The BD Pre-mortem: A Fresh Set of Eyes on Your Business Development
By Sue-Ella Prodonovich | May 2026
Key Takeaways
The pre-mortem is a low-cost technique for stress-testing plans
It works well with a mixed-seniority team
It surfaces the assumptions your Business Development (BD) plan is built on
Partners can use it to bring less experienced professionals into BD planning in a meaningful way
Many lawyers and accountants hit a point where their Business Development (BD) feels stale or plans feel like repetitive form-filling. Rather than applying more effort, the fix can be a different kind of thinking, applied earlier.
Here is a tool that does that. It’s borrowed from behavioural economics, and surprisingly easy to run with your team.
Nobel Prize thinking, applied to BD
A pre-mortem is a planning exercise developed by cognitive psychologist Gary Klein and published in the Harvard Business Review in 2007. Before a project begins, the team imagines it’s already failed badly and describes what went wrong. Nobel prize-winner, Daniel Kahneman, later championed the technique in “Thinking, Fast and Slow” (2011) as a counter to optimism bias in planning and the tendency to overestimate the likelihood of a good outcome.
The concept is straight forward: After sharing your group’s plan for the next period, you ask the team to imagine how it failed and to write down how that happened (not how it might go wrong but how it did go wrong. The shift in tense matters because it moves people from polite optimism into frank diagnosis).
Why BD planning needs a reality check
Most BD planning in professional services is optimistic by design. You set targets, list activities, and assume momentum will follow effort. Sometimes it does. Often, it doesn’t go 100% because the plan was built on assumptions that weren’t examined too closely.
Perhaps you assumed a particular client would continue expanding their work with you, or you planned to build a referral relationship that never quite materialised, or you committed to a speaking programme that generated goodwill but no instructions.
These aren’t so much failures of effort. They are failures of assumption and the pre-mortem is one of the easiest, low-cost techniques for catching assumptions early.
How to run a BD pre-mortem
All you need is your group’s draft BD plan and about one hour with the team. Here’s how it works…
Start with your plan. Share the BD plan or strategy for the period ahead. Give everyone time to read it properly.
Set the scene. “It is twelve months from now. This plan has not worked. Something went wrong. Write down what happened.”
Write independently first. Each person writes their response individually before anyone speaks. (This avoids group-think).
Share and discuss. Go round the room noting themes and paying particular attention to concerns raised by less experienced team members (they may see things senior partners overlook).
Revise the plan. Use what you heard to stress-test your assumptions. Adjust targets, activity mix, or resourcing where the risks are real.
That’s it. Simple in structure and surprisingly effective in practice.
What it surfaces that planning may not
Run this exercise well and you could hear things like:
“We relied too heavily on one or two relationships.”
“We planned a lot of activities but did not follow through properly.”
“We assumed the market would stay the same as last year.”
“The junior team had no real role in BD, so nothing was built over time.”
“We didn’t have the wherewithal to thoughtfully respond to bids.”
“Promised introductions from others didn’t happen.”
These are not unusual insights but they rarely surface in a conventional planning session, where the mood is forward-looking and the pressure is to commit and contribute.
A tool for Partners, not just planners
If you lead a team, the pre-mortem has a second use beyond checking your own thinking. It is one of the better ways to bring younger professionals into BD in a way that is genuine rather than tokenistic.
Most firms tell junior team members that BD matters but struggle to find meaningful roles to contribute. A pre-mortem can adjust that because when you ask an associate or manager to imagine the plan has failed badly, and explain why, you are treating their perspective as valuable, because it is.
Junior team members can have a clearer view of where BD activity is falling short. After all, they know the clients you work with, they attend the events, and they see the follow-up that didn’t happen. Your pre-mortem gives their knowledge somewhere to go.
It also builds BD capability. Stress-testing a plan requires the same thinking skills as building one. Do this a couple of times and your team starts to develop a more critical, more strategic eye for business development as a discipline.
A fresh start doesn’t need a blank page
If your BD feels like it has lost its energy, you don’t need to scrap everything and start over. Kahneman’s point was that unexamined planning is flawed. The fix is not more effort but rather fresh thinking, applied earlier.
Related Techniques Worth Knowing
If the pre-mortem appeals to you, six other research-backed techniques are worth keeping in your kit. Each does something a pre-mortem can’t.
1. Six Thinking Hats (Edward de Bono, 1985). A method that asks the group to think in one mode at a time (facts, optimism, caution, emotion, creativity, process). Useful when one voice tends to set the mood and you want the cautious or creative thinking to get its full turn.
2. Devil’s Advocacy and Dialectical Inquiry (Schweiger, Sandberg and Ragan, 1986). Assign one person to argue against the prevailing plan, or present two competing plans and debate them. Useful when consensus has formed too quickly.
3. Double-loop Learning (Chris Argyris, 1991). Step out of the plan itself and ask whether the assumptions it sits inside are still true. Useful in the year you notice your BD plan looks almost identical to last year’s.
4. Knowing When To Quit (Annie Duke, 2022). Apply this test to each BD activity: “If I weren’t already doing this, would I start it today?” Useful for the annual review of an activity list that has quietly grown too long.
None of these replaces the pre-mortem. Each one catches something a pre-mortem might miss.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a Business Development (BD) pre-mortem?
A BD pre-mortem is an exercise where you imagine your business development plan has already failed and work backwards to explain why. It draws on the pre-mortem technique from behavioural economics, associated with Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman. In a professional services context, it is used to surface blind spots in planning before they cost you a year of lost momentum.
How long does a BD pre-mortem take?
Most pre-mortems run in forty-five minutes to an hour. You need a draft BD plan, a small group (partners and senior associates or managers work well) and a facilitator able to keep the exercise on track
Who should run a BD pre-mortem?
Any Partner or senior leader responsible for business development planning can run one. It works well as a team exercise, particularly when younger professionals are included. Their perspective on where BD activity falls short can be sharper than that of more senior team members.
How often should lawyers and accountants review their BD strategy?
At minimum, twice a year and ideally before the new financial year begins. The pre-mortem is well suited to this timing. Running it before you commit to targets and activities gives you the best chance of catching faulty assumptions early.
What is optimism bias in business development?
Optimism bias is the tendency to overestimate how well a plan will go, and to underestimate the obstacles.
Want More?
If you’d like to discuss your Business Development plans email Sue-Ella or get in touch.
Articles by Sue-Ella
Six Ways to Tackle Your Business Plan
BD Tips For Getting Through Troubled Times
References and further reading
Klein, G. (2007) Performing a Project Premortem. Harvard Business Review, 85(9), 18–19. hbr.org/2007/09/performing-a-project-premortem
Kahneman D (2011) Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
de Bono, E. (1985) Six Thinking Hats. Little, Brown.
Schweiger, D. M., Sandberg, W. R., & Ragan, J. W. (1986) Group approaches for improving strategic decision making: A comparative analysis of dialectical inquiry, devil’s advocacy, and consensus. Academy of Management Journal, 29(1), 51–71.
Argyris, C. (1991) Teaching smart people how to learn. Harvard Business Review, 69(3), 99–109. hbr.org/1991/05/teaching-smart-people-how-to-learn
Duke, A. (2022) Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away. Penguin.
Sue-Ella Prodonovich
Sue-Ella is the Principal of Prodonovich Advisory, a business dedicated to helping professional services practices sharpen their business development practices.
She works with law and accounting firms on Business Development strategy and support structures, leadership and professional-development programs, and designing client-listening initiatives.
She also co-facilitates firm planning retreats and delivers public workshops such as Business Skills for Lawyers.
Through her BD45™ service, she assists individuals with their personal business-development plans.
Connect on LinkedIn or visit prodonovich.com.au
© Prodonovich Advisory. Please respect our copyright and the effort taken to produce the original material in this document. This document or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author.