Read on for your free premortem template and facilitator guide. Personal Productivity Pointers give you the tips and tricks that productivity masters use to get more things done. Using Lean thinking to keep your ideas and your outputs flowing, you’ll turn your to-do list into a to-done list. It’s like a shot of espresso for your daily grind.
Every single day, things die unnecessarily. Lots of things.
In fields such as healthcare, the connotation is unfortunately a literal one. Each year, 900,000 Americans die prematurely from the five leading causes of death, and the figures suggest that between 20% and 40% are preventable.
However, in most areas, death takes on a more figurative sense. Projects die. Programs flat line. Initiatives nosedive. Transformations fail. And the rate at which they do is alarming. Estimates suggest that only 41% of projects will be successful in terms of meeting expectations for time, cost and quality. Whether the number is completely accurate is irrelevant; the undeniable truth is that in whatever we set out to accomplish, there is a real and significant chance that we will fail.
In response to these failures, organizations have turned to postmortem reviews designed to prevent future recurrences. No matter how thorough and effective the postmortem, however, there is and always will be one **ahem** fatal flaw with the process. Let’s see if you can pick it out in the diagram below: