Speaker 1: Do you find yourself setting the same goals year after year,
Speaker 1: only to leave them unaccomplished. If so, it might be
Speaker 1: time to try a new strategy for planning your goals.
Speaker 1: Lisa Leong is an ABC broadcaster, host of This Working
Speaker 1: Life with Radio National, and also a very good friend
Speaker 1: of mine. In our chat, Lisa and I discuss a
Speaker 1: simple but game changing strategy you can be using to
Speaker 1: plan your goals for the year to come. Welcome to
Speaker 1: How I Work, a show about habits, rituals, and strategies
Speaker 1: for optimizing your day. I'm your host, Doctor Amantha Imber.
Speaker 1: On today's quick Win episode, we go back to an
Speaker 1: episode from the past and I pick out a quick
Speaker 1: win that you can apply today. We've all heard of
Speaker 1: a post mortem where you analyze the year that was
Speaker 1: or the project that was and see what went wrong
Speaker 1: and what went right. But in this quick Win, Lisa
Speaker 1: and I discuss how a pre mortem could be the
Speaker 1: strategy you need if you're regularly finding that you're not
Speaker 1: achieving the goals that you've been setting.
Speaker 2: You know the pre mortem exercise.
Speaker 1: Yes, but can you share what this is for those
Speaker 1: that don't know it?
Speaker 2: So we could tie in a bit of a pre
Speaker 2: mortem exercise. So a post mortem is when you analyze
Speaker 2: something after it's happened and so, oh wow, what went
Speaker 2: wrong and what went right? So that's called the post mortem.
Speaker 2: A pre mortem is a useful exercise, and it's basically
Speaker 2: what if I'm talking about the end of twenty twenty five,
Speaker 2: That's what I'm utilizing, is this concept of pre mortem.
Speaker 2: So I'm beaming myself into the future and I'm describing
Speaker 2: it like it is happening right now. Because humans are
Speaker 2: terrible at being able to properly project ourselves into the
Speaker 2: future and say, oh, you know, and set goals. So
Speaker 2: we set unattainable goals, but we also think that we
Speaker 2: can do way more than we can a year. So
Speaker 2: what the pre morton does is it says, let's be
Speaker 2: mourselves into that future state. So it could be five
Speaker 2: years hence, if you really want to look at a vision,
Speaker 2: or it could be December twenty twenty five, and you
Speaker 2: describe your roaring success, so you know, Amantha roaring success.
Speaker 2: You know, you describe that maybe like a headline, and
Speaker 2: then you also look at the flip side, which is
Speaker 2: a kind of terrible disaster. So a disaster state, and
Speaker 2: then you write out like a paragraph of what happened,
Speaker 2: and you can do it like an article in you know,
Speaker 2: the Age or in the Australian Financial Review roaring success.
Speaker 2: This happened Amantha, you know, started sewing in her backyard
Speaker 2: and then you know, suddenly all these beautiful things happened.
Speaker 2: So you describe that future stage and then you do
Speaker 2: the opposite for the you know, what made it terrible?
Speaker 2: Amantha snowed under with way too much work, had it
Speaker 2: even worse year and then got burnt out, you know,
Speaker 2: So then you do the other side and then you say, well,
Speaker 2: what contributed to that? And it's in that process of
Speaker 2: writing the story where you can sort of crystallize, and
Speaker 2: they're often surprising things. Hugging Row from Stanford, he runs
Speaker 2: these pre mortems and I'll just do your quick story
Speaker 2: to tell you about what is non obvious. So Stanford
Speaker 2: Medical School, their pre mortem Rowing Success is to actually
Speaker 2: create innovations in the science area that would change the world.
Speaker 2: And they initially thought that it was about enticing more experts,
Speaker 2: high level experts, medical researchers into their organization. But what
Speaker 2: they actually found out through doing the pre mortem is
Speaker 2: that a lot of the difficulties happened because of bottlenecks
Speaker 2: because there were not enough to support people like nurses
Speaker 2: and the way they get their grants that these nurses
Speaker 2: got snowed under with these things that they absolutely had
Speaker 2: to do to get funding in the first place. And
Speaker 2: it didn't matter even if they attracted all these medical researchers.
Speaker 2: Without the nurses, they wouldn't be able to do anything,
Speaker 2: no breakthroughs. And so through doing the pre mortem, it
Speaker 2: opened that up. And so I actually go, this is
Speaker 2: fascinating and you can definitely use it for your own career,
Speaker 2: and you can unearth things that wouldn't be obvious through
Speaker 2: just doing it. I'm setting a goal and why do
Speaker 2: we repeat every year the same bad habits.
Speaker 1: What I love about that is I've only run pre
Speaker 1: mortems where you think about what if everything is a
Speaker 1: total failure? Well really, and how do we look back
Speaker 1: and how do we prevent that? But I've actually never
Speaker 1: done a pre mortem from memory where it's like, what
Speaker 1: if this was a raging success? What are the things
Speaker 1: that led to that? For me, I've always used that
Speaker 1: pre mortem in the work context, I haven't I really
Speaker 1: used it in my personal life to think about how
Speaker 1: do we prevent shit from going wrong? Yeah, but how
Speaker 1: do we actually promote things going right? I love that
Speaker 1: angle as well.
Speaker 2: Strictly speaking, pre mortem is about all the things that
Speaker 2: go wrong, So strictly speaking, it would be a pre
Speaker 2: victorium if we're talking, so maybe your Latin brain has
Speaker 2: gone pre mortem. That can't be about pre victorim. So
Speaker 2: strictly speaking, that's why amanthas So you have been doing
Speaker 2: it right. It's just the stand that they do both
Speaker 2: and sometimes there's overlap, but many times you can bring
Speaker 2: out different things. And also I think energetically what they
Speaker 2: say is it is better if you're doing this personally.
Speaker 2: So I've mainly done it for teams as well, the
Speaker 2: pre mortem pre victim both sides. And by the way,
Speaker 2: you want to make sure that you get really different
Speaker 2: people doing it, not just the leadership team, to get
Speaker 2: the voices in the room. You can do it anonymously
Speaker 2: as well. If you're doing it personally, it's kind of
Speaker 2: better to make sure that you do the pre victorium.
Speaker 2: But even just focusing on the pre victorium, because of
Speaker 2: the way our brains work, it's actually better to focus
Speaker 2: on the positive things rather than putting any energy into
Speaker 2: or intention into the negative things, because sometimes we can
Speaker 2: create our own futures by focusing on the wrong things.
Speaker 1: I hope you enjoyed this little quick win with Lisa.
Speaker 1: If you'd like to listen to the full interview, you
Speaker 1: can find a link to that in the show notes.
Speaker 1: If you like today's show, make sure you git follow
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Speaker 1: How I Work was recorded on the traditional land of
Speaker 1: the Warringery people, part of the Cooler Nation