Use feedforward to align team members on goals before projects begin

At the start of a project, invite feedforward on how to succeed — before any performance to critique.

Why it works

Feedforward at project launch is structurally pure: there is no past performance to evaluate, so suggestions genuinely aim at success rather than carrying retrospective critique. This also surfaces the team’s mental models of what success requires before work begins — a form of pre-mortem that generates alignment and identifies blind spots while there is still time to address them.

How to do it

1. After defining a new project goal, gather the team and ask: "What suggestions do you have for how we could best succeed at this?"
2. Collect all ideas without evaluation — this is not a critique session.
3. Look for ideas that recur across multiple team members — these are shared assumptions about what the work requires.
4. Incorporate the best suggestions into the project plan explicitly, so contributors see their input reflected.

Evidence

Pre-mortem research (Klein) shows that asking teams to imagine failure before a project begins surfaces more risks and blind spots than post-hoc review. Feedforward at launch applies a similar prospective logic to success rather than failure. The pre-mortem itself rests on Mitchell, Russo, and Pennington’s finding that "prospective hindsight" — assuming an outcome has already occurred and explaining why — increased the number of reasons people generated for that outcome, the mechanism that makes launch-time feedforward surface more shared assumptions. (mechanistic)

Pre-mortem evidence supports prospective review; feedforward at launch is a related but distinct practice not independently tested.

Sources

• Klein (2007), performing a project premortem, Harvard Business Review
• Klein, G. (2007). Performing a project premortem. Harvard Business Review, 85(9), 18–19.
• Mitchell, D. J., Russo, J. E., & Pennington, N. (1989). Back to the future: Temporal perspective in the explanation of events. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 2(1), 25–38.

Common mistake

Holding the launch feedforward session but not visibly incorporating the input — which teaches the team that feedforward is participation theater, not a real input channel.