I dont want to take away from the good thoughts in this article but it annoys me when people create terms for something that already exists. A "pre-mortem" as described here is just a "Risk Assessment", outside the startup world its typically a must have part of any project.
I find the "premortem" way of looking at it psychologically more appealing. When asked to "think of all the dangers", I can imagine a tendency existing to bury one's head in sand and say "what danger? What risk?". We also know of "hindsight bias", and I wonder whether a premortem would be a way to exploit it rather than be a victim to it.
At least, I'm not rational enough to reason identically whether I've been primed with death or just the risk of death. So I think this would be a useful exercise for me (and those like me).
I disagree, Risk Assessment is the process of assessing what could go wrong. In the Pre-Mortem, you take a different approach, and take, as a given that the project has failed, so now you are not discussing what could go wrong, but what did go wrong.
It's a subtle, but important distinction. As the article notes, that once you have an image in your mind of a failed project, you come up with a somewhat different analysis than if you are trying to picture what could wrong.
I frequently see attitudes in risk-assessment, particularly in those that have planning responsibilities, where people actually get quite defensive when people are pointing out the risks in the project, to the point at which others in the room no longer wish to participate. On the flip side, if we are presupposing things went really wrong, and everything failed - it almost becomes a game to figure out what went wrong.
I'll take it one step further - at a tactical level, when my engineers/technicians are preparing for a complex change in our IT environments, and they do their walkthrough, and demonstrate the change is guaranteed to work - that is just the first, almost minor step. The second, much more important one, is to then find at least three ways in which the change will fail. Getting something to work might only take a few hours. Finding out how the change will fail may take several days, or even weeks - but it's much more informative and useful to the change control procedure than demonstrating something will work, and I find the mindset of "accepting and looking for failure, rather than resisting it" is the key.
The researchers contend that a premortem is more effective than risk analysis:
> Although many project teams engage in prelaunch risk
> analysis, the premortem’s prospective hindsight approach
> offers benefits that other methods don’t. Indeed, the
> premortem doesn’t just help teams to identify potential
> problems early on. It also reduces the kind of
> damn-the-torpedoes attitude often assumed by people
> who are overinvested in a project. Moreover, in
> describing weaknesses that no one else has mentioned,
> team members feel valued for their intelligence and
> experience, and others learn from them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_assessment