Is your project consensus a silent killer? Easy agreement often masks the fatal flaws that lead to public disaster.

As a senior leader, I've faced the painful reality of projects being killed; sometimes early, sometimes way down the line after significant investment. The post-mortems always revealed the same thing: We knew the risks, but no one dared to speak the fatal truth.

The key to resilient strategy isn't optimism; it's strategic foresight. It's the precise tool needed to take better, faster decisions.

Learn the four-step "Pre-Mortem" process I used at the board level to diagnose the fatal flaws in your plan before they cost you time, reputation, and revenue. This investment in strategic pessimism replaces hopeful guesswork with intelligent action.

The consensus trap

Imagine you have just left the kick-off meeting for your flagship initiative. The room was buoyant. Everyone nodded and left feeling optimistic.

But what if that easy consensus is your biggest risk?

In high-stakes environments, optimism often masks a fundamental flaw: No one dared to speak the fatal truth. When everyone agrees, the critical flaws that could derail your entire strategy: the political risks, the talent exodus, the IP vulnerability are simply left unsaid. (

The cost of undue optimism

This is where the strategy sinks. Eighteen months later, your initiative is a spectacular, public disaster. The stock price has suffered. Key talent left. You are now scrambling to explain the failure.

The rational drowning is the data: millions lost, targets missed.

But the emotional impact is the true cost: the damage to your personal reputation, the feeling of vulnerability, and the draining realisation that the warning signs were there all along, buried under a false sense of security.

The strategic pre-mortem

The pre-mortem is an investment in strategic pessimism that results in a more resilient, strategically sound plan. It eliminates hope as a strategy and replaces it with intelligent action.

Here is the four-step process I found invaluable at the board level:

1. The time jump: Gather your core strategy team. Announce: "It is 18 months from now. Our flagship initiative has been a spectacular, public disaster. We missed all targets, key talent left, and the stock price has suffered." This forces everyone to adopt a mindset of risk identification.

   
   

2. The failure narrative: Give the team 30 minutes of silent, individual work. Each person must write down 10 to 15 completely distinct reasons why the project failed. Force them to be specific.

   
   

3. The data synthesis: Collect all the failure points (you will find enormous overlap). Group them into categories: Execution Risks, Market Risks, Political Risks, and Talent Risks. This collective list is now your strategic risk register, a proactive roadmap of threats you have already identified.

   
   

4. The counter-strategy: The final step is where the magic happens. The team must now assign specific, pre-emptive actions to neutralise the top three most catastrophic risks identified. This shifts the team's focus from "how we will succeed" to "how we will ensure we don't fail."

   
   

The pre-mortem does more than just mitigate risk; it aligns your team's cognitive resources against proven threats, ensuring your strategy is built on resilience, not just optimism.