A regional director who asks her team to imagine the lease-up has already failed before it begins, then builds the plan to prevent what they imagined.
A post-mortem tells you what went wrong; a pre-mortem lets you prevent it.
Psychologist Gary Klein built the pre-mortem as an antidote to the planning fallacy, our habit of underestimating risk and overrating our ability to manage it. The method is simple. Before a major initiative starts, the team assumes it has already failed, then works backward to figure out what killed it.
Run that on a lease-up, a renovation, a big staff transition, or a repositioning, and you surface the specific failure modes that optimistic planning misses. A team that has already pictured the collapse is far better equipped to prevent it.
The pre-mortem does cultural work too. It gives people permission to raise concerns while prevention is still on the table, instead of after the thing fails and all that’s left is the lesson.
She asked them to imagine it had failed. In forty minutes they named seven specific failure modes. She built prevention plans for four. The lease-up hit 94% in ninety days. Two of the failures she’d planned against actually showed up, and the plans held.
Run the pre-mortem before you run the project. — Mike Brewer
Discussion Prompt: Before your next major initiative, gather your team and spend thirty minutes assuming it has already failed. Write down every cause they name. Build prevention plans for the top three.