Kill Your Company
Why it sometimes helps to boycott your own project
Project management thrives on planning, control and goal orientation. But this is precisely where the danger lies: if you are too focused on successfully achieving the goal, you quickly overlook what can really cause a project to fail. You plan, optimize and control, but suppress risks and do not question your own assumptions until something unexpected happens. A conscious change of perspective can help in such moments, for example through the "Kill Your Company" method. The name sounds provocative, but the approach helps to specifically identify weak points in projects before they can have an impact in reality.
What’s behind Kill Your Company
"Kill Your Company" is a creative technique that works with a targeted change of perspective. The question is not how a project can be successfully implemented, but how it can be made to fail. The word "kill" in the name stands for boycotting a company or project until it fails. The method is therefore about playfully collecting destructive ideas that could jeopardize the successful implementation of a project. This can range from banal mistakes ("We communicate too late with stakeholders") to absurd scenarios ("Our entire project team drops out at the same time").
What sounds gloomy has a clear benefit: This relentlessly negative way of thinking brings to light weaknesses that would otherwise often remain hidden. The destructive ideas can then be transformed into concrete protective measures.
Why destructive thinking is productive in project management
Kill Your Company forces teams to take an honest look. And it's worth it:
- Radical change of perspective: instead of optimism about success and wishful thinking, the focus is on realistic analysis. This helps to uncover blind spots in project management. In this way, project ideas can be supplemented, strategies completed, processes reviewed and weak points or risks analyzed
- Creativity instead of routine: When everything is allowed, even the most absurd idea, unconventional thoughts arise that open up new solutions. What's more, it's the absurd ideas that provide fun and motivation in the team
- Responsibility and team strength: Once you have actively considered how you could boycott your own project, you automatically think more in terms of prevention and stability. This promotes personal responsibility and risk awareness.
- Easy to understand: The method is intuitively understandable, can be used immediately and delivers very fast results.
This is how a Kill Your Company workshop works
A Kill Your Company workshop is uncomplicated but effectively structured:
- Destructive phase: After explaining the topic and the method, the participants gather ideas in small groups of up to five people on how the project, programme or even the organization could be made to fail. All ideas are allowed and are not yet evaluated. The team members are therefore allowed to use their creativity to the full.
- Analysis: The ideas are then sorted, usually in a two-dimensional matrix. Choose axis designations that match the topic you are looking at. These could be, for example, impact and probability of occurrence. This creates a clear picture of which risks are particularly critical, as they have the greatest destructive potential.
- Positive turn: Now every destructive idea is translated into a constructive measure. The participants consider how the problem can be prevented, how its effects can be reduced, how its basis can be removed, or at least how its probability can be reduced. The group starts with the ideas that have the highest priority, i.e. those that have the greatest impact and probability. The results of this brainstorming session are noted down directly with the ideas.
- Integration: The measures developed are then incorporated into the risk management, the project plan or the lessons learned.
Example from practice
A project team is planning to introduce new project management software. The workshop question is: How could we make this project fail?
Possible answers are e.g:
- We are getting users on board too late.
- We do not train the team sufficiently.
- We underestimate the integration effort.
- We do not set clear responsibilities for the rollout.
In the subsequent reversal phase, concrete measures are developed from this: Early user feedback, structured training plans, technical feasibility analyses and a clear allocation of roles.
The result: a stable project plan that not only works on paper, but is also viable in practice.
Limits of the method
As effective as the approach is, Kill Your Company also has its pitfalls:
- Negative spiral: If there is no transition to the constructive phase, the mood can change, which can lead to team members becoming demotivated.
- Moderation requirements: The workshop needs a strong leader to guide the team through all phases.
- Time-consuming: An honest risk analysis takes time and requires the commitment of the team. This can seem daunting at first. Therefore, make yourself and your team aware that this time is well spent and that a long workshop is still more time-saving than if a project actually fails.
Conclusion
Kill Your Company sounds provocative, but is ultimately a tool for greater project maturity. Because those who dare to question their own processes, structures and assumptions gain valuable insights into the weak points and risks of their own projects and can thus prevent projects from failing.
In conjunction with project management software such as myPARM ProjectManagement, the "Kill Your Company" approach becomes particularly effective: the destructive scenarios and weak points identified in the workshop can be transferred directly into the tool, for example by recording risks in the system, assigning responsibilities and scheduling measures. myPARM supports classic, agile and hybrid approaches and offers dashboards with an active real-time overview of costs, resources and project status. This turns the hypothetical idea of destruction into concrete, measurable prevention. With its adaptability and interfaces, the software also facilitates both documentation and communication about risks within the team - a key factor in ensuring that the workshop idea does not end up in the wastepaper basket, but actually takes effect during project implementation.
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