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

Do you find yourself setting the same goals year after year, only to leave them unaccomplished?
If so, it might be time to try a new strategy for planning your goals.

In this quick win I’m joined by ABC broadcaster and Host of ‘This Working Life’, Lisa Leong to talk about why a pre mortem could be the strategy you need to set achievable goals for the year.

Lisa shares:

• What a ‘pre-mortem’ is and how it can help you set achievable goals for the next year
• How to make sure a ‘pre-mortem’ works if you are doing it for a team
• Why a ‘pre-victorum’ is essential to do as well if you are setting personal goals

Listen to the full interview with Lisa here.

Connect with Lisa via Instagram, or check out ‘This Working Life.”

My latest book The Health Habit is out now. You can order a copy here: https://www.amantha.com/the-health-habit/

Connect with me on the socials:

Linkedin (https://www.linkedin.com/in/amanthaimber)

Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/amanthai)

If you are looking for more tips to improve the way you work and live, I write a weekly newsletter where I share practical and simple to apply tips to improve your life. You can sign up for that at https://amantha-imber.ck.page/subscribe

Visit https://www.amantha.com/podcast for full show notes from all episodes.

Get in touch at [e-mail]

Credits:

Host: Amantha Imber

Sound Engineer: The Podcast Butler

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Do you find yourself setting the same goals year after year,
only to leave them unaccomplished. If so, it might be
time to try a new strategy for planning your goals.
Lisa Leong is an ABC broadcaster, host of This Working
Life with Radio National, and also a very good friend
of mine. In our chat, Lisa and I discuss a

(00:20):
simple but game changing strategy you can be using to
plan your goals for the year to come. Welcome to
How I Work, a show about habits, rituals, and strategies
for optimizing your day. I'm your host, Doctor Amantha Imber.

(00:45):
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

(01:07):
achieving the goals that you've been setting.

Speaker 2 (01:13):
You know the pre mortem exercise.

Speaker 1 (01:16):
Yes, but can you share what this is for those
that don't know it?

Speaker 2 (01:19):
So we could tie in a bit of a pre
mortem exercise. So a post mortem is when you analyze
something after it's happened and so, oh wow, what went
wrong and what went right? So that's called the post mortem.
A pre mortem is a useful exercise, and it's basically
what if I'm talking about the end of twenty twenty five,

(01:39):
That's what I'm utilizing, is this concept of pre mortem.
So I'm beaming myself into the future and I'm describing
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

(02:01):
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

(02:22):
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

(02:45):
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,

(03:07):
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

(03:28):
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

(03:50):
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

(04:10):
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

(04:31):
just doing it. I'm setting a goal and why do
we repeat every year the same bad habits.

Speaker 1 (04:36):
What I love about that is I've only run pre
mortems where you think about what if everything is a
total failure? Well really, and how do we look back
and how do we prevent that? But I've actually never
done a pre mortem from memory where it's like, what
if this was a raging success? What are the things
that led to that? For me, I've always used that

(04:58):
pre mortem in the work context, I haven't I really
used it in my personal life to think about how
do we prevent shit from going wrong? Yeah, but how
do we actually promote things going right? I love that
angle as well.

Speaker 2 (05:10):
Strictly speaking, pre mortem is about all the things that
go wrong, So strictly speaking, it would be a pre
victorium if we're talking, so maybe your Latin brain has
gone pre mortem. That can't be about pre victorim. So
strictly speaking, that's why amanthas So you have been doing
it right. It's just the stand that they do both

(05:31):
and sometimes there's overlap, but many times you can bring
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

(05:53):
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

(06:14):
or intention into the negative things, because sometimes we can
create our own futures by focusing on the wrong things.

Speaker 1 (06:23):
I hope you enjoyed this little quick win with Lisa.
If you'd like to listen to the full interview, you
can find a link to that in the show notes.
If you like today's show, make sure you git follow
on your podcast app to be alerted when new episodes drop.
How I Work was recorded on the traditional land of
the Warringery people, part of the Cooler Nation