We have all been in that meeting. The one where a project has officially failed, and the team gathers for a “postmortem” to figure out what went wrong. The mood is somber, the budget is gone, and the hindsight is 20/20.

But what if you could access that hindsight before you spent a single dollar?

In this episode of Smart Levers, Harish and Ramanand explore a powerful decision-making tool introduced by psychologist Gary Klein: The Premortem.

Unlike a risk mitigation strategy - which asks “what might go wrong?” - a premortem forces you to time travel. You fast-forward to a future where your project has already failed spectacularly, and you work backward to investigate the “cause of death.”

Here is how to master this mental time travel to build future relevance.

The Psychology of “It Has Failed”

Most corporate risk planning is flawed because of Confirmation Bias. When a leader presents a plan, the team naturally looks for reasons why it will work. Dissent feels risky.

The Premortem flips this dynamic by changing the tense from “future possibility” to “past certainty”.

• Risk Mitigation (Future Tense): “There is a 10% chance the vendor will be late.” We ignore it because 10% feels low.

• Premortem (Past Tense): “It is launch day. The vendor WAS late. The launch failed. Why did this happen?” We accept the failure as a fact and immediately look for the specific cause.

By assuming failure is a certainty, you give your team permission to be creative about disaster. It transforms them from “critics of the boss’s plan” to “detectives solving a crime.”

How to Run a Premortem

You don’t need a complex framework. You just need a meeting room and a willingness to be uncomfortable.

• Set the Scene: Gather your team and announce, “It is [Date in Future]. The project has flopped. It is a total disaster.”

• The Detective Work: Ask everyone to write down exactly why it failed.

  • Did a key team member quit?

  • Did a competitor launch a feature we ignored?

  • Did the gardener turn on the sprinklers during the client’s site visit? (A real example!)

• Safe Space: This exercise makes it safe for even the most junior employee to speak up. Since the failure is “hypothetical but certain,” pointing out a flaw isn’t negativity - it’s helpful analysis.

Why This Matters for the Upleveler

To be future-relevant, you cannot rely on hope as a strategy. You need to uncover your blind spots before the market does.

• Combat Groupthink: Premortems break the polite silence that kills innovation.

• Sharpen Decisions: You move from “optimism” to “robustness.”

• Save Reputation: It is better to look foolish in a conference room today than to look incom

  petent in the market tomorrow.

The Compound Effect

Next time you are about to sign off on a big decision - a new hire, a product launch, or even a vacation - stop. Fast forward. Kill the idea in your mind.

Then, use the clues from the corpse to make the living project bulletproof.

Choose to thinq different.