Before you launch your change initiative, do a premortem.
What I learned from conducting more than 50 of them
by Tijs Besieux, PhD
Introduction
One of my favorite methods when driving change is to conduct a premortem. In my experience, a premortem can help you do at least three things:
Identify obstacles that could stand in the way of a successful change, so you can find ways to resolve them effectively.
Position the why, what, and how of the change effort, which is then carried throughout the organization by premortem interviewees, lowering resistance to change.
Set up a feedback loop from people across the organization about how the change is unfolding, allowing you to act on that feedback before it is too late.
In this article, I describe what a premortem is as well as the dos and don'ts I have learned from designing, implementing, and anchoring change programs at the intersection of strategy and leadership development for over 15 years.
A Premortem Defined in the Context of Change
In change management, big or small, a premortem can be defined as a method for identifying, and resolving, any obstacles that may stand in the way of achieving the desired change outcome. You do so by imagining that something has failed and then generating an explanation for that failure, with the goal of reducing the likelihood that it actually occurs (Ghez, 2026).
Unlike its sibling, the postmortem, a premortem takes place before the actual change is initiated. A postmortem is a method for identifying and learning from issues, mistakes, and failures after the change has occurred. In that sense, a premortem is designed to prevent mistakes from happening; a postmortem is designed to keep them from happening again.
The following five steps are how I structure every premortem.
Step 1: Identify Who to Interview
Planned change almost always operates within a defined governance structure, and depending on the type and context of the change, that structure can be large or small. Your change program could involve any combination of the following stakeholders:
A steering committee with representatives from across the organization to guide the effort.
A senior sponsor, often someone from the executive committee, who lends status to the project and ensures visibility at the top.
A project management team, with more hands-on people to manage, monitor, and evaluate day-to-day actions, sometimes consisting of internal employees and external consultants.
A coalition of the willing, also called front-runners, early adopters, or a guiding coalition: people affected by the change who are willing to adopt it first and promote it throughout the organization.
On other occasions, you are simply handed a change briefing, a document describing the why, what, and how of the change, with an encouraging pat on the shoulder to "make the best of it." I have rarely witnessed this, but for employees who have no budget or team to support them, it can be a reality.
In all of these scenarios, my approach is to start by asking the same question:
"Who should I interview to increase the probability of this change program being a success?"
The answer is usually a list of people who meet one or more of the following criteria.
Informal power
In every organization, there is an unwritten list of people who are highly influential without holding formal authority. My favorite example is executive assistants, the people who manage how for example a CEO or CHRO spends their time. By definition, they prioritize, because most senior leaders are invited to more meetings, one-on-ones, and ceremonial activities than they could attend in a lifetime.
When I conducted my PhD research in a financial institution with 250,000 employees, I reported my progress directly to the CHRO. One day, near the end of my research, the CHRO's assistant told me she had always prioritized my meetings with him because she found it amusing to see a 25-year-old walking the corridors of a deeply traditional and very senior institution, where mostly 50-plus-year-old men in dark suits looked at me as if I had mistaken the building for the faculty library. On paper, she had little power. In reality, she had a decisive say in who got to sit down with one of the most powerful people in a multibillion-dollar company.
Formal power
These are the people who hold formal authority. If you are running a program to help a company define and implement a leadership model, the CEO needs to be involved, at minimum to validate and give a thumbs-up. Formal power comes from many sources: budget, people, and time, just no name a few.
Expertise
Especially when your change has technical dimensions, people who work in the current situation where the change may unfold are vital to consult. I once helped a dredging company improve its stage gate process, a structured series of meetings over time to guide the organization from initial sales opportunity to executing projects often exceeding fifty million dollars. Margins are thin, so details matter enormously. A single misstep, such as advancing a tender despite calculators flagging it as unprofitable, can waste resources, time, and morale. In that context, you need extended conversations, where you do most of the listening, with experts who deal with the technical details of a stage-gate process such as: software systems to capture and analyze large data-sets, standard operating procedures for who gets invited to the stage-gate meeting, decision-making protocols, and compliance requirements to document all the nifty details of the entire process.
Cultural weight
Culture is often defined as "the way we do things around here”. Another useful definition is "our unique answers to universal questions." In both cases, certain colleagues are more vocal and more influential in defining those answers. I think of the CEO of a construction company where I helped with a leadership program for its top 50 managers. In every meeting, whether a one-on-one with the CFO or a town hall with all 4,000 employees, the CEO would share a concrete, specific example of something the company had done that genuinely mattered to one of their customers. When I interviewed employees across the organization asking about the company’s aspirations, they consistently described the goal of the company to be more customer-oriented, and they often pointed to the CEO’s storytelling as the reason why.
Boundary spanning
Every organization, regardless of size, has silos: departments, divisions, or cells that are clearly distinct from one another. Boundary spanners are the people who excel at bridging those realities. They have relationships across teams, and they identify with the company first and their own unit second. During a premortem, they are particularly valuable for sense-making. They can look at one reality from multiple angles and help assign meaning to information coming from different pockets of the organization.
Legacy
Often, these are people who have been with the firm for more than 25 years. They are well equipped to point out what has worked in the past, what has failed, and why things operate the way they do today. To predict the future, one must understand history. Employees with significant tenure can help map the organization's timeline, making sense of why things are the way they are.
Laggards
Probably my least favorite interview, at first, but often the most valuable one. I use the term loosely: anyone who is unlikely to be among the first to embrace the change, whether because they lack the skills to adapt, the motivation to try, or simply because the context in which they work makes adoption genuinely difficult. Consider someone in a bank's compliance department, focused every day on keeping the bank's license to operate from the regulator, while the bank is pushing toward becoming more customer-centric which entails “getting rid of rigid compliance procedures that impair customer experience”. When you interview laggards, they may initially come across as sceptical. The key is to tap into that resistance, because there you may find a goldmine for increasing the odds of success.
Early adopters
The opposite of laggards: people who are almost willing to try any change in the interest of the company and its stakeholders. They will champion the program, experiment with it, and give you plenty of feedback. Early adopters are often skilled at identifying untapped sources of motivation inside the company. They may be invaluable for making that first start, for modeling the desired change, and for encouraging others to follow.
Together with the stakeholders who govern the change program, you now have a list of people to interview. At first it may feel daunting: you suddenly need to interview 15 people before you "really" start. But I see it differently. The premortem is already an invaluable intervention; it is one of the first formal steps in any planned change. I work according to the philosophy of going slow to go fast. The steps you take now, which may seem to slow your progress, will often prove crucial to increasing the impact of the change.
Step 2: Look Out for Blind Spots
The premortem interview list will never be perfect, nor does it need to be. That said, there are typically a few blind spots worth watching for.
Customers. Any change effort should ultimately create more value for customers, directly or indirectly. It follows that customers could be a relevant stakeholder to consider for a premortem interview. While this may not be appropriate in every program, I advocate for explicitly naming customers as a premortem stakeholder to address. After all, it is the customer who ultimately, directly or indirectly, funds the change program. Here, I also suggest stretching the meaning of the word customer to potentially internal stakeholders who ‘consume your work’. If, for instance, legal is adopting its way of working to become more efficient, it makes sense to to include in your premortem people from departments who will consume and use the documents and advise that is put forward by the legal department.
People affected by the change. This seems obvious, yet on several occasions I have reviewed premortem interview lists with no one, or almost no one, from the group most directly affected by the change.
The executive committee and board of directors. Also seemingly obvious, yet too often I see change programs, especially those focused on middle management and their teams, where the executive committee or board is loosely polled and not taken seriously. This can stem from well-intentioned reasoning: "They're too busy," or "Middle management can handle this on their own." That reasoning almost always backfires. Senior leaders who were not genuinely involved upfront will say so when the program needs their support most.
Step 3: Conduct the Premortem Interviews
Once you have created and reviewed your premortem interview list, you are ready to reach out. Three lessons stand out from everything I have learned at this stage: how you position the change in the build-up to the interview; the discipline to truly listen rather than sell; and the importance of making interviewees an active part of the change's success.
First: the build-up almost matters as much as the interview itself.
It may seem easy to pull an email address from an internal system and reach out. But how you approach the interview shapes the quality of what you get from it. When done poorly, people may act defensively, question whether you should be contacting them, or simply not respond.
In my experience, a two-step approach works best. First, have the program sponsor, or, if unavailable, the most senior person with formal authority over the program, send an introductory email to each person on the list. That email should explain what the change is about, why it matters, and, against that backdrop, why this particular person's input is essential. It should also clarify who will follow up to schedule the interview.
This may seem overly formal, but I recommend erring on the side of formality here. The sponsor's introduction creates legitimacy for the interview that follows. When you then reach out to schedule, and when you begin the interview itself, people tend to show up with a productive mindset.
During the interview, I use a semi-structured format: prepared questions, with sufficient space to follow unexpected but highly relevant threads. I typically cover the following, in order:
A genuine expression of thanks for the person's time.
A brief introduction of yourself in relation to the change program.
Confidentiality: explaining that the interview is fully confidential, that responses will be combined with others to identify patterns, and that no individual will be quoted or identified.
An introduction from the interviewee: their role and responsibilities.
A walkthrough of the change program, to verify that the interviewee understands the why, the what, and the how.
The premortem questions themselves. I typically use variations of: "Imagine this change program became a total failure. What are the factors that contributed to it?" Allow sufficient time and space for unexpected insights to emerge.
Explicit thanks for the conversation, plus a clear explanation of what happens next: when insights will be shared, with whom, and how the interviewee will be kept informed.
Second: your role is to listen, not to sell.
This was, at least for me, difficult to accept in the beginning. When you interview people for a premortem, your only goal is to capture as much information as possible from their perspective. You do not need to agree or disagree with what they say. You do not need to counter their point of view. You do not need a checklist of three reasons why the change program is the right call.
The mindset of listening without feeling the need to respond well can be uncomfortable, because you want the program to succeed. But a reframe might help: by listening to what they have to say, you actually increase the program's success, not by working to overcome their resistance, but by understanding it.
Third: treat your interviewees as ongoing partners, not one-time sources.
Instead of thanking them politely after the interview and never following up, position these conversations as the first of many. At the end of the interview, you might say: "We will send you a summary of the findings by next Thursday. Would it be okay if I then gave you a call to discuss?" A few weeks after formally launching the change program, reach out again to share how the premortem influenced the design.
In my experience, these efforts are almost always met with reciprocity. The practical benefit: whenever someone you interviewed encounters friction during the change itself, they are likely to pick up the phone and tell you. That call may be uncomfortable, but it surfaces exactly the kind of dynamics you need to address for the program to succeed.
Beyond the one-on-one interviews, another useful data source is to run the premortem with your change management team: imagine the change has failed, and generate explanations for why. A whiteboard and sticky notes are usually enough.
Step 4: Analyze Data and Report Back
Once you have conducted all your interviews and gathered insights from the group exercise, analyze the data to find patterns that can strengthen the change program by addressing potential roadblocks.
Here are some of the most common roadblocks I have uncovered through premortem interviews:
The change program offered a solution to a non-existing problem, or the wrong problem (often, symptoms of a problem such as lack of employee engagement were mistaken for root causes such as insufficient autonomy at work).
Overall readiness to change was too low. Perhaps the change program was good, but because of—for instance—a series of failed programs in the past or simply too much change going on at once or no real conviction that this would do any good, people demonstrate a low readiness for change.
Insufficient capability at leadership level to carry the change forward.
No real involvement from (especially front-line) employees to influence and implement the change.
Insufficient resources (especially: time) for people to carry out the change on top of their day-to-day ‘run’.
Friction between leaders, formal or informal ones, drawing away much-needed time and energy to implement the change.
Lack of support from top-management which should far exceed a rubber-stamping exercise for the change to actually create an impact that matters.
Timelines were seen as unrealistic.
The perspective of the customers, the stakeholder for whom a company eventually initiates change, was not taken into account sufficiently.
The change project team had the wrong people on board, lacking a diverse representation of the organization.
The change was seen as too distant from the company’s current capabilities and culture.
No clear vision or appealing communication for the change.
Once you have identified the patterns, share and validate them with your steering committee, project team, or sponsor, and decide together what actions to take: which insights from the interviews can be used to strengthen the program?
Beyond the standard feedback loop to the change team, I recommend two additional ones. First, report back to the group of interviewees. This increases transparency and lowers the threshold for them to provide further feedback whenever they think it is relevant. Second, report back, even if briefly, to the executive committee. Premortem insights frequently hold information that goes beyond the scope of your specific change program; they often reveal how the organization at large deals with change. That is vital information for any executive committee, whose work is largely defined by leading change. As a practical bonus, a feedback loop to the executive committee raises the program's visibility, which rarely hurts.
Step 5: Use the Premortem Insights to Reshape Program Tactics
The premortem insights are usually a fertile ground for reshaping elements of the change program, whether the actual content or the way it is positioned and communicated throughout the organization.
In my experience, this is also a valuable occasion to share any adaptations with your premortem interviewees. That way, they see that their voice actually mattered and understand the criteria you applied to adjust the program. By doing so, you increase transparency, and you increase the likelihood that the people you interviewed will actively work to make the program succeed.
In Conclusion
A premortem is not a preliminary step before the real change begins. It is the change beginning.
I opened by outlining three benefits: clear insights on obstacles in the way of the change program's success, an opportunity to position the change program with key stakeholders, and a network of eyes and ears across the organization to flag issues as the change unfolds. All three benefits depend on the people you interview for the premortem, so the quality of the output is largely determined by who ends up on that list.
My final lesson, after more than 50 premortems, is this: deciding deliberately to involve people, reach out proactively, and genuinely listen to what they have to say may be the single greatest accelerant for any change initiative. In all those premortems, I have never once seen a program sponsor regret having commissioned one. The same cannot be said for those who skipped it.
Sources
Beidas, R. S., Dorsey, S., Lewis, C. C., Lyon, A. R., Powell, B. J., Purtle, J., & Lane-Fall, M. B. (2022). Promises and pitfalls in implementation science from the perspective of US-based researchers: learning from a premortem. Implementation Science, 17(1), 55.
Ghez, J. (2026). Case study: Conducting a premortem. In Architects of Change: Designing Strategies for a Turbulent Business Environment (pp. 119-143). Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland. [Please verify publication year.]
Klein, G. (2007). Performing a project premortem. Harvard Business Review, 85(9), 18-19.
Stouten, J., Rousseau, D. M., & De Cremer, D. (2018). Successful organizational change: Integrating the management practice and scholarly literatures. Academy of Management Annals, 12(2), 752-788.