Why Every Project Manager Should Think it Backwards

The Kingdom has been booming with transformational projects in every size and sector imaginable, and chances are you have played a vital role in one, or even several of them. In my years of managing projects, I’ve come to learn the importance of going beyond the mere analysis of the present, and to further examine the unforeseen future. Hence, at the initiation phase, a project manager must think thoroughly about the different scenarios that could arise during the project’s lifecycle and jeopardize its outputs in any way.

In reality, asking project managers to analyse a future that didn’t yet happen can get tricky. Our perception of “what could happen” may be influenced by many factors, such as past experiences, cognitive skills, and where we stand in the spectrum of optimism and pessimism. But what if, instead of asking “what could happen?”, you allow your imagination to run wild and picture the project that hasn’t even started has already failed. Of course, this is an atrocious thought that may be dismissed by many in the early stages of a project. However, such dismissal may lead the project manager to overlook many risks that could otherwise have been prevented if taken into consideration at an earlier stage.

In a 1989 study called “Back to the Future: Temporal Perspective in the Explanation of Events”, the subject matter was “prospective hindsight”, which was defined by the researchers as “generating an explanation for a future event as if it had already happened; i.e., one goes forward in time, and then looks back”. According to the study, performing such technique can lead to two main advantages:

1. A) Thinking about future events with absolute certainty generates more explanations relative to thinking about them with uncertainty (hence looking at a future event with a backward perspective, or in simple words, looking at the future like it happened in the past)
2. B) The chances of accurately identifying future outcomes increases by 30%

In a business setting, the “prospective hindsight” technique is commonly known as a “premortem”. A premortem is defined as a management strategy that helps the project team to imagine that their project has failed, then work backward to identify the reasons that led to the failure of the project.

Now comes the important question; how can one perform a premortem for their next project? The answer is by following three simple steps:

Step #1: Two Brains are Better than One

• A premortem is more effective when conducted as a team instead of individually.
• Choosing team members with diverse expertise and backgrounds will decrease level of biasness and increase the variety of expected scenarios.
• Ensure common understanding of the project’s goals, outcomes, and the purpose of the premortem.

Step #2: Engage, Visualize and Document

• Every team member should be asked to contribute a specified number of risks because the possibilities could be endless.
• Remain focused as it is easy to lose track in a brainstorming session and drift towards providing solutions instead of generating more reasons to fail.
• Use a tangible medium (a white board or a shared e-document) to increase engagement level and ease the documentation of shared ideas.
• Read risks out loud and prioritise them by voting based on impact and probability.

Step #3: Changing Thoughts into Actions

• Build a matrix and rate all the risks based on voting results.
• The matrix will then be used as input to the action plan required to prevent risks based on the likelihood of their occurrence and the severity of their outcome.
• The action plan must be detailed and include all resources and stakeholders required to prevent each risk.
• Once the action plan is completed, share it with the team to be reviewed and implemented.

Applying the aforementioned steps will enable project managers to kickstart their projects with an accepted degree of certainty about the future. Although performing a premortem may consume some time and effort at the initiation phase, the fact still stands that it will minimize the impact of risks once the project is up and running.