How a ‘Premortem’ or ‘Failure CV’ Could Help Your Career

During your job search and application process, you probably think you should focus on your strengths and what you can offer an institution, all while touting what you’ve accomplished in your career. You’re not wrong. But it helps to also think about all the times in your career when you were wrong or could be wrong. After all, a strength is acknowledging your weaknesses, or knowing what you don’t know, and often your greatest successes are responses to failures.

Weaknesses are anything that gets in the way of your success, so identifying them will help you navigate a successful route in your career. Failure is not the opposite of success because failures often point you in the right direction toward success. Idleness is more likely the other side of the success coin.

So how do you, as a job seeker, identify your weaknesses and failures beyond practicing responses to interview questions such as “What are your weaknesses?” or “Can you tell me about a time when you failed?”

Try conducting a “premortem analysis” and writing a “failure CV.”

Premortem Analysis
According to cognitive psychologist Gary Klein, writing for the Harvard Business Review, a premortem is the hypothetical opposite of a postmortem, which is a term that comes from the medical field to describe what caused a patient’s death. Postmortems are used in business as an assessment of why a plan failed. With premortems, you predict what could go wrong so that you can prevent it in advance. A premortem helps correct for an optimism bias, which many job seekers have, causing them to think ahead.

For example, before an interview, you could plan for what a search committee might be skeptical of about your candidacy. This will help you anticipate questions. If you lack published research, you can plan to accentuate other scholarly work. Elsewhere, you can conduct a premortem in your current job by assuming enrollment shortfalls or a manager resigning. Then you can start developing skills or a plan so that your institution can rely on you. Another premortem is assuming you will be fired tomorrow and asking yourself, “What will my replacement do differently?”

Failure CV
When Johannes Haushofer was a professor of psychology and public affairs at Princeton University, he wrote a CV of his failures to show support for a friend who had a professional setback. The failure CV, which he later published online for everyone to see, included rejections from degree programs, research funding, and journal submissions. The original idea is credited to Melanie Stefan of the University of Edinburgh, who said it was a way for others to deal with their shortcomings, but it can help the person writing their own failure CV.

The failure CV can help you come up with success stories about your career to share in an interview if, for example, you were in a crummy situation and still met expectations. Explaining how you got to a “good” or sufficient outcome in spite of poor circumstances could be more impressive to a search committee than achieving “great” results. Also, if you need a jolt of confidence after experiencing a period of languishing at work, writing your failure CV can help you see progress in spite of challenges, imbue meaning or belief in fate, or recognize your ability to be resilient and rebound from setbacks.

What About Your Actual CV?
Failure is a useful part of the narrative arc when telling stories during an interview, but what about actually listing failures as a section on your CV? After all, an essential part of what it means to be a scientist or an academic in general is to prove yourself wrong and to find what doesn’t work in order to discover what does. The failure CV’s internal benefits of self-awareness and overcoming the fear of failure might not be valued externally. If an institution explicitly desires traits like trustworthiness and courage from candidates, you might want to give it a try. But a bold display of humility is a risky tactic and might not be taken seriously by a search committee.

What About Playing to Your Strengths?
The use of premortems and failure CVs seems to fly in the face of the strengths-based psychology popularized by Don Clifton, former chairman of Gallup, who developed the popular CliftonStrengths talent assessment. To summarize Clifton’s research, the greatest gains in human development are based on an investment in what people do best naturally — their strengths — by building on their talents rather than making comparable efforts to improve their areas of weakness. But according to the Gallup website, the “strengths-based approach to development is to define, understand, and address weaknesses in the context of strengths.” Keep this in mind as you conduct a premortem or write your failure CV. The point of these exercises is to grow, not wallow in pessimism or lament your shortcomings.

In Conclusion
The “fail early, fail often” or “fail fast, fail often” mantras have been embraced by company executives and Silicon Valley startups for years. There’s less stigma around failure which has come as a backlash to the constant public successes shared on social media and the pressure to keep a polished personal brand. Remember, though, that failure is not a desired outcome. Don’t fail for failure’s sake. The famous “fail early, fail often” quote by John C. Maxwell ends with “fail forward.” Think of your failure as an experiment. Premortems and failure CVs are simply lab exercises.