The Pre-Mortem

Shreyas Doshi has a practice that transformed how he launches products: the pre-mortem. Every company does post-mortems after things go wrong. Shreyas asked: why wait until after?

The genius is in the prompt: 'Imagine this has failed miserably. Now work backwards - what went wrong?'

This gives everyone psychological safety to voice concerns they'd normally suppress. Nobody likes being the negative one. But in a pre-mortem, negativity is the whole point.

Apply this to parenting moments that stress you out. The birthday party. The long car trip. The first day at a new school. Before it happens, sit down with your partner and ask: 'Imagine this went terribly. What happened?'

Maybe the answer is: we didn't bring enough snacks. Or: the transition from one activity to another triggered a meltdown. Or: we assumed they'd nap but they didn't. Now you can prepare.

Shreyas uses categories: tigers (real threats that could kill the project), paper tigers (things others worry about but you don't), and elephants (the thing nobody's talking about). What's the tiger in your family outing? What's the elephant nobody's mentioning?

If you do a pre-mortem right, you won't have to do the ugly post-mortem.