the pre-mortem, a no BS look into the future

Post-mortems help you do it better next time. In start-ups, sometimes you only have one shot and so I love the concept of the pre-mortem to help you do it better this time.

When I was building product at AND 1, we always did post-mortems on product launches and other strategic initiatives. It helped us get better as a team and build a culture of make mistakes, but never make the same one twice. In lots of start-ups, you see post-mortems in the form of Eric’s 5 whys when things break, when dollars are wasted and when people are looking to improve for next time. This is great, but it doesn’t help make what you just did any better and it doesn’t help eliminate the group think that probably caused the mistake in the first place.

The true “best idea wins” culture is rare in a company of more than about 10 people. As an organization scales, you have more structure and more meetings and often you get conversion around an idea or strategy and lose the highly valuable dissenting opinions.  A systematic post-mortem will help the company make better decisions over time, but to really make better decisions as a group, the institutionalized pre-mortem is one of the best ideas I have heard in a long time.

In a pre-mortem, you get your team together after a strategy or plan of action has been set and instead of asking them to project what will happen, you tell them to imagine it is 12 months from now and the effort was a complete disaster. Their job is to describe, in a detailed narrative, what went wrong and the impact of each mistake. You may not kill the project, but pushing your team to point their creative talent at imagining the things that got messed up a instead of the arguments for going full speed ahead, you will look through the curve and see errors before they happen.

Rather than group think, you have institutionalized dissent.

The term was created by Gary Klein and I heard it in the video below where Daniel Kahneman talks about the concept and how to apply it (the whole thing is good — the topic is how to think of decisions as products and implement quality control mechanisms, but the specific part I am referencing is from about 13:00 minutes left to about 8:30 left). Let me know if you try it and if it works for you (or doesn’t).

Spend some now to make more later

The recent buzz about Google buying Twitter has generated lots of conversation and opinions on what @ev and @biz will and should do. Clearly they know best and will do what is best for the company, their employees and investors, but I would encourage them to discuss buying not selling.  Specifically, I believe they should be paying attention to another conversation streaming across the web right now on the merits and capabilities of URL shortening services.

In 2006 I spoke at an innovation conference for American Express and my talk followed a panel that included Bradley Horowitz, then of Yahoo. He was discussing the keys to a successful Web 2.0 service and he emphasized the need to have “every act of content consumption serve as an equal act of content production.” He pointed to Flickr as an example of this balance in practice and I believe Twitter is close to achieving this web zen. However, while Flickr was able to achieve this content production and consumption balance around images within the service, Twitter is on the way to platform nirvana across the web as a whole. Retweets, #tags, @mentions, @replies and via@ all reference content created within the ecosystem but the tweets that include a link, via a shortened URL, expand the content production and consumption available to Twitter users to include the entire web and suggest the possibility of a new form of indexing and search. As Josh Kopelman pointed out in his recent post, the world may have called the search game over much too soon and while start-ups like OneRiot, Aardvark and Social Mention are working on real-time and social search. I hope Twitter does not participate exclusively in the plans of an incumbent because they have the ability to lead this evolution (as discussed here and here) with a defensible position and favorable network geometry.

The conversation platform is in place and the relationship with the consumer is strengthening by the day. The tools to enable the reach of content production and consumption to include the entire web and the monetization possibilities that lie in the indexing and surfacing of content based on the conversation can be built or acquired. A search interface is already being tested and with search comes sponsored links and monetization. As Om Malik points out here, we are witnessing “the complete disaggregation of the web in parallel with the slow decline of the destination web.” As this trend progresses, Twitter, with the addition of indexing and search tools, is capable of creating new temporal and social metrics that can deliver a re-imagined Pagerank optimized for the disaggregated web. This capability makes them an appealing target for any of the large players in the search space, but given their team and current traction, I would bet on their ability to execute and hope they choose to compete rather than participate in the strategic efforts of others.

1926 ad for The General Electric Company

I saw this GE ad from 1926 and it made me think of Google in 2009. In 1926, the world was figuring out the best ways to use electricity and was willing to pay for new appliances that would harness the power of electricity and help make people more productive. In 2009, the world is looking to leverage the web to make people more productive, to communicate in new ways and to solve problems in new ways (as Josh Kopelman has pointed out here).

If you read the text of this ad and replace “electricity” with “the web” and replace “the General Electric Company” with “Google” it would read like this:

“To make available tremendous power at the touch of a switch, to help lighten thousands of human tasks, and to increase production — these are the services of the web. Google makes apparatus by which the web performs its useful work…” Not quite a perfect parallel, but pretty close in my mind.