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Brian Kerr
Brian Kerr Tacoma, WA 98407
Facilitation

Premortem: before starting a new project, learn why it will end in failure

A walking path through a forested gulch. A neighborhood bridge goes overhead, partially obscured by the trees.
Photo by Brian Kerr.

A simple method for uncovering big, ‘undiscussable’ risks to a project.

Identify project risks using this fun, thought-provoking 15-minute method to capture wisdom from the people who know best—those who will do the work and those who will be affected by it.

It’s the venerable project premortem.

I recommend this method if you’re leading a project in your own organization. And if you’re a consultant, like me, it can be a significant information-seeking behavior at the beginning of a project.

The underlying capability is prospective hindsight. Here’s a definition from Gary Klein, in his HBR piece from 2007 on premortems:

Prospective hindsight—imagining that an event has already occurred—increases the ability to correctly identify reasons for future outcomes by 30%. We have used prospective hindsight to devise a method called a premortem, which helps project teams identify risks at the outset.

The premortem is not a new idea—this 2007 article popularized the technique. However, I keep using it because each time I do, I learn things that are valuable to know at the beginning of a new project—and particularly with a new client.

The power of the premortem is this:

  1. People will just tell you things if you ask them nicely.
  2. And if you ask using prospective hindsight, they will come up with surprising answers, sometimes even mentioning their organization’s ‘undiscussables.’

A few things I’ve learned from premortems

  • That the current effort was the second attempt, and therefore doomed to failure for the same reasons the first effort failed.
  • That the current effort was the third attempt, etc.
  • The existence of a specific policy making the intended change impossible, and that policy-makers were not involved in designing or selecting the project.
  • That the ongoing budget to support this work had already been allocated to a particular technology, program, or team.
  • That people don’t trust or believe their leadership, or the project’s sponsors, or one another.
  • Various discoveries about an organizational problems in communication and clumsiness in making changes.

These were all things worth learning quickly—as in, cheap and early—so that possibilities remained for adjustment or better awareness of the environment.

Here’s how it’s done: running your premortem

  1. Before the meeting, write a simple scenario. Something like: “It is December and our project has failed spectacularly. As the first snow falls, we gather together and ask—what happened? Why did this fail?” Be precise about the future date: maybe 2 months after the presumed project completion; link the date to some major event or local seasonality.
  2. Schedule 15 minutes in a project kick-off meeting to run the premortem.
  3. At the start of the premortem, state the scenario and ask the question.
  4. Allow 1-3 minutes for individual reflection.
  5. Offer an anonymous feedback form and invite participants to provide their responses. Clearly state how you will use these, for example, that individual responses remain anonymous, but you will share themes and takeaways with the group and with project sponsors.
  6. After the individual reflection time is complete, open up for a brief discussion across whatever participation modes are available. Acknowledge and thank people for their responses. Do not attempt to problem-solve or diagnose right now, but make it clear you’ll be doing so later. If project sponsors, execs, etc. attend, you will have to coach them on this behavior in advance, the message being: we’re listening now, we’ll problem-solve afterwards.
  7. Close with sincere thanks and by telling people where and when you’ll share takeaways from the premortem—ideally with planned remediations for each.

An encouragement

The project premortem concept may seem a little weird. It is.

But it’s a great way to show up and listen. The simple act of listening to people and adjusting based on what you hear is wonderful.

And, almost as a side effect, the things people mention might be the things that doom the project to failure—or the things that, adjusted and kept in mind, might make it a great success.

October 7, 2025: Edited for length & added new photo.
Brian Kerr
Brian Kerr Tacoma, WA 98407
Continuous improvement

Merely being the person you are

An iron gate is open on both sides of a gravel road heading down into a thick forest.
Photo by Brian Kerr.

The consulting advice that made me a better person & a more effective consultant.

A passage from Jerry Weinberg’s The Secrets of Consulting:

Your ideal form of influence is first to help people see their world more clearly, and then to let them decide what to do next. Your methods of working are always open for display and discussion with your clients. Your primary tool is merely being the person you are, so your most powerful method of helping other people is to help yourself.

I first read Jerry Weinberg around 15 years ago, at a time when I was comfortable working as an independent consultant, but remained deeply uncomfortable with existing in the world as a human being. I wasn’t yet ready to take seriously the projects of caring for myself, or for others, or understanding what it was like to be a person.

That passage really stuck with me. Let’s read it together.

“Your ideal form of influence is first to help people see their world more clearly, and then to let them decide what to do next.”

The best job description for my kind of work that I’ve ever seen. It opens questions like:

  • Which people? Who is excluded yet should be included?
  • What constitutes their world?
  • How do they make that world intelligible to themselves or to others?
  • How might they (as a group) produce explanations, find consensus, or make a decision and stick to it?

“Your methods of working are always open for display and discussion with your clients.”

If we’ve worked together, you know what this is like. The garage door is up, where somebody is always making a mess and then cleaning it up so it shines.

As a consultant, I will come and I will go. After I’m gone, I hope some of the methods of working I demonstrated might be retained. This is why I enjoy cycling through approaches, methods, and techniques. At the start of an activity, neither you nor I know what will work best, but we can hope to uncover it together.

“Your primary tool is merely being the person you are, so your most powerful method of helping other people is to help yourself.”

It’s only in the last few years that I’ve come to recognize myself as an object truly capable of being helped, much less being worth the effort. Weinberg’s words gave me an important, early reason, which I now see as evidence of how deeply damaged I was (and still am) as a subject of capitalism. But that’s fine: you’ve got to go at the rate you can go.

These days, I work to keep things quiet in my head, so I can listen carefully to others. I sit still on my cushion so I can get up and move skillfully. I practice kindness so I can act kindly. Would it be better if I had come to these on my own, or earlier? Certainly. But I am grateful they came when they did.

No two go by one way; this one was mine.

Thanks, Jerry.

Brian Kerr
Brian Kerr Tacoma, WA 98407
Facilitation

Open space technology, principle 2: “Whatever happens is the only thing that could have”

Open space technology, principle 2: “Whatever happens is the only thing that could have”
Photo by Brian Kerr. 

Planning for a facilitated event involves being ready to throw the plan away.

A few years ago, a client asked me to run a half-day lean (A3) workshop with her team. I knew my client and a few of her staff, but hadn’t spent time with the whole group before. And it turned out—neither had they.

As we did introductions and settled in, I noticed a few things:

  • Several people were new to the team or the larger organization.
  • Everyone was learning about their colleagues.
  • There were urgent, unresolved, undiscussed topics.

After conferring with my client in front of her team, we quickly scrapped the morning’s plan. Instead, I guided the crew into lean coffee—a simple method for letting participants organize and run their own structured discussion.

And it was great. They got to talk about what they needed to. My appearance in their conference room had the important effect of bringing them together and letting their boss participate as part of the circle rather than running the show. They decided they needed to meet more often—which they continued to do, without my involvement. Success!

Two things made this possible.

  1. My client was willing to use the opportunity as soon as we saw it.
  2. I trusted this group to find its own way, using this principle of open space technology: “Whatever happens is the only thing that could have.” That’s because—see one, do one, teach one—I was lucky enough to have previously seen this put into action by another facilitator.

What the leader must do

In 2006 I participated in my first open space technology gathering—a three-day event hosted by Michael Herman. Watching the way Herman embodied the principles of open space helped me see how powerful it was at letting a group become itself.

Here’s what Harrison Owen’s Brief User’s Guide has to say:

It is the special function of the leader to raise the expectations of the group, and heighten their sensitivity to the opportunities at hand, whatever they may be. … The leader must truly trust the group to find its own way. … Any person who is not fully prepared to let go of their own detailed agenda should not lead.

In open space, the role Owen calls “leader” is really half host, half facilitator. Leadership arises from the entire group.

And this from John Fowles’ novel “The French Lieutenant’s Woman”:

I said earlier that we are all poets, though not many of us write poetry; and so are we all novelists, that is, we have a habit of writing fictional futures for ourselves, although perhaps today we incline more to put ourselves into a film. We screen in our minds hypotheses about how we might behave, about what might happen to us; and these novelistic or cinematic hypotheses often have very much more effect on how we actually do behave, when the real future becomes the present, than we generally allow.

All the time I spend planning for facilitated meetings—prepping agendas, arranging materials, booking rooms, gathering snacks and beverages—is critical to the “cinematic hypotheses” of how I imagine the day could go and the outcomes that might arise from it. It’s important to do this work.

And it’s important to be prepared to discard any such planning whenever a group arises and is ready to find its own way.

  • In a better world, that would happen every single time.
  • In our given world, we must encourage this arising wherever it is found.

Whatever happens is the only thing that could have…
as long as you get out of happening’s way.

Open space technology series:

August 30, 2024: Edited for length.
Brian Kerr
Brian Kerr Tacoma, WA 98407
Facilitation

The Strategy / Culture Bicycle: one picture that replaces an infinite amount of bullshit

A strategy method that gets right at the good stuff.

Putting together a coherent, useful strategy for a group is hard.

  • When strategy gets too complicated, intelligibility goes out the window. Nobody will adhere to a strategy they can’t remember. But…
  • When strategy is too simple, it’s merely a container for people to toss their assumptions and pet projects into.
  • And often a group is required to keep a strategy document in order to unlock funding, etc., even though nobody is excited to create it or use it.

Now—as a consultant—I’ve been called upon to create strategic plans and the like that I knew were going to collect dust. The complete and immediate uselessness of the strategy was a foregone conclusion. I’m not proud to say it, but I’ve flown across the country, eaten lousy hotel breakfasts with those weird runny eggs, and hosted elaborate multi-day sessions all in order to generate complicated, detailed strategic plans that nobody wanted, nobody used, and ultimately helped no-one. What a waste!

A couple years ago, in an effort to never do that again, I hit the books. Here’s what I found—it’s my go-to method to help a group of people generate and explain their strategy.

The Strategy/Culture Bicycle:

A wheel for Strategy. A wheel for Culture. And three questions on each wheel which can produce real, meaningful, shared understanding of a group’s intent. When guided by an attentive facilitator, you can get it done in an hour or two and create something amazing. (A detailed facilitator’s guide is available. It is excellent.)

Not part of the Strategy/Culture Bicycle: setting goals, establishing performance measurement, planning. But each of these are way easier to do once there’s consensus on thoughtful answers to these questions.

In my experience, Strategy/Culture Bicycle works for three reasons:

  1. It cuts directly to the big questions without getting mired in a bunch of the inventory-making throat-clearing, fussing about contingency, or working backwards from preferred / “management-approved” actions that overtake many strategy efforts.
  2. The inquiry-based affinity mapping that generates a Bicycle prevents any one person from defining strategy in a way that others can’t, or won’t, support. Autocracy is incoherent.
  3. The Bicycle reminds us that a group needs to have both strategy and culture operating in parallel. Too many strategy documents exist in a timeless void, severed from the people and ways of being which might realize that strategy.

The Strategy/Culture Bicycle was created by Eugene Eric Kim and Amy Wu. I’m grateful for it. It’s in the public domain. Go for it: start with the web-based intro, then move onto the detailed instructions.

And here’s a secret: if you want to figure out who to become and where to go, you can prepare a Bicycle for yourself, by yourself. No lousy hotel breakfast required.

Brian Kerr
Brian Kerr Tacoma, WA 98407
Continuous improvement

On speeding things up

A cute little snake sunning itself on the woodpile.
Photo by Brian Kerr.

Learning from the hourglass & the snake.

People want to go faster. I’ve made my career helping people speed up things they care about: foster care placement, order-to-cash cycles, school transportation, weather radar rendering, customer support escalations, replacement part ordering, academic award selection, environmental site reviews, and on and on.

During these adventures, I learned two points about speed—one from the hourglass, the other from the snake.

1. The hourglass isn’t listening

Imagine an hourglass. Two glass bulbs, a skinny bottleneck connecting the two, an enclosed volume filled with sand.

  • The rate at which sand falls is controlled by the width of the bottleneck. This bottleneck is what makes it an hourglass, not a jar.
  • The hourglass is filled with an amount of sand, and an amount of air.
  • The duration it takes for the sand to fall from one side to the other is a function of these two: the rate at which sand passes through the bottleneck, and the amount of sand.

Hourglasses are compelling because all parts of the system are in clear view. To see an hourglass is to use it.

Complicated systems tend not to be self-documenting like this. It’s work to make the underlying rates, amounts, and durations they produce visible enough that they can then be adjusted with skill and care.

Bottlenecks & key constraints

The simplest way to adjust an hourglass is to add or remove sand. Sand is easier to change than glass.

You don’t make an hourglass run at a faster rate by yelling at the bottleneck, or putting it onto a performance improvement plan, or taking it to a baseball game. Tell the sand to do more with less and see where that gets you.

To adjust a complex system, first, figure out what the bottlenecks are. In this line of work, you might call them constraints. Go look, measure, count. Once you’ve found those constraints, get comfortable with them. There’s always a key constraint. Remove the key constraint and the second-worst constraint rises, smiling, to take its place. Continuous improvement is the practice of removing constraints, one at a time, without hurting anybody. Contrast this with typical improvement projects that merely push problems around until they are held by the unluckiest manager.

To adjust the system, you must discover the system under adjustment. We learn from the hourglass that it’s possible: rate, amount, duration.

2. The snake & its skin

A page from ‘Be Here Now’ by Ram Dass (1971).

This page from Ram Dass’ Be Here Now helps me find patience. And patience makes me effective.

  • For example, on the meditation cushion, I appreciate and laugh off moments where I notice a desire to produce more stillness—and faster.
  • For example, when working with clients, I remember that things only happen at a certain rate, especially inside large, dysfunctional organizations, where people suffer under autocratic leadership, and where safety is neither established or maintained.
You can’t rip the skin off the snake.
The snake must moult the skin.
That’s the rate it happens.

Please don’t take this as discouragement against change. It is a reminder that each moment prefigures the next. Let us allow change to happen, to remain steadfast in our conviction that it will, and that we create the conditions for it, and that we’re not to rip the skin off the snake.

August 6, 2024: Edited for length.
Brian Kerr
Brian Kerr Tacoma, WA 98407
Facilitation

How to make any meeting better with 3 simple fenceposts

How to make any meeting better with 3 simple fenceposts
Photo by Brian Kerr.

Identify a purpose, rational aim & experiential aim—quick actions with a huge effect.

Before your next meeting, write down these three things:

  1. Purpose ← the topic or problem that brings a group together.
  2. Rational aim ← the action, decision, or outcome the group must arrive at.
  3. Experiential aim ← how the group will feel changed by the experience. Express this as a feeling: something like resolved or open or refreshed.

Many meetings begin with only one of these known. The best have all three.

Here’s how to use them:

  • At the beginning of a meeting, share the meeting’s purpose and the rational aim. For example: “We are here today to X. We’ll get there by creating Y and Z together.”
  • Keep the experiential aim to yourself, but keep it in mind.
  • At the end, close with a question that reinforces the experiential aim.

Consensus Workshop

The Institute of Cultural Affairs’ Consensus Workshop is a more elaborate facilitation method. Consensus workshop uses the rational aim and experiential aim to build a fence around group work, and then offers structured planning tools to make sure those aims are met.

For today: keep it simple

Even for short, informal meetings, take a few moments to get clear on the meeting’s purpose and identify both a rational aim and an experiential aim.

  • Knowing the purpose will help the group begin.
  • Knowing the rational aim will help everyone walk the same path.
  • And knowing the experiential aim will help you produce the experience of change or transition that is needed.
May 15, 2024: edited for length.
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Thanks for reading & be well ❦ © 2016-2026 Brian Kerr.