You're about to run a client onboarding meeting. You've done it a hundred times. You could do it in your sleep. That's exactly the problem.
The things you do all the time are the things your brain has stopped examining. It runs the autopilot script to save calories, and while it's coasting, all the little details that have shifted since the last time go unnoticed — the client's situation changed, your team changed, the market moved, you changed. By the time you notice, you're mid-meeting and improvising.
The fix takes about 60 seconds. I call it the micro pre-mortem, and I run it probably five times a day.
The 4 Questions
Before you do something you've done many times before, stop for one minute and run this checklist:
Have we changed anything since the last time I did this? New tool, new template, new team member, a step someone "improved" without telling you.
Have I changed the way I think about this since last time? Your own assumptions drift. What you believed about this process six months ago may not be what you believe now.
Is anything different about the circumstances? The people, the process, the companies involved, the market environment. Has anything moved that I haven't accounted for?
Is the other party where I expect them to be? This is the one I focus on hardest. The person on the other side of this — the client, the prospect, the teammate — are they in the same headspace I'm assuming they're in? Or has something changed for them that changes how I should show up?
That's it. Sixty seconds. You're running a surprisingly comprehensive checklist of "is there something I should be thinking about that I'm not?" — and you're doing it before you act, while you can still change course.
Why the "Other Party" Question Matters Most
Most of my attention goes to that last question, because it's the one most likely to be wrong and the one that changes my behavior the most.
If I assume the client is exactly where they were last week and they're not — they got bad news, their boss changed the priorities, they're quietly furious about something — then every move I make is calibrated to a reality that no longer exists. The whole meeting is off, and I won't know why.
So I ask: can I actually verify where they are? A quick message, a glance at recent activity, a question at the top of the call? Or do I have to assume something has changed and prepare for that? Either way, the answer changes how I act — and those small changes in how you act are exactly what make the process succeed.
The Stasis Trap
Here's what's really going on underneath. If you've been running a process the same way for a long time and you haven't been actively spending energy to keep it sharp, it hasn't stayed the same. It's decayed. It's become entropic and it's quietly falling apart — and because you weren't looking, you have no idea.
The micro pre-mortem is the small, repeated dose of energy that keeps the system from drifting. It's not a big initiative. It's 60 seconds of attention applied to something you'd otherwise run blind.
Tim's Take: Some days the micro pre-mortem is automatic and some days you get lazy and skip it. The skip is where the micro failures live. None of them are fatal on their own. But stack up enough of them across enough processes and you start to feel the bumps — the engine knocking, the agency that just doesn't run as smoothly as it used to. It's almost always a pile of small things that went out of tolerance, not one big disaster.
Start Doing This Today
Use the micro pre-mortem before any repeatable task: client onboarding, a campaign launch, a reporting cycle, a sales call, a team handoff. Anything you do often enough that you've stopped thinking about it is a candidate — which is to say, almost everything.
For the big, rare, high-stakes projects, 60 seconds isn't enough. That's when you need the full catastrophic brainstorm. But for the daily and weekly grind, this little habit catches more problems than any process document you'll ever write.
Test This Out
Pick the one process you run most often and feel most confident about. That's the one your brain has most thoroughly stopped examining. Run the four questions before the next time you do it. You'll be surprised what surfaces.
If you want a clear-eyed read on which of your regular processes are quietly decaying — and a system for keeping them sharp — that's the kind of thing we work on inside Agency Studio.