Historical Society of Washington: About to go into Death Spiral?

Hiring Sandy Bellamy to be the director: little experience working in resource constrained environments; with local history; or with programming; and having to maneuver amongst the Federal City Council, which likely covets the building, as do other more connected actors--well, it's definitely a job for someone with a wide(r) variety of skills.

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Something I keep meaning to blog about:

From "Analyzing Failure Beforehand," in the New York Times:

Post-mortems, trying to figure out why a new idea failed, are a common business process. But wouldn’t “pre-mortems” make more sense?

They would, argues Gary Klein, chief scientist at Klein Associates, a division of Applied Research Associates, which works with companies to show them how to conduct pre-mortems and “identify risks at the outset.”

“A pre-mortem in a business setting comes at the beginning of a project rather than the end, so the project can be improved rather than autopsied,” Mr. Klein explains in The Harvard Business Review.

In the pre-mortem, company officials assume they have just learned that a product or a service they are about to introduce has “failed spectacularly.” They then write down every plausible reason they can think of to explain the failure. The list is then used to eliminate potential flaws before the new idea is actually introduced into the marketplace.

While companies frequently engage in risk analysis beforehand, employees are often afraid to speak up, fearing they will be seen as naysayers or will suffer the political consequences of objecting to an idea that is popular internally.

An exercise that assumes the new idea fails frees people to be more candid, and can, Mr. Klein writes, serve as a check on the “damn-the-torpedoes attitude often assumed by people who are overinvested in a project.”
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