The Metiss Group's Blog

It’s a well know fact that 75% of business startups fail in the first year, over 80% fail in the first 5 years, and only 4% survive 10 years.  Given these overwhelming odds, why do so many entrepreneurs risk their life savings and start businesses?  When most people anticipate future events, their initial reaction is to be overly optimistic.

We’ve all sat in meetings where the high influencers in the group persuade the team with the optimistic vision.  The opinions of the quiet realists are often overlooked or stifled by the enthusiasm created by the energetic influencers. Good leaders recognize decisions can be highjacked by the overly optimistic vocal team members and go out of their way to extract the opinions of the less forceful deeper thinkers.

One approach is to challenge the team to conduct a premortem when making important decisions.  When the team has almost come to an important decision, have the team imagine they are a year into the future. They implemented the plan as it now exists. The outcome was a disaster.  Discuss what went wrong that created the disaster.  You’ll be amazed how engaged the introverted conscientious team members become and how better decisions are made.

Empower your decision makers to conduct premortems and they will make more successful decisions.

This entry was posted on December 9, 2013 at 5:00 am and is filed under Leadership. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.