Quick: Imagine it is three to six years in the future and your proposed strategy has been unsuccessful. Why did it fail? It’s a lot easier to see what went wrong looking backwards using 20/20 hindsight. It’s likely that current company leadership has some clues that would enable it to complete the sentence, “If only we had . . .”
This is the “Pre-Mortem Question” one of five exercises in strategic review that Alex Lowy recommends in the article “Five Reframing Questions Every CEO Should Ask,” in the lastest CEO Advisory from Emerald Group Publishing. Download the article here.
Alex Lowy (alowy@sympatico.ca) teaches Critical Thinking at the Schulich Executive Education Centre and Strategy Execution at the DeGroote School of Business at McMaster University in Toronto. He is co-author of The Power of the 2 x 2 Matrix (Jossey-Bass, 2004, with Phil Hood) and Digital Capital (Harvard Business School Press, 2000, with Don Tapscott & David Ticoll). His last book, No Problem, addresses the challenges of effectively reframing business issues.