“All I want to know is where I’m going to die so I’ll never go there.”
Unfortunately for Charlie, knowing where you’re going to die is harder than you might think. Odds are, it follows the same statistical shape as car accidents. Most happen within five miles of your home. That’s not because your neighborhood roads are treacherous, it’s because most of your driving happens there.
So, while we can’t nail down the precise location of your death, we can get close, we can identify the things that are most likely to kill you.
Peter Attia calls them the four horsemen.
Atherosclerotic disease (heart attack), cancer (cancer), neurodegenerative disease (Alzheimer’s), and foundational disease (diabetes).
And with the simple act of identifying how 80 percent of us will die, he is putting awareness on the subject and kicking off a pre-mortem. A literal pre-mortem.
What is likely to kill you, and what are we going to do about it?
For today’s post, we’ll talk about the figurative application of a pre-mortem.
Last week’s post was about working backwards, keeping the end in mind, and writing your obituary, book blurb, or press release before you begin.
That is an excellent practice, but it is incomplete on its own.
When you write those documents, you dream of an ideal future. During that optimistic process, it is important to take a step back and punch some holes in your desired outcome.
How could this project fail?
Keys to the game:
Most days you can turn on ESPN and the talking heads will spend 30 minutes discussing their “keys to the game.” Any game.
Something like, “The Dolphins will need to stop the run if they want to stay in striking distance of the Ravens.”
What they are saying is, this thing blows up for the Dolphins if they let Lamar Jackson run all over them. It’s a pre-mortem. They are telling the Dolphins where they die, so they don’t go there.
Alas, it’s not always that easy to avoid.
And what is more common is John Madden analytics. The restating of obvious and unhelpful truths. Coach Madden famously said, “At the end of the game the team with the most points on the board is going to win.”
Thanks, Coach!
Your business has a version of John Madden analytics as well.
“Can we do a S.W.O.T analysis and take a look at the R.O.I.? It feels like we should circle back on the go-to-market data, level set expectation on margins, this could be a perfect storm.”
To get the value out of a pre-mortem, you’ll need to get a little more specific than that.
Use that press release energy, except this time imagine the worst-case scenario. Working backwards, asking where things got off track. What did we not do or see that led to our demise? What self-destructive behavior put us in position to steal defeat from the jaws of victory?
If you get too enamored with the prize, you might not see all the obviously silly obstacles that are in your way.
And it is easier to avoid these things when we start from the end. As the old saying goes, if you “sing a country song in reverse, you will quickly recover your car, house, and wife.”
Ask yourself, what would be a bad outcome and how can I avoid it? How can I sing this song backwards?
It’s really that simple.
Heading out to the pub with your buddies? What would be a bad outcome?
DUI would be bad. Worse would be killing yourself or others while driving under the influence. So how do you avoid that? Two drinks instead of ten.
That is an obvious example. But if you compound that type of decision making, just take the simple “keys to the game” approach and avoid the most egregious in every scenario, you’ve just upgraded all areas of your life by avoiding calamity.
If you want to be a good salesperson, manager, husband, or Little League Coach, just ask how you could be a terrible one.
And don’t do that.
“A pre-mortem is the heckler in the audience,” writes Annie Duke, in Thinking in Bets. And she adds that “we are more likely to execute on goals if we think about the negative futures.”
But how do we do it?
Make your keys to the game. Imagine that you lost the game, imagine that the project failed, and the business never got off the ground.
What went wrong? Make a list. And don’t stop when it gets difficult. Press through and think of ways you could fail. Did the customers understand it? Did the product function as anticipated?
Elroy Dimson said, “Risk means more things can happen than will happen.” So, all undertakings have risk. Root around and find it.
This process, in combination with the press release, will give you a spectrum of possible futures.
That is the key.
To see as many possible futures as you can.
You will not see them all. Black Swan events will happen. But we can improve our lot in life if we spend time up front to imagine the causes of failure, and steer clear.
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