Run a classic pre-mortem.
The pre-mortem was named by psychologist Gary Klein, building on the 1989 research into prospective hindsight. It is one of the most useful exercises in decision practice — and it needs no platform, no account, and no permission. This is the whole method.
Six steps. Ninety minutes.
Brief the room on the plan
The pre-mortem works on a real plan, not an ambition. Run it when the plan exists — vendor shortlists drafted, budget sized, roadmap written — but before commitment has hardened. Too early and there is nothing to fail. Too late and doubt is politically expensive.
Stipulate the failure
Do not ask what might go wrong. Assume it did. Tell the room: it is eighteen months from now, and the programme has failed. Not wobbled — failed. The premise does the work: explanation is easier than prediction, and honesty is easier when failure is the assignment rather than the fear.
Independent writing, in silence
Ten minutes. Everyone writes their own reasons for the failure — privately, before any discussion. This is the step that protects the exercise from hierarchy: once the room starts talking, the senior voice anchors it, and the most valuable doubts stay private.
Round-robin — every voice before the senior voice
One reason each, in turn, no commentary, captured verbatim. The junior engineer's sentence is taken before the sponsor's. The pre-mortem legitimises doubt precisely because the rules make doubt the contribution, not the interruption.
Synthesise into failure paths
Group the reasons into themes: ownership, data, workflow, coalition, timing. For each, ask what it would cost if it were true and what decision would prevent it. A list of worries becomes a set of failure paths only when someone names the decision attached to each.
Revise the plan — then revisit
The exercise that ends as notes has failed politely. Change the plan: reassign ownership, reorder the roadmap, write the pause condition. Then revisit the failure paths once the work is under way — the exercise's second gift is that the room becomes sensitive to early signs of the trouble it named.
Five ways the exercise fails politely.
The room anchors on the first confident voice and the independent signal is lost.
"Risks" invites hedging. "It failed — why?" invites the truth.
Once leadership speaks, doubt starts performing agreement.
A risk without a decision is a worry. Name who decides what, by when.
The failure paths were the early-warning system. If no one looks at them again, the room paid for foresight and spent nothing.
A basic pre-mortem can surface concerns. NORTH is for when those concerns cross functions, budgets, coalitions, and board-level commitments.
The classic exercise depends on a facilitator, produces a list, and ends when the meeting ends. NORTH captures the signals independently and privately, synthesises them across strategy, operations, and build reality, maps the coalition behind each failure path, and turns the list into a decision brief, an implementation route, and a rescore that shows whether the risk has moved.