Postmortem & Premortems

Looking backward and forward

Author

Tim Kilroy
20 Dec • Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes

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In This Week's Edition

Let’s Look Back (and ahead)

This is the time of year for retrospectives and future predictions. Jump into LinkedIn and you’ll see no end of them. My favorite so far is one from Vic Drabicky - the founder of January Digital. He’s got Taylor Swift & Travis Kelce saving the world via the collective joy around their engagement.

For you, however, I want you to think about your retrospectives and previews as something different.

Regardless of your successes this year, stuff went wrong & didn’t turn out the way you expected it to. It could have been a client leaving, or an under appreciated staff member, or giant waste of money on something you thought was going to be a big winner.

It’s never fun to think about screwups, but this postmortem process makes it easier. I want you to remember 5 things that went awry.

Got ‘em? Good.

Write them down.

Still with me?

OK - try to remember what the circumstances were when you made whatever decision(s) that didn’t go well. And if you can, try to remember how you were FEELING when you made that decision.

What’s super cool about this is that hindsight is 20/20. You know what happened, so there is no more uncertainty. If you can remember the feelings you were experiencing, you probably can identify some clear heightened emotion - excitement, fear, confusion, frustration, overwhelm - whatever.

This is important, because it isn’t likely that you made a decision that was logically wrong. It is more likely that your emotional state wasn’t allowing you to consider all of the available information. My enthusiasm and optimism gets me all the time…so now, I’ve learned to do a double check when I am really excited about something because the excitement narrows my field of vision, and I can’t see everything that I need to see.

What’s your emotion that messes up your thinking?

So, when you are looking ahead to 2025, I am sure that there are somethings that are really exciting to you, or scary to you, or whatever. (And if there aren’t exciting and scary things ahead, you probably aren’t do this whole living thing the best way, IMHO.)

Write them down.

Cool - now this is easy. Write beneath these big, scary, exciting goals, “Chill the f' out. Your brain works better when you aren’t in a high-emotion state”. So, as you start crafting the plans and checkpoints for your success next year, keep reminding yourself that emotional regulation makes EVERYTHING work better.

News From Adland

Legislation is Coming To Advertising Near You: There is a huge push, globally, to better regulate digital advertising. Part of it is privacy focused, but the majority of it is a reaction the increased use of AI and it’s potential use for fraud in advertising. It’s a big deal. Wired walks you through some of the issues.

Short Form SORA? Sora, Open AI’s video creation tool, was given wide release earlier this week. MediaPost has the straight skinny. It only makes 5 second clips, but word on the street is that with enough prompting magic, you can make short clips that make sense together - you know, enough to make a TV commercial? I tried and I clearly do not have the prompting skillz, but as these models accelerate and get better, lots of people are going to have to evolve their skill sets.

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