Kill your project! — Choose To Thinq

(This is from Edition 49 of The Upleveler, our weekly smartletter)

When it comes to ideas and projects that we conceive, we are often likely to suffer from 'Optimism Bias'. In this, we don't carefully consider what could go wrong with these ideas. (Negativity can be painful.) Sometimes, we do a perfunctory 'risk analysis', but this may not push the boundaries of what could go wrong.

If you are a leader, you can make things worse by preventing people from speaking up and pointing out flaws in your idea. In many cases, it may just be out of deference to your authority. No one likes to volunteer bad news, least of all to people up in the pecking order.

So what can you do to overcome this?

Death comes as the answer

Psychologist Gary Klein has an elegant idea for us to use. You may know what a post-mortem is: a dead body is bought in, and an analysis is conducted to find out possible causes of death.

In a pre-mortem, ask yourself: the project died. What all could have killed it?
Knowing the answers to this can help you pre-empt some of these causes of death. Asking this in past tense makes this exercise an emotionally stronger experience than mere risk analysis, and thus likely to make you act in response.

For instance, let's say our smartletter 'died' 😔 i.e. it failed to be useful to readers.

What are 5 ways in which this could have happened?

1. The contents were too dull, complicated, or lacking in useful information
2. It was misclassified as spam/promotions
3. Mailchimp, our email provider, was down
4. Something nasty happened to CTQ last week and the smartletter didn't go out
5. The letter was too long and most people postponed reading it.

...and so on. We can now try to fix these fatal errors in advance, or at least have a plan B.

You can even turn this into a game for your team:how many different causes can we come up with? This gives them permission to take a ruthless scalpel to your baby.

The pre-mortem is a terrific technique to add to your planning process. We have often applied it to our own work and it's been very useful.

So go on - you have a license to kill.

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