Driving Continuous Improvement: The Postmortem and the Premortem

As a leader, one of your jobs is to minimize risk and help drive continuous improvement. A best practice in business that achieves both these objectives is the postmortem, also known as an end-of-project review. A less well-known practice is the premortem, conducted before a project begins. It can also pay big “dividends.”

The Postmortem Process

Purpose. You’re no doubt familiar with the concept of postmortems—long used to dissect and diagnose what’s already occurred with an event, project, or missed outcome. The purpose of a postmortem is to assess successes, challenges, and failures—it’s not a finger-pointing exercise.

Process. Here are examples of what to incorporate into a postmortem process:

• Give people advance notice that a postmortem is coming to allow perspective and encourage reflection and documentation.
• Make sure you don’t dominate the meeting and endeavor to strive for a balanced approach.
• Set a positive tone and encourage widespread participation.
• Be transparent with the findings—relaying a common understanding of what happened and why and the most important lessons learned.

Outcome. What should you gain from a postmortem? Here are a few beneficial outcomes:

• Improved procedures
• Better decision making
• Identification of risks
• Promotion of accountability

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected many aspects of our businesses and personal lives. Have you given thought to conducting a post-pandemic postmortem? If so, think about the people who helped you weather this storm. Consider ways you can prepare to pivot if your area experiences another surge. And as we emerge from the pandemic, ask yourself how you will integrate the lessons learned from this experience, whether positive or challenging.

What is a Premortem?

What if you imagined in advance that a project had failed so you could predict potential problems and avert future failures?  Just think what you might learn – and how you might increase your chances of success – if you provided the doubters and dissenters a safe environment to articulate reasons for its theoretical failure before launching a project. The premortem process does exactly that. It focuses on prevention and performance, rather than on review—which is the purpose of a postmortem.

The premortem approach is backed by research conducted in the late ‘80s at the Wharton School, Cornell, and the University of Colorado. This research revealed that imagining an event has already occurred increases by 30 percent the ability to correctly identify why future outcomes occur. 

Granted, many of us would have been hard-pressed to imagine a pandemic of the scale we’ve experienced. Therefore, a premortem might not have even occurred to us. However, this is a good time to remind ourselves of the power of both the postmortem and premortem to help minimize risk and drive continuous improvement.

Wishing you success during these unprecedented times. 

Renee

Sources

1. Business Insider: “The Art of the Post-Mortem.” Available at: https://www.businessinsider.com/the-art-of-the-post-mortem-2011-3
2. Purdue University: “Postmortem Reports.” Available at: https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/subject_specific_writing/professional_technical_writing/activity_and_postmortem_reports/postmortem_reports.html
3. Harvard Business Review: “Performing a Project Premortem.” Available at: https://hbr.org/2007/09/performing-a-project-premortem
4. Redbooth: “Pre-mortems and Post-mortems: The 2 Most Important Parts of Any Project.” Available at: https://redbooth.com/blog/premortems-postmortems