Embedded in How to Make a Big Decision, a breezy read adapted from Steven Johnson’s forthcoming book, Farsighted, is a particularly interesting decisioning technique:
The psychologist Gary Klein has developed a variation on this technique. He calls it a “premortem.” As the name suggests, the approach is a twist on the medical procedure of post-mortem analysis. In a post-mortem, the subject is dead, and the coroner’s job is to figure out the cause of death. In a premortem, the sequence is reversed: “Our exercise,” Dr. Klein explains, “is to ask planners to imagine that it is months into the future and that their plan has been carried out. And it has failed. That is all they know; they have to explain why they think it failed.
Budget constraint, compressed timelines, failing fast and moving forward… this assemblage of a business rubric has become the norm, creating an environment in which taking time to do proper postmortems is becoming extinct. But where we can create space for rigorous decision-making, we must. After all, strategy is just another way of saying “deciding”, and as long as we agree strategic planning is better than reactionary guessing, then creating tools to do it good and fast is our mandate.
A few years ago I was working with a children’s toy maker as they wrestled with digital — establishing a license to operate in social media. We’d adapted the brand guidelines (type, logo, lockup, list of adjectives) into a usable verbal identity, brand narrative, message hierarchy et al. and we were working through the final phases of the community management, content strategy, and response guidelines, when we decided to host a scenario planning session with the clients. We figured getting them involved, in a simulator-like setting, would get buy-in on what we’d recommended and equip them with the foresight and confidence to act when they needed to rather than going silent in times of a challenge or crisis.
We created a calendar of predictable events and gave each attendee a paddle with Yay or Nay printed on each side for them to raise when we asked, “Do we say anything?” Then we went through each scenario: back to school, international cupcake day, competitor product launch, product recall, school shooting… going on to figure out what we’d say, when, how etc.
Some agencies call this type of so-called real-time marketing exercise agility planning but just because we have more media channels to be communicating in, arguably with more constituents and customers, doesn’t mean companies haven’t always needed tools to be nimble and set a clear course of action. In my view, it’s something that should happen on a regular basis outside of comms alone. In uncertain times, playing out the options, especially the ones you can’t see from where you sit, is critical. Having a methodology for weighting pros and cons, yays and nays, is essential.
The Times piece talks about the importance of generating alternatives to any course of action you are considering, citing a study in which, only 29% of organizational decision makers contemplated more than one alternative.
This turns out to be a bad strategy. Over the years, Professor Nutt and other researchers have demonstrated a strong correlation between the number of alternatives deliberated and the ultimate success of the decision itself. In one of his studies, Professor Nutt found that participants who considered only one alternative ultimately judged their decision a failure more than 50 percent of the time, while decisions that involved contemplating at least two alternatives were felt to be successes two-thirds of the time.
That’s pretty startling and would deeply concern me if I were a CEO relying on my decision-makers, agencies and advisors to act.
Going back to our mandate to do this work efficiently, it seems incumbent on planners and strategists to do the pre-work and come with a well of options for their clients. Yes, even when we know there’s an initial reflex against choice overload, we have to do this work. And we can make it fast and fun.
Scenario planning is a core component of what I’ve built in our approach because it’s regularly overlooked in brand communications and organizational storytelling. But it’s something most of us do naturally when making life decisions. Whether or not we actually jot them down or build a scoring system, most of us make pros/cons lists and play the mental “what if?” game, so doing it in a business setting doesn’t necessitate a new way of thinking for those involved — meaning you’ve just found a shortcut in your timeline and cost efficiency, if you bill by the hour.
Premortems are the way to go. Whether you’re building a brand communications strategy, thinking about changing jobs, relocating, or getting divorced. I mean, there must be fifty ways to leave your lover.
