CRA Inc

11 Feb 07 @ 12:55 pm

The Crystal Ball Post-Mortem

As part of my 2007 reading regimen I’m working through Gary Klein’s Sources of Power, which is a fantastic if slightly academic text on how people make decisions—especially in time-compressed, high-risk situations. In the book I came across something that strikes me as a practical and powerful tool to use as you prepare for important communication events (be they an important speech, presentation to the board, or a face-to-face with the CEO). Klein calls it a “Pre-Mortem” strategy, and it’s a means of identifying assumptions and mitigating risk. The original approach comes from Choen, Freeman, and Thompson’s “Crystal Ball” method (PDF), which the US military uses in war game exercises. The Crystal Ball method goes like this:

• Select a critical assessment, no matter how confident you are that it is true (e.g., that the enemy will cross the river at point X).
• Imagine that a perfect intelligence source, such as a crystal ball, tells you that this assessment is wrong.
• Explain how this assessment could be wrong.
• The crystal ball now tells you that your explanation is wrong and sends you back to step 3.

The Pre-Mortem is a slight variation on this: After laying out a plan, look several months into the future and assume the plan has failed. The task is to explain why. The idea is to break the emotional attachment to the plan, and turn your creativity and experience toward identifying its flaws and opportunities for breakdown. These are contingencies to revise the plan against, making the plan as a whole stronger (and your or your team’s view of the plan more realistic).

Here’s why it’s important: The research shows that people tend to “fall in love” with their own plans. We lend them more credibility than they deserve, especially if we are not highly experienced in the area and do not have a good sense of what’s typical. As a result, we tend to underestimate risks and be under-prepared for contingencies.

In our work with leaders and communication professionals we’ve taken a similar approach for years, building what we call a “Risk Mitigation Checklist” for any significant communication event. It’s the list of all the things we know can introduce significant risk into a communication, all other things being equal. A small example might be “Test the TelePrompTer equipment” before a speech; a more significant example might be “Brief the Audit Committee of the Board of Directors about any change to the capital budget” for a multi-million dollar technology initiative.

We arrive at the items for the Risk Mitigation Checklist through our experience. The issue is that with the communication opportunities or problems you face day-to-day, you don’t (and shouldn’t) have us by your side to identify problems in the plan and craft contingencies. So here’s what you should do: Before your next important communication, project several months into the future and assume the thing failed—miserably. Then explain why it failed, and come up with as many explanations for failure as you can. Then work alone or with your communication staff to resolve those failure points in the design of the message and plan.

We have an adage at CRA that is one of the first things we tell a new employee, regardless of their level or experience: “Plan for the worst, expect the best. Find the worst thing that can happen, and eliminate it. Repeat.” It’s served us well for years, and I think the Crystal Ball / Post-Mortem method is a great little tactic to keep in your back pocket while you communicate as a leader.

posted in category(s): Tools in Practice, Leadership Communication, Planning