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Conducting Pre and Post-Mortems

Developing Strategic Thinking

Professor Brandon Lee

June 2016

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Reflect on Yesterday’s Session

• What insights did you gain?

• What will you do differently as a result?

• What questions were raised? What else do you need to know?

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Where to Look for Insight

Anomalies

Confluence and juxtaposition

Frustration and pain points

Orthodoxies

The Periphery

Go Native

Analogies

Sawhney and Khosla, 2014

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“Iron Mike” Webster

“He was the best center in the history of the game.”

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Dr. Bennet Omalu

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Post-Mortem:

Why conduct a post-mortem?Who benefits?

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Beware of:

Fundamental attribution error: attributing success to our talents and our current strategy instead of other external factors

Overconfidence bias: our perception of our abilities and confidence is higher than it should be

Failure-to-ask-why syndrome: the tendency not to investigate the cause of good performance systematically

Gino and Pisano, 2011

Learning from Successes

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Learning from Successes

Tactics to learn from success:

1. Celebrate success but examine it

2. Institute systematic project reviews

3. Use the right time horizons

4. Recognize that replication is not learning

5. If it ain’t broke, experiment

Gino and Pisano, 2011

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What is Your Mindset?

A study of resident anaesthesiologists to see how they interpreted evidence and diagnosed a problem.

• “In-the-doldrums” (2): Could not identify any pattern in the evidence and could therefore not generate a diagnosis; neither correctly diagnosed.

• “Fixated” (11): Jumped to the obvious diagnosis, not considering alternatives. None discovered the problem.

• “Vagabonds” (17): “Diagnostic vagabonding” meant no commitment to any diagnosis, treating all possibilities as tentative. None figured out problem

• “Problem Solvers” (9): These identified the most likely cause immediately. However, when treatment did not work, they turned to other diagnoses, testing and rejecting each. 7/9 discovered the problem

Source: Serrat, 2012

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Operation Market Garden

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Operation Market Garden

Arnhem Bridge

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Operation Market Garden

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Operation Market Garden

Of 10,000 paratroopers, 1,500 die and 6,000 captured.Estimated casualties for entire operation:

~15,000 - 17,200

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Future vs Past

Past

• Certainty

• More Detail

• Causal Complexity

• Reasoning based on the concrete

• Specifics are too relevant to ignore

• We ask “Why did that happen?”

Future

• Uncertainty

• Less Detail

• Causal Simplicity

• Reasoning based on the abstract

• Specifics too numerous to anticipate

• Looking forward, we ask, “what will happen?”

Source: Mitchell et al., 1989

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Pushing the Past into the Future: The Pre-Mortem

• Pre-Mortems come at the beginning of the project rather than the end

• Objective is improvement, not autopsy!

• Creates space for creative and contrarian objections

• Legitimizes early dissent

• Those that develop the plan are generally committed to its success and are therefore overconfident and blind to liabilities

• Removes penalty of being viewed as disloyal

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Conducting at Pre-Mortem - Step 1

“Unmitigated Disaster”

• Identify ALL possible reasons for failure

• Even those that have a remote chance of occurring

• Session of Doom and Gloom

• DO NOT consider solutions at this point.

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Conducting at Pre-Mortem - Step 2

“Unprecedented Success”

• Identify as many causes/drivers for success.

• Be as specific as possible

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Step 3: Make Exhaustive List

“Unmitigated Disaster”

• Appoint someone as scribe

• One person reads her potential problems/reasons for failure

• In turn, each person adds a new problem to list until saturated.

“Unprecedented Success”

• Appoint someone as scribe

• One person reads all causes for success.

• In turn, each person adds a new cause/reason until saturated

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Step 3: Select Top 10

“Unmitigated Disaster”

• Narrow massive list of problems

• Focus on Show-Stoppers

• Identify probability of occurring

• Differentiate between control/no control

“Unprecedented Success”

• Narrow massive list of success factors

• Prioritize criticality for success

• Differentiate between control/no control

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Step 4: Assess and Prepare

“Unmitigated Disaster”

• Develop Solutions

• Plan to address each highly likely problem

• Contingency plan for “unlikely but show-stopper”

“Unprecedented Success”

• Are needed resources and capabilities in place?

• Does organization currently enable this success factor?

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Summary

• Post-mortem and Pre-mortems create opportunities to question assumptions and anticipate problems

– Help prevent a whole range of biases

– Draw together strategy and execution to develop necessary differentiated capabilities

• Powerful stories are critical to issue selling

– Simple

– Unexpected

– Concrete

– Emotive