Example data. Fieldnote is a fictional company used to fill all 61 boards, so the examples tell one consistent story.
Post-PMF Fieldnote, the week before starting the offline mode project: Karim, Tom, Ana, Julien and Élise imagine it is six months later and offline mode failed.
What the team took away
Nobody had said out loud that the toggle would live in settings. Five mitigations, five owners, the scope stays at intervention logging only.
How to run it
Preparation
The whole project team plus the sponsor. The sponsor must stay for the full hour, not just the opening.
Send the project plan, or the one-page brief, 2 days before. Everyone must know what is supposed to happen.
Prepare three columns on the board: Causes of failure, Grouping, Mitigations. Sticky notes ready, one color for everyone.
Agenda
5 min
Set the scene Say it exactly like this: 'It is six months from now. The project failed badly. Not delayed, failed.' Do not soften it.
10 min
Write the causes Everyone writes, in silence, one cause per sticky. Push for volume: at least 5 per person. Nobody speaks.
15 min
Read around the room Go around, one sticky per person per turn, until all are on the board. No comment, no defense, no 'that would never happen'.
15 min
Group and vote Cluster similar causes. Each person gets 3 dots for the causes they find most likely. Take the top 5.
15 min
Mitigate For each of the top 5: what do we change in the plan this week? One action, one owner, one date. Write it in the Mitigations column.
Pitfalls
Do not run it without the sponsor. The most useful causes are the ones only the sponsor can fix, and they need to hear them said.
Stop anyone who argues against a cause during the read-around. The exercise works because nobody is allowed to defend the plan yet.
Do not leave with 12 mitigations. Five with owners beat twelve without.
Afterwards
The top 5 risks and their mitigations go into the kick-off canvas or the project risk log. Review them at the first milestone: which ones happened anyway?