Plan the funeral
The cheapest place to fail is on paper.
Before a campaign launches, before a submission lands, before a leader does a sit-down, run the pre-mortem. Assume it's already blown up, then work backwards to why. Postmortems are written by people defending their choices. Pre-mortems catch what they can't (or usually, won’t), while the failure modes are still cheap to fix. Do this on anything that matters.
- 01Any project or campaign with real stakes: pre-mortem before launch
- 02Team assumes it's failed. Everyone writes down what killed it, independently. Then cluster
- 03Address the top three failure modes before you go live
- 04Compare against the actual postmortem later. Refine the discipline over time