When I arrived at my client, they were still reeling from a failed “digital transformation.” They’d spent months planning it. The deck was flawless, the timeline ambitious but achievable, the stakeholders aligned. Six months after launch, they were performing a painful post-mortem on why it had failed spectacularly. It was soon after that when I introduced them to pre-mortems and
how to learn from failure BEFORE it happens.
The Change Pre-Mortem Process
Instead of asking “How can we make this project a success?” we ask “It’s 12 months from now, and this initiative has completely failed. What happened?”
Last month, a client’s team and I spent 90 minutes imagining their new performance management system had crashed and burned. The insights were blunt, but brilliant:
“Nobody trained the managers properly”
“IT said it would integrate with our systems, but it didn’t”
“People gamed the metrics within a month”
“Leadership stopped caring once the next shiny initiative launched” etc.
What we Actually Did
We built solutions for each failure scenario:
Created a manager certification program (not just a one-hour webinar)
Got IT commitment in writing with specific integration tests
Designed metrics that were harder to manipulate
Established quarterly leadership check-ins with consequences
The result? Their rollout hit every milestone, and adoption is at 92%.
The Magic of a Change Pre-Mortem
Pre-mortems give permission to voice concerns that people are thinking but not saying. That junior analyst who’s seen three similar initiatives fail becomes the oracle of wisdom, not the negative Nancy.
It also forces you to stress-test your assumptions before you’re emotionally invested in being right.
Try this: Before your next change initiative launches, gather your team and ask: “It’s failed. What killed it?” Then build your plan to resurrect it before it’s even dead.
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