Turn Talking About Risk From a Taboo Into Your Secret Weapon

Discussing risk can feel like crossing a social minefield. Most people flinch, fearing that candidly naming what could go wrong will make them look like pessimists or underminers. Yet smart teams flip that script: they imagine, 'What if we look back in six months and see we’ve hit a wall? What tripped us up?' In a good pre-mortem session, the tension gives way to relief as laughter and creativity emerge—maybe someone jokes about a router outage, someone else admits a fear about a missed deadline, and suddenly ideas start flowing. Those who rarely speak up feel permission to share, knowing this is all hypothetical, like a post-disaster movie. Reviewing the list, the group finds several issues appearing over and over: unclear responsibilities, delayed supply orders, poor communication. Rather than feeling defeated, people feel lighter. They realize the disasters are often preventable—if you anticipate and talk about them with enough lead time. By assigning someone to monitor warning signs and by setting up fallback plans, the group turns future anxiety into present-day preparation.

Behavioral science calls this ‘exposure with response prevention’—the more you practice facing your fears with structure, the more manageable those worries become. Pre-mortems lower anxiety, encourage honest talk, and turn risk into a team sport—not a solo struggle.

Pull your group together before launching something important and walk them gently through an imaginary disaster. Ask everyone, with no blame, to list two or three reasons things might fail, and write them up for all to see. Once the list is out there, group common causes, look for the earliest warning signs, and laugh off the wild ones. Pick out the risks you all really care about and decide two practical steps that could keep those problems at bay, assigning individual names to each. Doing this before you start makes risk a shared adventure—go on, try it before your next launch.