The limits of classic risk reviews
In a team, the pressure to conform often prevents people from voicing doubts: nobody wants to look defeatist. This groupthink phenomenon, described by Janis (1972), hides the project's real weaknesses until it is too late.
Prospective hindsight
Psychologist Gary Klein (2007) proposes the pre-mortem: you announce upfront that "the project has failed," then everyone looks for why. The announcement lifts the social taboo, because failure is stated as a fact, not as a pessimistic opinion. It relies on prospective hindsight: Mitchell, Russo and Pennington (1989) showed that imagining an event has already happened improves the ability to identify its causes (on the order of 30% more relevant reasons, according to the figures Klein cites).
Running a workshop (30 to 60 minutes)
- Preparation: the team meets before launch, once the plan is drawn up.
- Projection: "It's a year from now. The project is a total disaster. What happened?"
- Individual brainstorming: everyone silently writes down every reason for the failure for five minutes.
- Consolidation: collect the causes, group them, rank them by likelihood and impact.
- Action plan: for each main cause, decide on a preventive action, an owner and a deadline, and adjust the project plan.
It is also the right moment to set your stop criteria, and to neutralize the sunk cost fallacy in advance.
In FluidOps
Turn each retained risk into a Kanban card, with an owner and a deadline: a preventive measure left on a sticky note is useless. Place the exposed milestones in the Gantt, and follow blocked tasks in the analytics to react before the risk becomes a delay.
Sources
- Klein, G. (2007). Performing a project premortem. Harvard Business Review, 85(9), 18-19. hbr.org
- Mitchell, D. J., Russo, J. E., & Pennington, N. (1989). Back to the future: Temporal perspective in the explanation of events. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 2(1), 25-38. doi:10.1002/bdm.3960020103
- Janis, I. L. (1972). Victims of Groupthink: A Psychological Study of Foreign-Policy Decisions and Fiascoes. Houghton Mifflin. openlibrary.org