94 Reduce Risk Creatively …

YES! AND… # 94 By placing yourself in the future and visualising why something has gone wrong, you can help ensure it goes right… “One does not have to be a mad scientist to travel in time” – Authors of research paper: “Back to the future. Temporal Perspective in the Explanation of Events”</ How might you help ensure that a project does not go wrong? Curious? As many of you know, I like to try different techniques that I encounter. Researching material for an article last year, I stumbled across one such technique from Gary Klein of Applied Research Associates (you can find a copy of his article here). In the article, Gary talks about using a technique called the Premortem at the beginning of a project. Instead of asking project members, “What might go wrong with this project?”, Gary has people think themselves into the future when the project has gone wrong and asks, “What went wrong?” In Gary’s version, individuals write down as many reasons as they can, the project leader records these on a flipchart and then uses the data to strengthen the project plan. This technique is based on a concept known as Prospective Hindsight. Research on this concept has shown that people are able to come up with richer and more numerous explanations of why an event might happen when they are told to imagine that the event has actually happened. So Having read Gary’s article, I decided to use his technique with a client’s project team. In their case, they were working on a pilot of a major project that had to deliver...