Quick Win: Lisa Leong reveals why doing a ‘pre-mortem’ could revolutionise how you set and achieve your goals

for optimizing your day. I'm your host, Doctor Amantha Imber. On today's quick Win episode, we go back to an episode from the past and I pick out a quick win that you can apply today. We've all heard of a post mortem where you analyze the year that was or the project that was and see what went wrong

and what went right. But in this quick Win, Lisa and I discuss how a pre mortem could be the strategy you need if you're regularly finding that you're not achieving the goals that you've been setting.

it like it is happening right now. Because humans are terrible at being able to properly project ourselves into the future and say, oh, you know, and set goals. So we set unattainable goals, but we also think that we can do way more than we can a year. So what the pre morton does is it says, let's be

mourselves into that future state. So it could be five years hence, if you really want to look at a vision, or it could be December twenty twenty five, and you describe your roaring success, so you know, Amantha roaring success. You know, you describe that maybe like a headline, and then you also look at the flip side, which is

a kind of terrible disaster. So a disaster state, and then you write out like a paragraph of what happened, and you can do it like an article in you know, the Age or in the Australian Financial Review roaring success. This happened Amantha, you know, started sewing in her backyard and then you know, suddenly all these beautiful things happened. So you describe that future stage and then you do the opposite for the you know, what made it terrible?

Amantha snowed under with way too much work, had it even worse year and then got burnt out, you know, So then you do the other side and then you say, well, what contributed to that? And it's in that process of writing the story where you can sort of crystallize, and they're often surprising things. Hugging Row from Stanford, he runs these pre mortems and I'll just do your quick story

to tell you about what is non obvious. So Stanford Medical School, their pre mortem Rowing Success is to actually create innovations in the science area that would change the world. And they initially thought that it was about enticing more experts,

high level experts, medical researchers into their organization. But what they actually found out through doing the pre mortem is that a lot of the difficulties happened because of bottlenecks because there were not enough to support people like nurses and the way they get their grants that these nurses got snowed under with these things that they absolutely had to do to get funding in the first place. And it didn't matter even if they attracted all these medical researchers.

Without the nurses, they wouldn't be able to do anything, no breakthroughs. And so through doing the pre mortem, it opened that up. And so I actually go, this is fascinating and you can definitely use it for your own career, and you can unearth things that wouldn't be obvious through just doing it. I'm setting a goal and why do we repeat every year the same bad habits.

do we actually promote things going right? I love that angle as well.

out different things. And also I think energetically what they say is it is better if you're doing this personally. So I've mainly done it for teams as well, the pre mortem pre victim both sides. And by the way, you want to make sure that you get really different people doing it, not just the leadership team, to get the voices in the room. You can do it anonymously as well. If you're doing it personally, it's kind of better to make sure that you do the pre victorium.

But even just focusing on the pre victorium, because of the way our brains work, it's actually better to focus on the positive things rather than putting any energy into or intention into the negative things, because sometimes we can create our own futures by focusing on the wrong things.