Those who work in the A/E/C space know about about the postmortem (or debrief): a glum meeting where the pursuit team attempts to hash out the reasons we didn’t win a project. When the client is willing, we get to actually have the meeting with the client and quiz them on our failure. (As useful as these meetings can be, I have come to dread them—the ulterior motive, of course, is to build better relationships with client stakeholders…but dwelling on your failures
To me, if your goal is to gain actionable insight into your pursuit approach, these meetings are hit-and-miss. With or without the participation of the client, I would recommend having these meetings, even though they have a big problem:
The moment we learn about a win or less, our brains begin to play an elaborate trick on us. Suddenly, we “knew all along” how the pursuit would turn out. Hindsight bias blinds us to the elaborate games of post-rationalization we play with each other in postmortem meetings. If informed by the client that our team experience was inadequate, we are able to vividly recall that sliver of conversation we had about the topic during our go/no-go meeting. So, blurred by hindsight bias, we proceed with these meetings and their foggy takeaways.
But what if there were another way?
In their consistently enlightening book Decisive, Chip and Dan Heath touch on a planning strategy that flips the postmortem on its head: the premortem, Exactly what it sounds like, the premortem is a meeting (or part of a meeting) where we ask ourselves why we lost a pursuit before we actually lose it.
Rather than allowing hindsight bias to rule our thinking, as it does in the postmortem, where we claw after a cause looking at the effect—This happened. What are the reasons it did?—the premortem requires us to participate in creative thinking—Say we lose. What are the reasons that this would happen? The Heaths touch on research that indicates this strategy, which they also call “prospective hindsight,” is results in more creative thinking.
Less compelling as evidence, of course, but I can attest from my own experience to how this strategy can energize a go/no-go or planning meeting for a pursuit:
“So, before we talk strategy specifics, let’s talk about why we lost this project.”
The first time I used this tactic, I actually had to repeat my request before it was understood. The point is, my request and the resulting discussion sent a real jolt through the pursuit team. It forced them to consider our losing the project not as some abstract notion, but as a reality that we might need to face.
Taylor Coe 