Hi there, this is Jon & Mark from Salt & Light.
Tension is rising among the leadership team.
You can tell from the murmurings that this product launch is creating pressure.
The decision to launch has been made. But ‘the how’ is in your hands and needs sign-off from the senior leadership team.
Snatched conversations reveal real concern.
Every question seems to lean towards risk and how to avoid it. How to contain budget? What’s the right marketing mix? How might competitors react?
The danger is that in avoiding risk, you end up doing nothing.
What they really want is security. A guarantee.
You can’t predict the future or give them the perfect plan. But you can apply thought and rigour to give greater clarity and ringfence some of the risk.
The solution comes from applying your creativity at the intersection of decision-making and implementation.
Instead of simply experiencing risks, costs and failures whilst implementing for real, your team can exercise time travel to bring failure ahead of the decision (h/t Annie Duke).
Get your team to picture two outcomes that follow execution.
One is a successful outcome and the other a spectacular failure.
These give you a baseline to work backwards from. They highlight critical success and failure points and shine a light on your assumptions.
You get to travel forward and gain a new perspective through your mind. What you and your team see, might fundamentally change everything about how you launch this new product.
Either way, your implementation plan gets exposed in a helpful way.
Let’s break these down into a concrete process.
Backcasting
Bring your team together and give them this brief about the plan you’re about to present to the senior leadership team.
Imagine the roll out of your plan, say six months to a year from now.
Knowing it was a stunning success. Write the headlines and imagine your pride at reading them.
Make the success tangible enough that you can feel it. Consider different perspectives from customers to employees, from shareholders to the global economy.
Then, step by step, work backwards from the positive future to the present day.
What was behind success? Where were the high and low probability events? Where were naturally strong in our implementation? Where might we have been stronger? What made this outcome more likely?
Reflect on how this impacts the decision, and in particular the implementation of it. What could you change to ensure those events come out in your favour?
It can be easy to gloss over this type of outcome. The optimists love a half-full glass. But deep within this vision lies some insights your original decision won’t have seen.
And that’s a win for implementation.
Premortem
The Premortem is discussed in the work of Gary Klein but is rooted in Stoic Philosophy: Seneca’s Premeditatio Malourum (the Pre-meditation of Evils) which anticipated the ups and downs of life.
Arguably Gary Klein's most famous insight is assessing the death of a decision (mors is the Latin translation) before it happens, not after.
It is often more helpful than Backcasting.
We tend to see things through rose-tinted glasses.
The premortem corrects for that.
It forces a negative outcome into your thinking, which makes it easier to improve both the decision and its implementation, and to build in the kind of agile monitoring that helps you learn as you go.
It means bringing your team together, but this time, the context is spectacular failure.
Why did it fail? Write the reasons down. What happened at roll out? What in our actions, communication, engagement, messaging, timing, resources, and tracking? Write them all down.
Discuss them and consider how you would mitigate them in the decision and at implementation. As you reflect. How might you revise your plans before you go to the senior leadership team?
But there's a harder question underneath all of this: at what point does failure become irreversible?
This gives you your kill criteria.
Perhaps you have a number in mind? Perhaps a signal of poor uptake? Or price threshold? If it takes six months to fail and you can't undo it, why spend another six months trying to save it?
Set some tripwires that pre-commit you to a decision — kill the project, cut your losses, course correct, or change the plan. Those tripwires become your signposts.
This week's challenge is a simple one.
Before you make your decision, bring your team together.
Experiment with Backcasting. Imagine the impact of implementing your decision six months to a year from now, knowing it was a stunning success. Write the headlines. Make the success tangible enough that you can feel it. Then work backwards, step by step, to today.
What did you see that your original decision missed?
Now try the Premortem. Imagine spectacular failure and work through it the same way. Discuss what you find and revise your plans before you walk into that room.
What assumptions turned out to be shakier than you thought? How might you wrap your mitigation plans into the decision and its execution?
Then set your tripwires. At what point does failure become irreversible? Pre-commit to the actions that follow — kill the project, cut your losses, course correct, or change the plan.
What does this change about the decision you walk in with?
Record everything you find from both exercises.
That's what rigour looks like. And it's exactly what your senior leadership team are looking for.
If you'd like to explore how better decision-making could work across your team — whether that's our decision-making course or a conversation about what you're facing right now — we'd love to talk.
Click here to book onto our next course.
Jon & Mark