How to Prevent Problems with a Pre-Mortem Analysis

Bonus: What to do if prevention is impossible. Part 5 of an article series about trust in the workplace, in our personal lives, and in general.

“When I see a slippery slope, my instinct is to build a terrace.” We’ll use a premortem analysis to identify slippery slopes and build a series of terraces. Photo by PxHere

A farm-raised turkey has a predictable life. 1,000 days of daily feeding leads our feathery friend to the expectation that its human caretakers will continue feeding it indefinitely. This is a reasonable expectation until the 1,001st day, when the turkey goes to the slaughterhouse…and its expectations crash headfirst into reality.

It’s easy to look upon the turkey’s plight with disdain. We have big brains, free will, and advanced technology! We’d never meet the same fate as those simple bird-brains! And yet, we’re lulled into a sense of security by years of steady employment, stable marriage, stock market gains, and workplace camaraderie. Then comes the sudden layoff. The divorce papers. A market crash. Your star employee leaves for a competitor. As our expectations crash headfirst into reality, we feel unsettled, naked, and alone.

Humans and turkeys have different problems of the same nature: we trust too much and mistrust too little. What separates us is that humans are capable of enough hubris to believe otherwise.¹

How to Conduct a Pre-mortem Analysis

Instead of reveling in our anthropocentric superiority, let’s use our big brains to avoid the turkey’s fate. Quoting our very first post:

It’s common to conduct postmortems on dead bodies and dead projects. Why not conduct a pre-mortem? Close your eyes, visualize yourself in the midst of a preventable crisis, and reconstruct the most likely chain of events that led you to this hypothetical situation.
[…]
Then, open your eyes. Let the relief wash over you, like the feeling of waking from a nightmare. And turn your pre-mortem findings into preventative action².

This exercise is simple, but not easy. Most of us avoid dwelling on scenes of misery and catastrophe; we’d rather spend our time in psychological comfort. As we discussed in part 2, comfort is best defined as the absence of negative feelings, and comfort is closely associated with trust (best defined as the absence of mistrust). Misplaced trust leads to 1,000 days of comfort, followed by a rude (potentially lethal) awakening on the 1,001st day.

As anxiety-inducing as it is, we invite you to embrace a small amount of suffering today. It’s empowering to withstand a bit of pain today, on your own terms, so that you can prevent a tremendous amount of pain from being foisted upon you later.

Use the Mistrust Jar for Your Premortem Exercise

You should reasonably equipped to perform a pre-mortem if you’ve been following this article series. We’ll start with the mistrust jar that we asked you to bring from the previous article. Flip over that jar and dump out all the colorful mistrust marbles onto a tray. We’re going to first count all the ways you mistrust yourself, before we tally up the reasons we mistrust others. The surest way to prevent future problems is to start with the person over whom you have the most control: yourself.

To illustrate the process, we’ll conduct a premortem on the primary author of Adventures in Leadership Land. Let’s investigate how the contents of my mistrust jar could ruin my career and personal life:

1. Inconsistent output: Some days, I’m hyper-productive. Other times, it takes monumental effort just to produce mediocre work, like wringing half-baked ideas out of a ragged brain. I could become stuck in the Career Swamp if my bosses on Executive Mountain expect me to produce world-class results when I’m only capable of minimally-viable products.

2. Motor-mouthing and preachy-ness: I give detailed instructions and explanations to my subordinates, following Simon Sinek’s “Start With Why” principle. However, this practice can backfire if I waste everyone’s time with long, unnecessary explanations. Worse yet: a listener might interpret my “whys” as moralizing, which instantly turns an explanation into an unwelcome sermon. I might perish in the Desert of Good Intentions if my leadership style ends up alienating my team.

3. Philanderous tendencies: I work with people who are sharp, motivated, and competent. Unfortunately, I’m also attracted to people with those qualities. I’ve been married for years, but the wedding did not extinguish my lust for novelty; the gold ring on my finger cannot cure “Grass is Greener Syndrome.” I can imagine myself floundering in the Straits of Conflicting Interests, ensnared in the whirlpool of a sexual harassment lawsuit. Even if I didn’t drown in the Straits, there’s a high likelihood I’d be exiled from Leadership Land (and my marriage) for my transgressions.

Now that I’ve inspired you with lurid tales of my hypothetical demise, it’s your turn! What are the contents of your mistrust jar?

• Do you have an excessive smoking/drinking/drug habit? Your pre-mortem might involve your hospitalization or imprisonment.

• Do money problems constantly gnaw at you? Your pre-mortem might involve your bankruptcy, your involvement in a bribery scandal, or you accepting a job you hate just to pay the bills.

• Do you have anger management issues? Your pre-mortem might involve you punching a colleague, punching the person who serves you with the lawsuit, and punching the judge.

Every reader who follows along with this exercise will produce a different premortem analysis. That’s because every reader is a unique snowflake, making them untrustworthy in their own unique way! Hey, we warned you in the previous article that we’re equal-opportunity misanthropes :)

Turning Premortems Into Prevention

Now that you’ve envisioned several hypothetical calamities in your future, it’s time to work backward along the chain of events to until you return to present day. What’s the weakest link in that chain? How can you break that weak link and prevent this miserable future from ever becoming reality?

To illustrate, let’s revisit the ways I mistrust myself:

1. Inconsistent output: My productivity can vary wildly due to medical flare-ups and distractions.

   1. The weak link in the chain that causes flare-ups is a poor diet, lack of exercise, and exposure to certain physical irritants – I can break that chain by eating healthy, exercising, and avoiding those triggers (again, simple but not easy).

   2. Instant gratification is the weak link in the chain that leads to distraction. By artificially creating a 2-3 minute barrier against instant gratification, I remove 90% of the distractions from my life³.

2. Motor-mouthing and preachy-ness: When I get preachy, I lose track of time. Being mindful (or being reminded) of the time is the weak link in the chain that leads to my sermonizing. I instruct my subordinates to craft agendas for each meeting, and to enforce those agendas – even if they have to interrupt me.

3. Philanderous tendencies: The weakest link in the chain that leads to a sexual harassment lawsuit or divorce is that I can’t become infatuated with someone whom I don’t know about. By pouring my excess time and energy into other activities, such as writing Adventures in Leadership Land, I’m breaking the chain and protecting my spouse from my worst tendencies. Incidentally, writing for this Substack also supports the avoidance strategy for #2. When I’m busy preaching to strangers on the internet, there’s no time to flirt with cute co-workers! When social engagement is unavoidable (like during the workday, or at happy hour), it comes down to maintaining a professional aloofness and avoiding anything that could lower my inhibitions. Incidentally, avoiding alcohol also supports the avoidance strategy for #1 by helping me avoid medical flare-ups.

Your turn. What’s the weakest link between today and the hypothetical crisis looming in your future? What can you do to break the chain and steer yourself into a better future? If you’ve ever studied strategic planning, you’ve probably learned how to do a SWOT analysis; many of the principles used in SWOT analyses will apply here.

Help! I’m Trapped as a Turkey!

Even if you must be a turkey, there are ways for you to avoid becoming someone else’s Thanksgiving dinner.

Pre-mortems are powerful preventative tools, but they aren’t panaceas. Sometimes, your premortem exercise will reveal an unbreakable chain that is dragging you inexorably toward an unwanted future. You might be the Cassandra of your organization: blessed with foresight, but cursed to be forever ignored and overruled. You might work in an environment where there’s a strong incentive to be a turkey (e.g. an organization that rewards leaders for short-term performance and encourages them to take huge risks – the equivalent of stockpiling barrels of dynamite in the basement).

When we’re stuck being turkeys, we follow these general guidelines to cover our cloaca:

• Formulate several layers of contingency plans. It’s good to have a plan B. It’s better to have plans B, C, D, and an insurance policy tucked away in a side pocket of plan E. It’s better to have and not need, than to need but not have.

• Seek advisors. We like to pick mentors who are smarter and more experienced than us. We also study the legacies of the eminent dead. No matter how smart and farsighted we may become, we will never be as smart and farsighted as the accumulated wisdom of all humanity.

• Maximize optionality. When facing the Fog of Uncertainty and stuck with two choices that are equally unpleasant/equally expensive, we usually prefer the one that gives us more options. Instead of keeping a “rainy day fund,” our goal is to build a “f*** you fund” which gives us the option (but not the obligation) to say those magic words in response to problematic people and other people’s problems.

• Build in as many redundancies as you can afford. We keep multiple data backups in multiple locations. We stockpile emergency supplies in our homes, vehicles, and offices. We train our staff so they can do each other’s jobs. We train ourselves so that we can do most of our subordinates’ jobs. The years between 2020-2022 taught us that tight supply chains, low inventory, and specialization have the same problem as the Thanksgiving turkey: these “efficiencies” were terrific during the 1,000 days of normal operation, and terribad on the 1,001st day when the pandemic struck.

  • If your organization survives on thin margins in a competitive industry, you won’t be able to afford many redundancies (in which case, one of your contingency plans should be an exit strategy to a less turkey-prone industry).

• Transform from armored turkey → vulture. In zero-sum situations, all you have to do is outlast your competitors. For every prepared turkey, there are ten turkeys who are blissfully unaware of the impending Thanksgiving slaughter. Don your armor. Train your agility. Let the butcher kill the slow, docile turkeys first.
  
  Then, use your superior optionality to morph from turkey (prey) to vulture (scavenger). Poach talented employees from fallen competitors. Buy property, plant, equipment, and equity at fire-sale prices. Sprawl out in the economic niche where your rivals used to be; an increased market share is your reward for being a patient and prepared turkey.

Final Thoughts

It’s preferable to prevent problems with premortem exercises, but it’s also unsexy. Society bestows no laurels upon the silent heroes who prevent a crisis, but we lionize those who clean up an existing mess.

If you have no choice but to be a turkey, the next-best thing is:

Hope for the best, prepare for the worst. Capitalize on what follows.

Trust is vitally important in the workplace, in our personal lives, and in all human interactions. But trust leads to comfort, and comfort presents a slippery slope down into the ditch of complacency. This is why we advocate for two things:

• High trust in others to promote comfort, cognitive ease, and camaraderie; this makes it possible to produce your best work

• High mistrust as a tool to fight against complacency; by maintaining realistic expectations, you’re building terraces along that slippery slope.

As incongruous as it seems, you can have both at the same time. Start by mistrusting yourself before you mistrust others. Water your self-awareness plant and it will grow. Neglect it, and it will shrivel.

1. Maybe turkeys feel superior to, say, cockroaches. Perhaps we’re being anthropocentric by assuming that humans have a monopoly on hubris.

2. Your pre-mortems should not be limited to only career-related considerations. Illness, marital problems, a drug addiction, a car accident, and a lawsuit out of left field can all end a career from the outside as easily as a work-related event from within. Additionally, your pre-mortems should not be limited to acts of commission. An act of omission, like neglecting your health, spouse, seat belt, or liability insurance, can also lead to a ruinous end. The decision to do nothing can be as impactful as the decision to do something.

3. I sometimes lock my phone inside my car trunk when I absolutely need to get work done. The LeechBlock app limits the depth of my internet rabbit holes; the app clamps down on browsing once I reach my daily limit. I also use parental controls and administrative policies on routers to block access across all devices, not just the one I’m using. The limits can be overruled or changed if something urgent comes up, but I have to enter a long, annoying password. It takes me about 2-3 minutes to dig the password out and type it in. These minor delays are usually enough to suppress the urge for immediate gratification.