Perreault Magazine - 80 -
Continued from page 79
Pre‐Mortem
Another way to future‐proof your company is to conduct a pre‐mortem. A pre‐mortem is the opposite of a post‐mortem. Instead of waiting until your sales have plummeted, your old customers have left or a new competitor has ravaged your business to determine what went wrong, you take a more pro‐active approach. Encourage your team to imagine it is ten years in the future and you are out of business.
Then ask the provocative question: What went wrong? What didn’t we seeing coming? The dialogue this question unleashes will astound you. More interestingly, instead of it being a depressing question, it’ll generate a candid conversation about the threats and opportunities the changing world is creating and you can use these insights to take constructive actions to position your organization for the future.
By their nature, many of the actions are likely to be risky. I wish I could guarantee you that each one will be a success. I can’t. What will serve you well is a policy of conducting small experiments and pilot projects. In an ever changing world strategic planning is less and less helpful. What needs to replace strategic planning is a thoughtful policy of experimentation.
Try new things, play with emerging technologies, and partner with different individuals and companies to exploit new technologies and explore new ways of doing business. There will, of course, be some setbacks and failures but there may also be some surprising successes. If you learn from the mistakes and build upon the small successes, your future might just be unusually successful.