Here’s the new business buzzword: premortem. Instead of conducting business meetings about the new project that are actually pep rallies (“We’ll slaughter the competition!” “We’ll capture the market!”), some managers are leading off with the bad news: “Gentlemen and ladies, the project has failed. What happened?” Even when the project hasn’t been launched yet.
That’s a premortem, wherein a project committee tries to envision everything that could go wrong—or rather, what is certain to go wrong—in order to sketch out the best response and file a backup plan. Proponents of such negative thinking hark back to Stoics like Epictetus and Seneca, not to mention Murphy: Life is struggle. Patient endurance is heroic. If something can go wrong, it will. The practical benefit, of course, is that when the worst happens nobody is surprised.
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