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Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of IHeart Radio.

Good morning. This is Laura.

Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast.

Today's tip is that whenever you are about to begin a project,

think about the end of it. Today's tip, like some other recent ones, was inspired by the book,

The Friction Project, how smart leaders make the right things easier and the wrong things harder. In this book, authors and Stanford professors Robert Sutton and Huggy Rao talk about how organizational

friction can slow down productive output.

However, in certain situations they note, friction is good.

Slowing things down can help teams make better decisions.

One form of good friction is pausing before you start a project to think about how it might end.

Team members can project themselves into the future and envision two scenarios, the project's success and the project's failure. The imagined future success is a pre-Victoram, if you well, and the imagined failure is a pre-mortem.

Now, you've probably heard of a post-mortem.

That's Latin for after-death.

You can examine a project after it is over, to understand what worked, what didn't, and why.

This can be a very valuable practice. But, and why? This can be a very valuable practice.

But why wait to consider what leads to a project's success or failure

until after the project is over?

Sutton and Rao suggest inviting the team to time travel

before a project begins.

And imagine the project's success.

What events and behaviors led to that success?

...