Premortem e gestão de riscos

"A premortem, which is beneficial for just about every endeavor, from running a marathon to starting a business, simply asks you to envision that you failed and to ask yourself: What went wrong? Or, in the words of Kahneman, “Imagine that you are [X amount of time] into the future. You implemented your plan as it now exists. The outcome was a disaster. Take five to ten minutes to write a brief history of that disaster.” [Moi ici: O desastre pode ser provocado porque tivemos demasiado sucesso e a nossa empresa não estava preparada para ele. Por exemplo, falta de capacidade produtiva. Fornecedores incapazes de escalarem o seu fornecimento, armazém insuficiente ]
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Going through this exercise not only helps to ensure that your optimism is at least somewhat grounded in reality, but it also helps you to uncover potential pitfalls on the path to your goal that might otherwise be overlooked. This way, you can prepare for them in advance."

Posso relacionar isto com a abordagem baseada nos riscos da ISO 9001:2015, por exemplo.

Trecho retirado de "To Reach Your Goals, Imagine You Already Tried and Failed"

Autópsias para aprender

Cada vez mais trabalhamos em projectos.
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Por isso, faz cada vez mais sentido pensar em "post-mortem":

"Get more out of post-mortems. Many people dislike project post-mortems. They’d rather talk about what went right than what went wrong. And after investing extensive time on the project, they’d like to move on. Structure your post-mortems to stimulate discussion. Example:
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Pixar asks post-mortem participants to list the top five things they’d do again and the top five they wouldn’t do. The positive-negative balance makes it a safer environment to explore every aspect of the project. Participants also bring in lots of performance data—including metrics such as how often something had to be reworked. Data further stimulate discussion and challenge assumptions based on subjective impressions.
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Because we’re a creative organization, people tend to assume that much of what we do can’t be measured or analyzed. That’s wrong. Most of our processes involve activities and deliverables that can be quantified. We keep track of the rates at which things happen, how often something has to be reworked, whether a piece of work was completely finished or not when it was sent to another department, and so on. Data can show things in a neutral way, which can stimulate discussion and challenge assumptions arising from personal impressions."

Trechos retirados de "How Pixar Fosters Collective Creativity"

Viajar até ao futuro e voltar

Ontem, o dia começou com esta recomendação de leitura do Paulo Peres "Sizing New Markets -- Five Solutions and Four Traps".
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Fiquei preso quando li logo no início aquele:

"Companies need to start this task with the end in mind. 

A preciosa lição que há muitos anos aprendi com Stephen Covey.
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Entretanto, ao final do dia, durante o jogging ouvi a parte final de "Decisive" de Chip e Dan Heath onde o tema da viagem ao futuro voltou a aparecer:

 "Even if we have a pretty good guess about the future, the research on overconfidence suggests that we’ll be wrong more often than we think. The future isn’t a point; it’s a range:
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How can we learn to sweep a broader landscape with our spotlights—to attend to the bookend of possibilities ahead? Psychologists have actually created some simple tools for exactly this purpose.
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It is November 2020 and something historic has just happened: The United States has just elected its first Asian American president. Think about all the reasons why this might have happened.
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Russo and Schoemaker have found that when people adopt the second style of thinking—using “prospective hindsight” to work backward from a certain future—they are better at generating explanations for why the event might happen. You may have experienced this yourself. The second scenario feels a bit more concrete, offering firmer cognitive footholds.
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Prospective hindsight seems to spur more insights because it forces us to fill in the blanks between today and a certain future event (as opposed to the slipperier process of speculating about an event that may or may not happen).
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A postmortem analysis begins after a death and asks, “What caused it?” A premortem, by contrast, imagines the future “death” of a project and asks, “What killed it?” A team running a premortem analysis starts by assuming a bleak future: Okay, it’s 12 months from now, and our project was a total fiasco. It blew up in our faces. Why did it fail?
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When we bookend the future, it’s important to consider the upside as well as the downside. That’s why, in addition to running a premortem, we need to run a “preparade.” A preparade asks us to consider success: Let’s say it’s a year from now and our decision has been a wild success. It’s so great that there’s going to be a parade in our honor. Given that future, how do we ensure that we’re ready for it?"

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Trechos retirados de "Decisive" de Chip e Dan Heath

PMEs: Cuidado com o que assinam, cuidado com o que se comprometem

Daniel Kahneman no seu livro "Thinking, Fast and Slow" inicia o capítulo 23 "The Outside View" com uma história da sua vida profissional. Um grupo, do qual fazia parte Kahneman, foi constituído para redigir um livro que servisse de texto base para o ensino de boas práticas de julgamento e tomada de decisões.
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Um ano após terem iniciado as reuniões e terem escrito os textos mais fáceis, alguém pergunto:
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"- Começamos isto há um ano, o plano prevê que demoremos 2 anos. Quanto é que grupos semelhantes ao nosso costumam demorar?
 - Cerca de 7 anos os que terminam. A taxa de insucesso é de 40%!
 - E somos melhores ou piores que a média desses grupos?
 - Somos um pouco abaixo da média."
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Depois, o grupo discutiu um pouco acerca desta realidade. Passado alguns minutos retomaram o trabalho... e demoraram 8 anos a terminar o livro.
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Não é interessante? Ainda para mais sobre um livro acerca do julgamento e da tomada de decisões...
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Kahneman usa esta história para escrever:

"This embarrassing episode remains one of the most instructive experiences of my professional life. I eventually learned three lessons from it. The first was immediately apparent: I had stumbled onto a distinction between two profoundly different approaches to forecasting, which Amos and I later labeled the inside view and the outside view. The second lesson was that our initial forecasts of about two years for the completion of the project exhibited a planning fallacy. Our estimates were closer to a best-case scenario than to a realistic assessment. I was slower to accept the third lesson, which I call irrational perseverance: the folly we displayed that day in failing to abandon the project. Facing a choice, we gave up rationality rather than give up the enterprise."

Esta preponderância da inside view e este optimismo no planeamento, não prevendo o que pode correr mal, não são problemas portugueses, estão embutidos no nosso ADN. Engraçado, relacionar a ideia de que a economia é uma continuação da biologia, com o título do capítulo 24, o optimismo que anima os humanos, que os leva a sobrevalorizar as suas capacidades e hipóteses pessoais é "The Engine of Capitalism":

"Most of us view the world as more benign than it really is, our own attributes as more favorable than they truly are, and the goals we adopt as more achievable than they are likely to be. We also tend to exaggerate our ability to forecast the future, which fosters optimistic overconfidence. In terms of its consequences for decisions, the optimistic bias may well be the most significant of the cognitive biases. Because optimistic bias can be both a blessing and a risk, you should be both happy and wary if you are temperamentally optimistic."

Escrevo tudo isto por causa da relação com histórias deste tipo "Groupon demand almost finishes cupcake-maker"... esta história é mais comum do que se possa imaginar. Quando uma PME se sente lisonjeada com o convite de uma multinacional para começar a fornecer um produto/serviço... iludida pelas quantidades, iludida pelo "poder dizer que é fornecedor de", iludida pelo desafio de ter as máquinas todas a trabalhar...
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Cuidado!
Cuidado com o que assinam, cuidado com o que se comprometem, cuidado com os investimentos que vão ter de fazer, cuidado com o risco que vão assumir. Façam um desenho, convidem um amigo para vos ouvir e servir de advogado do diabo. Pensem no que pode correr mal, e terminando novamente com Kahneman:

"Organizations may be better able to tame optimism and individuals than individuals are. The best idea for doing so was contributed by Gary Klein, my “adversarial collaborator” who generally defends intuitive decision making against claims of bias and is typically hostile to algorithms. He labels his proposal the premortem. The procedure is simple: when the organization has almost come to an important decision but has not formally committed itself, Klein proposes gathering for a brief session a group of individuals who are knowledgeable about the decision. The premise of the session is a short speech: “Imagine that we are a year into the future. We implemented the plan as it now exists. The outcome was a disaster. Please take 5 to 10 minutes to write a brief history of that disaster.”"

Imaginem o pior, imaginem o desastre. O que falhou?

Muitas PMEs ainda não fazem um orçamento para o ano seguinte.
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Admitamos que algumas o fazem.
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Muitas PMEs com um orçamento, fazem como MFL e TdS, não o acompanham, só no final do ano é que descobrem que não vai ser cumprido e inventam medidas de última hora.
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Admitamos que uma PME fez o seu orçamento para 2012, definiu objectivos e estabeleceu iniciativas estratégicas para os atingir.
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Por que não se interrogam, ainda em 2011, sobre o que é que pode correr mal? Por que pode falhar o cumprimento dos objectivos para 2012? Por que não realizar uma análise premortem?
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" If you gather a team of experienced leaders and ask them why past projects failed, the explanations flow readily: The project was bigger than we realized … we were too slow … our design was flawed … we were operating from faulty assumptions … the market changed … we had the wrong people … our technology didn’t work … our strategy was unclear … our costs were too high … our organization sabotaged us … the competition was tougher than we thought … we reorganized ourselves to death … we fought among ourselves … our strategy was flawed … our strategy was good but our execution was lousy … we ran into unexpected bottlenecks … we misunderstood our customers … we were short on resources … the economics didn’t work … we got killed by internal politics …
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Unfortunately, most teams never create such a list at the start of any project. That’s not in the genetic code of most innovators, who are (and who need to be) gung-ho optimists. But what if you ask your team to imagine a failure in advance, and explain why it happened? Research by Deborah Mitchell of the Wharton School, J. Edward Russo of Cornell, and Nancy Pennington of the University of Colorado found that “prospective hindsight”—imagining that an event has already occurred—increases the ability to correctly identify reasons for future outcomes by 30 percent.

Gary Klein, author of Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions and The Power of Intuition, builds on this “prospective hindsight” theory. He suggests that a premortem exercise frees people to express worries that they might otherwise suppress for fear of appearing disloyal or undermining the team’s confidence. Klein says the process reduces the kind of “damn-the-torpedoes attitude often assumed by people who are overinvested in a project.” People participating in a premortem might raise red flags before, rather than after, failure. 


So try this nightmare exercise: Imagine disaster. Ask why you failed; list all the possible reasons. Then do your best to counter those mistakes before they have a chance to occur. Most launches die from self-inflicted wounds. It means that if you’re willing to take a clear-eyed look at the forces seemingly conspiring to derail your next launch, you’ll probably find that the most powerful factors are actually under your control."
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Imaginem que um comercial negoceia com a sua chefia um objectivo de vendas para 2012.
OK, existe uma estratégia que a empresa como um todo está a implementar...
Viajar rapidamente até final de Novembro de 2012, olhar para trás e listar o que é que pode ter corrido mal e minado a possibilidade de atingir os objectivos...
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Regressar ao presente e ... é possível desenvolver medidas preventivas que impeçam ou minimizem os efeitos do que pode vir a correr mal? É possível enrobustecer as iniciativas estratégicas definidas?
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Trechos retirados de "Demand", o último livro de Adrian Slywotzky.
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BTW, adoro viagens ao futuro...

• Março de 2007
• Abril de 2007
• Outubro de 2007
• Setembro de 2009

Performing a Project Premortem

A revista Harvard Business Review deste mês de Setembro traz um pequeno artigo assinado por Gary Klein e intitulado "Performing a Project Premorten".


O artigo é de acesso livre aqui. Dele retirei este trecho:


"A typical premortem begins after the team has been briefed on the plan. The leader starts the exercise by informing everyone that the project has failed spectacularly. Over the next few minutes those in the room independently write down every reason they can think of for the failure—especially the kinds of things they ordinarily wouldn’t mention as potential problems, for fear of being impolitic. For example, in a session held at one Fortune 50–size company, an executive suggested that a billion-dollar environmental sustainability project had “failed” because interest waned when the CEO retired. Another pinned the failure on a dilution of the business case after a government agency revised its policies.

Next the leader asks each team member, starting with the project manager, to read one reason from his or her list; everyone states a different reason until all have been recorded. After the session is over, the project manager reviews the list, looking for ways to strengthen the plan."


Ou seja, o autor propõe a incorporação de uma acção preventiva antes de ser dado o "GO!" de um projecto. Assim, perante este exemplo de projecto, retirado daqui:

O que é que pode correr mal?
O que é que pode contribuir para um falhanço na execução do projecto?

E actuar antes de começar a pôr a nossa reputação em jogo. Parece uma ideia muito útil.