From Ambition to Action: The Case for Pre-Mortems in Major Business Programmes

In major business programmes, the excitement of ambition can often eclipse the practicalities of delivery. Organisations invest millions in digital transformations, system upgrades, or operating model redesigns with detailed plans, glossy decks, and optimistic timelines. Yet, despite the rigour on paper, many of these programmes miss their targets — or worse, fail entirely.

While retrospectives tell us what went wrong after the fact, pre-mortems offer a chance to see those same risks before they become reality. It’s a simple, powerful shift in mindset: instead of assuming success and reacting to failure, assume failure and plan to prevent it.

Pre-Mortems: A Strategic Reframing of Risk

A pre-mortem is not about being cynical. It’s about being clear-eyed.

This technique, popularised by psychologist Gary Klein, helps teams imagine that a project or programme has failed, and then articulate all the possible reasons why. Unlike traditional risk registers — which often surface only the obvious or already-known threats — a pre-mortem encourages a more creative and candid examination of vulnerabilities.

In the context of large, cross-functional change, pre-mortems allow leadership teams to:

• Pressure-test assumptions that underpin business cases and roadmaps.
• Identify cultural, political, or behavioural blockers that formal planning often ignores.
• Expose interdependencies across teams or initiatives that may not be obvious at the outset.
• Build a shared understanding of what failure actually looks like — and how to avoid it.

Rather than relying solely on bottom-up risk escalation, a pre-mortem gives the executive team direct visibility into the dynamics that may threaten delivery. It facilitates proactive decision-making rather than reactive damage control.

Anatomy of a Pre-Mortem: From Assumption to Action

To conduct a high-impact pre-mortem, it’s essential to go beyond surface-level exercises. The process must be structured, inclusive, and psychologically safe — especially when challenging sacred cows or exposing potential leadership missteps.

Here’s how it typically works:

1. Clarify the Objective: Define what success looks like. What is the intended outcome of the programme? What metrics or milestones matter most?
2. Assume Failure Has Happened: Fast forward 12–18 months. The programme has failed to deliver. Imagine the headlines, the boardroom discussions, the loss of confidence.
3. Identify the Causes: Participants — ideally a cross-section of business, IT, delivery, and operations — list every reason this failure occurred. Nothing is off limits: unrealistic timeframes, underpowered governance, missed change impact, lack of user buy-in, weak sponsorship.
4. Cluster the Insights: Group the risks into themes — technical, organisational, behavioural, political — and assess their severity and likelihood.
5. Turn Risks into Action: Identify countermeasures for the most critical risks. This might include governance changes, sequencing adjustments, redefined KPIs, or a reframed narrative to support alignment.

The key is to embed this process before execution begins — and revisit it at key decision gates as the programme progresses.

Executive-Level Benefits

Senior leaders are the primary custodians of business outcomes. Yet they’re often the furthest removed from daily delivery challenges. Pre-mortems bridge that gap by giving executives direct, unfiltered insight into what may go wrong — and what can be done about it now.

Some of the core benefits include:

• Strategic clarity: Gain confidence that major assumptions and dependencies have been pressure-tested before sign-off.
• Cultural candour: Signal to the organisation that speaking about risk isn’t punished — it’s valued.
• Alignment: Ensure sponsors, delivery teams, and supporting functions are clear on their role in both success and failure prevention.
• Governance resilience: Design oversight that goes beyond reporting — capable of course-correcting when needed.

By investing time in a pre-mortem, leadership teams don’t just prevent failure. They build stronger muscles for delivery, agility, and cross-functional trust.

Making Pre-Mortems Part of the Governance Rhythm

The real power of pre-mortems lies in consistency. While a single workshop can generate valuable insights, embedding pre-mortem thinking into programme governance creates ongoing resilience.

For instance, some organisations:

• Schedule pre-mortem checkpoints before each major investment gate.
• Use “What would make this fail?” as a standing agenda item in executive steering groups.
• Conduct mini pre-mortems for specific workstreams or vendor engagements.

In this way, the pre-mortem evolves from a one-time event to a cultural mindset — one that embraces critical thinking, surfaces dissent productively, and encourages leaders to challenge their own blind spots.

Conclusion: Preparing for Failure to Deliver Success

It’s tempting to believe that a well-documented plan and a high-level sponsor are enough to guarantee transformation success. But the reality is that even well-intentioned programmes falter when organisations fail to anticipate — and mitigate — the many forces that work against change.

A pre-mortem isn’t about slowing down delivery. It’s about making delivery smarter.

By assuming failure and designing from that place, organisations give themselves the best chance to succeed. They protect their investments, their credibility, and most importantly — their outcomes.