Introduction: Learning from Failure – Before It Happens

Every business initiative carries risk. Projects can fail at a spectacular rate, often because warning signs were missed or concerns went unspoken during planning (Performing a Project Premortem). In hindsight, companies perform postmortems to dissect what went wrong—but what if you could conduct the autopsy before the failure? In medicine, an autopsy finds a cause of death after the fact. In business, a “premortem” flips this idea: it’s an autopsy at the beginning of a project, not at the end, so the project can be improved rather than examining its corpse later (What is a Premortem? – Smartpedia – t2informatik). By imagining a future failure in advance and asking *“What *did* go wrong?”* teams can expose hidden weaknesses while there’s still time to act. This proactive mindset – from premortem analysis to red team drills and chaos testing – is becoming essential for modern organizations that strive to anticipate problems, not just react to them.

Executives, IT managers, and process improvement professionals worldwide are adopting these approaches to bolster resilience. From tech giants like Netflix to telecom once-leaders like Nokia, from infrastructure firms to jewelry brands, we’ll explore how anticipating failure (or failing to do so) has real business consequences. We’ll also see how global best practices (ISO standards, Atlassian’s playbooks, etc.) encourage cultivating a forward-looking risk culture. The goal: turn potential disasters into opportunities to fortify your strategy, long before any “lessons learned” meeting is needed ( ISO 31000:2018 – Risk management — Guidelines).

The Premortem: Autopsy in Advance to Prevent Disaster

In project management, a premortem is essentially a “pre-emptive” retrospective. It asks team members to envision that a project has failed utterly and then work backwards to determine what potentially went wrong (What is a Premortem? – Smartpedia – t2informatik). Psychologist Gary Klein, who introduced the premortem method, found that this exercise can significantly improve our ability to identify real project risks. In fact, a study he cited showed imagining a future event as if it already happened increased the accuracy of identifying reasons for future outcomes by 30% (What is a Premortem? – Smartpedia – t2informatik). In other words, pretending your project has hit the wall sharpens team foresight.

Why is this so effective? Under normal conditions, team members may be reluctant to voice doubts during planning – nobody wants to sound pessimistic or disloyal. The premortem provides a safe “what-if” space where raising concerns is expected. As Klein noted, by ‘considering the project a failure’ upfront, participants are more comfortable airing their worries, since the exercise removes the stigma of being the naysayer (What is a Premortem? – Smartpedia – t2informatik). Instead of “I think this might fail because…”, which can be awkward, the conversation shifts to “It’s failed – why did it?”. This psychological trick encourages brutal honesty and surfaces issues that typical risk brainstorming might miss. It also helps overcome groupthink and optimistic bias by forcing the team to confront uncomfortable possibilities (What is a Premortem? – Smartpedia – t2informatik).

Crucially, a premortem isn’t about dampening morale or predicting doom – it’s about illuminating blind spots early. Teams often report feeling more, not less, confident and motivated after a premortem, because they have a clearer roadmap of pitfalls to avoid (What is a Premortem? – Smartpedia – t2informatik). Identifying a potential failure mode now means you can enact countermeasures and “resuscitate” the project before it ever flatlines (What is a Premortem? – Smartpedia – t2informatik). As Harvard Business Review succinctly put it, a premortem at project kickoff lets you improve the plan “rather than autopsy it” after a failure (Performing a Project Premortem – Harvard Business Review).

Modern businesses are increasingly embracing premortems. Atlassian, for example, includes premortem exercises in its Team Playbook for project planning, noting that this practice helps teams visualize how a project could fail (or even exceed expectations) and then take steps to address those factors upfront (3 reasons your project needs a premortem – Work Life by Atlassian) (3 reasons your project needs a premortem – Work Life by Atlassian). By front-loading the hard questions, organizations create plans with built-in contingencies and clearer eyes. As international risk standards like ISO 31000 emphasize, a proactive approach to risk turns potential challenges into strategic advantages ( ISO 31000:2018 – Risk management — Guidelines). In sum, premortems allow you to “fail” on paper in a consequence-free environment – and use those insights to increase your odds of real-world success.

Red Teaming: Stress-Testing Plans Like an Adversary

Where premortems involve imaginative introspection, Red Teaming brings an external critical eye to test your strategy or system. The term comes from military and cybersecurity contexts: a “red team” plays the role of a realistic adversary or devil’s advocate to challenge the main (“blue”) team’s plans. In practice, red teaming can range from simulated cyberattacks on your IT infrastructure to contrarian reviews of a business strategy. The core idea is an independent, structured assault on your assumptions – before a real opponent or market reality does it for you.

Official definitions describe red teaming as “the independent application of a range of structured, creative and critical thinking techniques to help decision-makers make better-informed decisions or produce more robust plans” (Red Teaming Handbook, 3rd Edition ). In plainer terms, you deliberately seek out the flaws in your own plan by thinking like a skeptic or competitor. This process can reveal overconfidence, faulty assumptions, security holes, or blind spots that the insiders may overlook. Importantly, Red Teaming isn’t only about cybersecurity or war games – the mindset is equally applicable to business strategies and project plans. It’s about fostering a culture where ideas are rigorously challenged for the sake of strengthening them, not to tear down morale.

Many forward-thinking companies have formalized this “challenge culture.” For instance, tech firms often run “game day” simulations or chaos experiments to test system resilience (more on Netflix’s famous example shortly). Some organizations designate internal devil’s advocates to critique major product launches or investments. Even the US military, in its Red Teaming Handbook, now talks about instilling a “red team mindset” across all levels – encouraging individuals and teams to routinely question and test their thinking, not just rely on a separate Red Team unit (Red Teaming Handbook, 3rd Edition ) (Red Teaming Handbook, 3rd Edition ). The goal is to catch critical errors in design, security, or strategy while they are still fixable.

In the realm of cybersecurity, red team exercises have become a staple for enterprise risk management. IBM defines red teaming as a process of testing defenses by having ethical hackers simulate a real attack (Red Teaming Handbook – GOV.UK). The findings let the “blue team” (defenders) patch weaknesses before malicious actors exploit them. Outside of security, one can red-team a marketing plan or a supply chain strategy by asking, “If I were a savvy competitor or a highly skeptical customer, how would I find faults in this plan?” This technique, like premortems, is another way to anticipate failure and fortify plans proactively.

Netflix: Anticipating Chaos – and When You Don’t

Netflix provides two instructive tales: one of not anticipating backlash, and another of deliberately courting chaos to build resilience. First, the backlash. In 2011, Netflix made a bold strategic shift, separating its DVD-by-mail service from streaming and imposing a 60% price hike for customers who wanted both. The DVD service was even rebranded as “Qwikster.” The move was meant to pave the way for streaming’s future, but management severely misjudged customer reaction (Netflix Loses 800,000 Subscribers After Price Hike, Qwikster Debacle | TIME.com) (Netflix Loses 800,000 Subscribers After Price Hike, Qwikster Debacle | TIME.com). The uproar was immediate. Within a quarter, Netflix lost 800,000 subscribers and its stock price plummeted by 77% in four months (Netflix’s lost year: The inside story of the price-hike train wreck – CNET). Hastings, Netflix’s CEO, admitted they had moved too fast without adequately explaining the value – in his words, “many of our long-term members felt shocked by the pricing changes… more of them canceled Netflix than we expected” (Netflix Loses 800,000 Subscribers After Price Hike, Qwikster Debacle | TIME.com). The Qwikster plan was mercifully killed weeks after launch, but not before Saturday Night Live and countless media outlets skewered the company (Netflix Loses 800,000 Subscribers After Price Hike, Qwikster Debacle | TIME.com).

What went wrong? In hindsight, Netflix failed to do a premortem on this decision. Had they run a scenario of “It’s a few months after our announcement and we’re facing a customer revolt – why?” they might have foreseen key issues: the abrupt price increase during a recession, the confusion of splitting services, the undervalued attachment customers had to the old integrated model. No one inside effectively played the angry customer in advance, or if they did, their voice didn’t carry. The result was a very public lesson in stakeholder management. To Netflix’s credit, they did learn quickly – the company backtracked on Qwikster, apologized, and refocused on gradually adding value to justify price changes (Netflix Loses 800,000 Subscribers After Price Hike, Qwikster Debacle | TIME.com) (Netflix Loses 800,000 Subscribers After Price Hike, Qwikster Debacle | TIME.com). The episode underscores how even a market leader can stumble badly by not stress-testing a big change through skeptical eyes. A simple premortem exercise (“imagine our customers are furious – what sparked it?”) might have saved Netflix a lost year of rebuilding trust.

On the other hand, Netflix is also famous for its proactive approach to technical failures. The Netflix engineering team literally unleashes chaos on its systems to ensure they can survive it. In the early 2010s, Netflix moved to the cloud and recognized that despite building in redundancies, they needed to constantly test those fail-safes against real failure scenarios (The Netflix Simian Army. Keeping our cloud safe, secure, and… | by Netflix Technology Blog | Netflix TechBlog) (The Netflix Simian Army. Keeping our cloud safe, secure, and… | by Netflix Technology Blog | Netflix TechBlog). They created the now-legendary “Chaos Monkey” – a tool that randomly turns off servers and services in their production environment (The Netflix Simian Army. Keeping our cloud safe, secure, and… | by Netflix Technology Blog | Netflix TechBlog). The whimsical name belies a serious purpose: by randomly disabling components in the middle of a business day, Netflix forces its infrastructure to handle failures seamlessly, with no customer impact (The Netflix Simian Army. Keeping our cloud safe, secure, and… | by Netflix Technology Blog | Netflix TechBlog). It’s like training your immune system. Engineers monitor these controlled outages and fix weaknesses that the Chaos Monkey exposes. As Netflix engineers put it, if a server dies at 3 AM on Sunday, no one should even notice, because they’ve rehearsed that disaster so many times (The Netflix Simian Army. Keeping our cloud safe, secure, and… | by Netflix Technology Blog | Netflix TechBlog).

The Chaos Monkey spawned an entire “Simian Army” of failure-inducing and anomaly-detecting scripts Netflix uses (Latency Monkey, Conformity Monkey, etc.) (The Netflix Simian Army. Keeping our cloud safe, secure, and… | by Netflix Technology Blog | Netflix TechBlog). This is Red Teaming at an infrastructure level – Netflix essentially red-teams its own network by simulating the role of entropy and outages on a regular basis. The payoff is legendary uptime and confidence in their resilience. When Amazon’s cloud had a major outage, Netflix famously stayed afloat thanks to these practices. The takeaway for executives: **don’t trust a design on paper – actively *attack* your own systems and plans to ensure they hold up under pressure**. Netflix’s proactive chaos testing, complemented by a culture of blameless postmortems for real incidents, exemplifies learning from failure *before* it happens and after it happens, in a virtuous cycle.

GoDaddy: 5 Million Websites Go Dark (A Cautionary Tale)

When your business underpins others’ businesses, a single failure can cascade into a catastrophe. GoDaddy, the popular web domain registrar and hosting company, learned this in September 2012. On that day, millions of websites and email accounts suddenly went offline, all tied to GoDaddy’s services. Initially, rumors swirled about an Anonymous hacker attack (a rogue actor even claimed responsibility on Twitter). But as the company’s investigation concluded, the truth was more humbling: the outage was caused not by hackers, but by GoDaddy’s own internal network errors (GoDaddy Says Outage Was Not Caused By Hack : The Two-Way : NPR). In their post-incident statement, GoDaddy admitted a series of internal events “corrupted router data tables.” Essentially, a technical glitch in their infrastructure knocked out their Domain Name System – the address book of the internet – for over 6 hours (Go Daddy claims internal problems, not an attack, took it down | ZDNET).

The impact was massive. GoDaddy hosts 5 million websites and manages over 50 million domain names (GoDaddy Says Outage Was Not Caused By Hack : The Two-Way : NPR). For a workday, a huge chunk of the internet was unreachable. Small businesses lost sales; customers couldn’t access services. GoDaddy’s interim CEO apologized, saying “we have let our customers down, and we know it” (Go Daddy claims internal problems, not an attack, took it down | ZDNET). More importantly, he promised measures to prevent such a failure from occurring again (Go Daddy claims internal problems, not an attack, took it down | ZDNET) – likely by adding more network redundancies, failsafe mechanisms and better testing. It was a classic case of a single point of failure (a central router issue) that had not been fully anticipated. In retrospect, one can imagine a premortem scenario at GoDaddy: “It’s a disaster – our entire network is down. What could cause that?” Perhaps they would have identified the risk of insufficient redundancy in DNS routers or procedures that might take too long to restore service. Likewise, a technical red team simulation might have uncovered that an internal configuration error could propagate widely. Unfortunately, that insight came the hard way, via a very public outage.

The GoDaddy incident reinforces that operational resilience needs continuous scrutiny. Just boasting a 99.999% uptime historically (as GoDaddy did) isn’t enough (Go Daddy claims internal problems, not an attack, took it down | ZDNET) – you have to constantly ask “Where are we weak?” and test “What if it all went wrong?”. After 2012, it’s safe to say GoDaddy and many in the hosting industry doubled down on chaos engineering and contingency planning, so that one software bug or human error cannot knock out an internet giant so easily. For IT managers, this case is a stark reminder: do not wait for a real outage affecting millions to discover your vulnerabilities – find them first, in drills, labs, and tabletop exercises.

Nokia: Missing the Market Shift – A Premortem on Innovating

Not all failures are as sudden as an outage; some unfold over years due to strategic missteps. Nokia’s fall from the pinnacle of the mobile phone industry is a textbook lesson in the cost of missed foresight. In the mid-2000s, Nokia was riding high – at its peak it commanded over 40% of the global mobile phone market (The Strategic Decisions That Caused Nokia’s Failure | INSEAD Knowledge). It seemed unassailable. Yet, as smartphones emerged, that dominance evaporated with breathtaking speed. Consider this statistic: Nokia’s share of the smartphone market plummeted from 33% in 2010 to just 14% in 2011 ( Analysis of Nokia’s Decline from Marketing Perspective ). By the second quarter of 2013, some estimates put Nokia’s smartphone share at a mere 3%. In the span of about five years, Nokia went from selling nearly half of the world’s smartphones to irrelevance (Global smartphone market share held by Nokia went from 50%+ to 2% from… | Gabor Gurbacs).

(Global smartphone market share held by Nokia went from 50%+ to 2% from… | Gabor Gurbacs) Nokia’s smartphone market share nosedived from ~50% in 2007 to single digits by 2012, illustrating the rapid decline of a market leader.

What happened? In short, Nokia failed to anticipate and react to critical market changes – a classic case where a premortem exercise at the right time might have changed history. In 2007, Apple’s iPhone debuted, and soon after, Google’s Android platform rose, redefining what consumers expected from “smart” phones. Nokia, however, stuck for too long with its Symbian OS and a hardware-centric mindset. One of Nokia’s own internal memos in 2011 famously likened their situation to standing on a “burning platform,” emphasizing the dire need to change course. But by then, execution lagged. A partnership with Microsoft to use Windows Phone was announced as a saving move, but it was arguably too late – Apple and Android had already locked in an ecosystem advantage. Nokia’s leaders, under immense pressure to hit short-term targets, neglected to invest aggressively in the touch-screen, app-driven smartphone revolution (The Strategic Decisions That Caused Nokia’s Failure | INSEAD Knowledge) ( Analysis of Nokia’s Decline from Marketing Perspective ). The company was iterating on what worked yesterday, instead of envisioning tomorrow’s customer needs.

In retrospect, one can imagine a strategic premortem for Nokia circa 2007: “It’s 2013, and Nokia’s phone business has collapsed – how did we lose?” The answers would likely have included: “We underestimated the shift to software and ecosystems,” “We assumed our dominance would carry over to smartphones,” “We failed to cultivate or acquire a competitive operating system,” and “We were too slow to respond to competitors’ innovations.” All of those things did happen. In 2013, Nokia’s phone division was sold off to Microsoft in a fire-sale, marking the end of an era (The Strategic Decisions That Caused Nokia’s Failure | INSEAD Knowledge) ( Analysis of Nokia’s Decline from Marketing Perspective ). The salutary lesson for executives is that even seemingly invincible companies need to constantly play devil’s advocate with their strategy. What disruptive technologies or consumer shifts could render our business model obsolete? Nokia’s blind spots were not technological incompetence or lack of resources – they were cultural and strategic: a reluctance to challenge success, to envision scenarios where the current path led to failure. The company has since reinvented itself in other arenas (telecom equipment), but the missed opportunity in mobile is studied in business schools as a “failure to adapt.” A stronger internal challenge function or scenario planning team might have prompted Nokia to reinvent its software approach a few years earlier, perhaps maintaining its leadership. For today’s companies, Nokia’s fall is a reminder to continually ask “What if the world changes drastically?” – because it often does.

SOKOLOV: Navigating Reputation Risk in a Polarized Environment

Not all project or business risks are technological; some are reputational and societal. SOKOLOV, a leading jewelry brand in Eastern Europe, faced a scenario where external events turned a successful marketing strategy into a potential liability practically overnight. In early 2022, as geopolitical tensions and social divides in Russia reached a peak, SOKOLOV found itself in the crosscurrents of public opinion. The company had built a high-profile campaign around Renata Litvinova – a beloved actress and style icon – as the face of its SOKOLOV Diamonds collection. Renata’s image lent sophistication and artistic flair to the brand. However, when the Russia-Ukraine conflict escalated in 2022, society became deeply polarized, and public figures were pressed to take sides. Litvinova took a stance against the invasion and ultimately left the country, which made her a controversial figure at home. Suddenly, SOKOLOV’s brand ambassador – through no fault of her own in a business sense – carried heavy political baggage.

For SOKOLOV, this was a classic reputational risk that likely wasn’t on the radar when they signed Litvinova. The company had to act swiftly to prevent a backlash from domestic consumers who might perceive the actress as “unpatriotic,” while also considering the views of more liberal customers who admired her. In effect, the brand needed an immediate pivot to avoid being boycotted or caught in political crossfire. SOKOLOV responded by quietly reshaping its marketing. They introduced a new ambassador – the singer Lolita Milyavskaya, who had a more neutral public stance – and shifted the focus of campaigns to product quality and timeless style rather than any one personality. The company’s communications emphasized unity and beauty beyond politics, trying to steer the conversation back to jewelry and away from current events. Essentially, SOKOLOV performed a midstream “premortem” of sorts: “Our brand reputation is at risk – how do we save it?” By scenario-planning in real time, they mitigated the damage. The potentially negative narrative (“jeweler partners with ‘traitor’ actress”) was supplanted by a fresh message and messenger before it could take root.

The SOKOLOV case may be local, but the lesson is universal. Companies must anticipate how sudden external shifts – political, social, or cultural – can impact their brand and partnerships. Endorsers, slogans, or campaigns that seemed unifying can become divisive overnight in a polarized climate. Smart firms do pre-crisis planning for reputation: “What if our spokesperson’s image shifts? What if a social movement turns sentiment against our ad campaign?” By asking these questions, you can prepare a playbook (alternative spokespeople, adjusted messaging, crisis communication strategies) in advance. In SOKOLOV’s scenario, having a contingency plan for controversy in place would have been ideal. Nonetheless, their quick pivot was a salvage operation that many brands in 2022 had to execute as well. For an executive audience, this underscores the need for vigilant environmental scanning and agile marketing risk management. The world can change overnight – be ready to change your message just as fast.

Building a Failure-Resilient Organization: Key Takeaways

Across these diverse cases – from Netflix’s product stumble and chaos testing, to GoDaddy’s outage, Nokia’s strategic miss, and SOKOLOV’s reputational tightrope – a common theme emerges: the importance of proactively identifying and addressing failure points before they hit you hard. Organizations that embrace this mindset tend to bounce back faster or avoid crises altogether; those that don’t often pay a steep price.

What concrete steps can leaders take to foster this failure-resilient culture?

• Institutionalize Premortem Analysis: Make “premortems” a standard part of project kickoffs, strategic planning sessions, and even quarterly reviews. Encourage teams to ask, “If this initiative fails, why might that be?” and generate risk lists and mitigation plans. As studies show, this can improve decision quality markedly (What is a Premortem? – Smartpedia – t2informatik). More importantly, it creates psychological safety for team members to voice concerns. When Atlassian used premortems with a distributed team, it not only revealed risks but also built trust through open conversation (3 reasons your project needs a premortem – Work Life by Atlassian) (3 reasons your project needs a premortem – Work Life by Atlassian).
• Empower Red Team Mindset: Cultivate an environment where asking tough “what if” questions and challenging prevailing assumptions is welcome – not seen as negativity. Whether through formal red team drills or simply encouraging devil’s advocates in meetings, make dissenting analysis a routine. Utilize frameworks from security (red teaming exercises) and strategy (pre-mortem, scenario planning) to systematically probe your plans. As the UK Ministry of Defence handbook suggests, even without a dedicated red team, staff can adopt red team techniques in everyday problem-solving (Red Teaming Handbook, 3rd Edition ). For major decisions, consider inviting an uninvolved team to critically review the plan.
• Simulate and Stress-Test: Don’t wait for an actual crisis to see how your systems and people respond. Follow Netflix’s lead in IT: regularly simulate failures – be it taking down servers, running disaster recovery drills, or role-playing PR crises. Firefighters drill so that real fires are second nature; businesses should do the same. Conduct “game day” exercises for your network (what if our primary data center goes down?), your supply chain (what if key supplier X fails?), and your comms team (how do we handle a sudden social media uproar?). Each rehearsal will uncover gaps to fix. Remember, if you only achieve 99.999% uptime by luck, one day luck will run out – better to achieve it by design (Go Daddy claims internal problems, not an attack, took it down | ZDNET).
• Learn and Adapt Quickly: Even with premortems and red teams, failures will sometimes happen. The difference in a resilient organization is the response. Netflix’s rapid course-correction after Qwikster, or GoDaddy’s frank post-incident improvements, show the value of a blameless postmortem culture. Analyze root causes, implement fixes, and share lessons. This turns every failure into fuel for future prevention, creating a continuous improvement loop.
• Align with Standards and Best Practices: Leverage external frameworks like ISO 31000 for risk management, which advocates embedding risk assessment in all business processes and encourages anticipation over reaction ( ISO 31000:2018 – Risk management — Guidelines). Industry best practices (ITIL for IT incidents, PMI guidelines for project risk, etc.) provide proven techniques to identify and mitigate risks early. Benchmarking against these can reveal areas your organization might be overlooking.

In conclusion, adopting a proactive stance on potential failure is not about being fatalistic – it’s about confidence through preparation. When you’ve wargamed the worst-case scenario, you won’t freeze if it comes true; more likely, you’ll avoid it altogether or handle it with aplomb. As the saying goes, “Plan for the worst, hope for the best.” By doing so, you transform worries into action items and unknowns into knowable challenges. In a business world defined by rapid change and uncertainty, that mindset can be the difference between ending up as a case study in collapse and being a story of adaptive, long-term success. As all these examples show, the time to ask hard questions about your plan is now – not after the plan has failed. Prepare, adapt, and you’ll find that even if failure is always a possibility, surprise failure doesn’t have to be. Your organization will be ready for whatever comes next, with fewer unpleasant surprises and more controlled outcomes.