How often does your team engage in pretend play during a project? Although this may sound like a trivial question, studies show that practicing "prospective hindsight" can lead to better decision-making. This approach involves envisioning a particular outcome (whether success or failure) and then working backward to identify the factors that contributed to that outcome.

To begin this process, you can use the Framework provided along with the attached worksheet to gather your team together and simulate a project failure. Then, together, you can determine what factors could have led to this failure and take steps to avoid them in the future.

Through a positive discussion on threats, the technique aims to break the possibility of group thinking and increase the chances of identifying the main threats. By analyzing the magnitude and likelihood of each threat, management can reduce the risk of failure due to heuristics and biases such as overconfidence and planning fallacy. It helps them take preventive actions to protect the project or organization from suffering an untimely "death".

Please share this Framework with your team and schedule a meeting to define risks and plan for the future. Use the attached worksheet to take notes. Also, add any feedback to a shared document that your team can access later. Don't forget to revisit this document every quarter to redefine new risks.