Validation Resources Blog

How to Prosper While Safeguarding Your People, Projects and Profits

• Prospective hindsight can accelerate your business’s bottom line and employee morale
• Pragmatic planning can safeguard key project management milestones and eliminate errors
• Why Benjamin Franklin knew that by failing to prepare, you are priming your project for peril

How Prospective Hindsight and the Pre-Mortem Project Management Strategy Breed Success

Is your organisation blighted by missed project milestones? Are the costs of project management dragging down your organisation’s employee morale and bottom line? Do you dread the endless finger-wagging, blame games and pearls of wisdom from hindsight? There is an alternative to this prosaic status quo. Most of us are consummate commentators when it comes to dissecting disasters and analysing the aftermath of missed milestones and failed strategies. But what if there was an alternative to the expensive inquests and arduous autopsies? What if you didn’t need to sacrifice your talent pool to save the numbers or tarnish your reputation to satisfy shareholders? Today’s blog examines an exciting approach to project management that lets you maintain morale, meet milestones and put money in the coffers without jeopardising you company’s culture or best assets.

At first glance, the idea of conducting a managerial pre-mortem may seem a peculiar and defeatist task. After all is said and done, people aim to please and we naturally want the best for our careers, projects and businesses. However, the scientific evidence bears out the fact that we are infinitely better at ploughing through the wreckage and lynching scapegoats than we are at putting in place the essential safeguards to ensure our projects succeed on time and on budget. Psychologists have coined this phenomenon the optimism bias and it impacts on our personal and professional lives on a daily basis. Is your business set up to be optimistic rather than realistic?

The pre-mortem project management strategy offers a simple 4-step process to allow your projects succeed while safeguarding your people, milestones and profits. The strategy necessitates a willingness to engage in frank, authentic discussions at all levels and an open mind to feedback and historical lessons. In short, the pre-mortem strategy requires short-term pain for long-term gain. Below is the 2016 take on ancient wisdom espoused by Benjamin Franklin and condensed into a 4-step strategy to revitalise your projects:

1. Widen Your Options

A major obstacle in modern decision making is humankind’s predilection for narrow framing or leaping on the first decent idea that surfaces. It is often manifested by viewing a problem in simple binary terms — yes or no, as opposed to later thinking and outside-the-box solutions. Moreover, research supports the glum view that many 21^st-century companies seem to be using the same intuitive/impulsive decision-making processes as hormone-crazed teenagers leading to catastrophic failures of projects, businesses and global institutions. The antidote to this toxic thinking is to assume that none of your options will work forcing you and your team to conjure up practical solutions to circumvent anticipated roadblocks and issues. Consider setting up several teams from all levels within the organisation to eliminate or mitigate all likely problematic scenarios.

2. Road-Test Your Options

A second stealthy assassin of decision-making is the tendency to simply confirm your biases with your analysis by using self-serving information. To combat this, you must get outside your head and eschew historical routines in favour of proactively seeking out trustworthy data. One practical technique to accomplish this is to consider what would have to be true for your presumption to be the right choice. This clarifies thinking for your whole team and separates people from their biases as they analyse factors more diligently as opposed to falling back on tried-and-tested techniques and we’ve-always-done-it-this-way complacency and comfort zones.

3. Get Some Distance Before You Decide to Act

A third saboteur in bad decision-making is our hardwired inclination to permit our emotions to lead us astray. Discrediting your gut instinct and the importance of the power of intuition isn’t the goal here. The critical objective is to try to attain some distance between yourself and the decision to be made. Analysis paralysis (or should one say paralysis by analysis?) is the condition of rumination and poring over hypothetical situations to the point where a decision or action is never taken, in effect paralysing outcomes and jeopardising key project milestones. The serum in this particular case when you are struggling with several appealing alternatives is to ask yourself what advice you would give to your best friend or partner faced with a similar conundrum. The options will be the same but your perspective will most likely change quite dramatically.

4. Prepare to Be Wrong

Complacency, overconfidence and the 21^st-century cult of positivity about how things will unfold tends to short-circuit our cognitive faculties and effortlessly distort our sense of what the future might bring. One sobering solution is to bookmark the future as an investment analyst might do by imagining both the best and the worst possible outcomes from a monetary decision. Being 100% risk-averse and completely insulated is impossible in the modern era but risk-taking needs to be exercised in a calculated and strategic manner rather than a long shot gamble. When the future is uncertain (i.e. always) it pays to anticipate all outcomes (good, bad and catastrophic) and to prepare resources accordingly.

Ultimately this is ancient wisdom repurposed for the 21^st-century business environment. As simple as it might seem, the majority of project managers don’t account for human biases and hardwired instincts when taking key decisions. It’s nigh on time for businesses to start investing the same commitment and enthusiasm projects deserve from the get-go rather than footing the bill and fallout from a lack of upfront pragmatic planning.

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