SUMMARY 

• In this episode, I'll share with you the two strategies that will help increase your ability to handle and learn from the unexpected. As Mike Tyson said,  “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”
• How do we develop our anticipation and our learning ability when it comes to the unexpected? Whether you are alone or you work with a team, there will always be things that will come up that you might not have prepared for. How do we avoid those things, and if we cannot avoid them, how do we make sure they don’t happen again? The answers are the pre-mortem and the post-mortem.
• The pre-mortem is asking this question, before you start a project: what are the reasons why we might fail? Listen to yourself and listen to your teammates, then list down all the reasons.
• After you list down the reasons why you or your team might fail, try to answer and solve those problems. Have a plan of action to avoid and to lessen the likelihood of those problems coming up during the project. By doing so, you are preparing and anticipating better.
• The post-mortem, as the name suggests, is what you do after a project is completed. Ask yourselves these questions: What are all the things that went well? What are all the things that didn't go so well? And if we were to do things differently the next time around, what would we do?
• By answering these questions, you are learning from the world and about yourself and you are also preparing for the next project by identifying your strengths and areas of improvement. As a result, you will come out better and stronger and you’ll have survived the punch of the unexpected.

TRANSCRIPT

One of my favorite quotes is Mike Tyson's, "Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth." And invariably, when I'm working with the CEOs and the leaders that I coach and mentor, one of the things that they say that they'd like to become better at doing is handling the unexpected. And today I'm going to show you two simple things that you can do to increase your anti-fragility, to increase your ability to handle the unexpected and emerge stronger as a result.

Hi, my name is Eric Partaker and I help entrepreneurs and leaders scale up themselves, their companies, and also their well-being. And today we're talking about how you can get better at handling the unexpected through two simple techniques, and they are the pre-mortem and the post-mortem, or in other words, I'm going to teach the two ways to get better at handling the unexpected by developing your anticipation and your learning ability.

So a pre-mortem is something that you would simply do either yourself, if you're working on something yourself, or with your team. And the question that you're posing to yourself or to the group is, “Okay, let's assume in 12 or 18 months time or whatever the period of time is to reach completion on whatever it is that you're working on, that we've failed. What are the reasons why we would have failed?” Listen to yourself, listen to the group, and list all those reasons out. And then the second thing that you're going to do is develop plans to mitigate each of those things, to lessen the likelihood that those things will happen, or if you can't avoid that they might happen, to be prepared for what you will do when those things occur.

Now, the post-mortem, as it sounds, happens after a project or a piece of work has been completed. And once again, either with yourself, if you're working alone or with your group, you're simply sat down and you're asking yourself, "Okay, what are all the things that went well? What are all the things that went right? What are all the things that didn't go so well? And if we were to do things differently the next time around, how would we handle those things?"

Get better at doing pre-mortems and post-mortems, get better at anticipating the unexpected and developing plans of action beforehand, and get better at learning from what happened so that you can together become much better and stronger at handling anything that comes your way and surviving that punch. As Mike Tyson said, "Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth." Don't be that person. Pre-mortems and post-mortems are two simple ways for you to not get knocked down and to keep charging ahead.