed because we never actually funded it. We had gorgeous slide decks, endless workshops, and a massive ____ , but zero budget allocated to the core infrastructure team.
• Laura: Oh come on, Patrick, that's a bit harsh, isn't it? We spent weeks on those ____ .
• Steve: That's quite a heavy silence in the room now. Let me frame the question differently. Did we treat the ____ as real execution or just an exercise?

Sources: photo by Vitaly Gariev on Pexels