Why ADHD Makes You Chase Bad Ideas (& how to stop it)

You've launched things that seemed solid, only to watch them unravel for reasons that felt obvious afterward. That's not a judgment problem. For ADHD founders, retrospective clarity comes naturally. The pre-mortem is a tool that pulls that clarity forward, to the start of a project, when fixing problems is still cheap.

Skye and Robbie break down the pre-mortem method, developed by cognitive psychologist Gary Klein and later popularized by Daniel Kahneman, and explain why it fits ADHD-wired brains in particular. ADHD founders tend to communicate broad vision without the full set of dependencies, leaving teams misaligned and triggering micromanagement loops. They're also prone to hyperfocused tunneling in the wrong direction. The pre-mortem interrupts both patterns before they cost you.

They also cover how to use it as a minimum viable test. Before a prototype, before a hire, before a pivot, spend an afternoon stress-testing the idea. Sometimes the right output is: don't do this.

What We Cover

• Why ADHD founders naturally access retrospective clarity, and how to use it at project start instead of after the fact
• How incomplete vision communication creates micromanagement loops, and what the pre-mortem does to close that gap
• The novelty bias and hyperfocus tunneling problem, and why planning for failure acts as a directional check
• How to run a pre-mortem solo, with a team, or with AI, including a specific reverse prompting approach
• Why a half-day pre-mortem with AI or a mentor counts as your minimum viable test before any build

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

The pre-modems a tool for basically trying to access that retrospective clarity near the start of it when changing or fixing the issues are still cheap where most of the work hasn't already been done.

SPEAKER_00 0:08

Hello, everybody, and welcome to the ADHD Skills Lab. Today we're going to talk about what happens if you plan for failure. And can planning for failure be the most successful thing you ever did when it came to your business and your ADHD? We're going to be getting into pre-mortems, why they work, how to do them, how to do them with a team, how to do them with AI. And hopefully by the end of this, you're going to have a really solid system that you can use whenever you feel yourself getting that novelty bias to know if this is something you should pivot to or if this is not going to work. But before we get started, if you are a service business owner, you're struggling with ADHD symptoms, and you've gotten to your business to the point where you're making, you know, $500,000 a year, maybe you've even made it to $2 million a year, but the business is still fully running through your brain. Everything depends on you. And the idea of even starting to delegate feels impossible. That's what we can help with. That's not a you problem, that's an ADHD systems problem. And with Invisible Systems, we're really proud to announce that we have a done for you process designed specifically for business owners who are in the services who have ADHD and who need help finding, onboarding, and building out their admin layer so that they can get things out of their head. So if that sounds like you, go ahead and click the link below to meet with me for a free business build-out. We'll look at what 90 days of getting your systems out of your head and operationalized looks like. And you could take that away, use it, or you can work with us. Either way, you win. So click the link below. So the retrospective trap, the thing where you failed to do something, and in hindsight you realize why, and you wish that you'd made an adjustment.

SPEAKER_01 2:07

I think more than that, it feels obvious in hindsight.

SPEAKER_00 2:09

And I think the problem with ADHD is that we have quite a few things that feel obvious in hindsight. I mean, that's one of the most frustrating things about getting diagnosed later in life, is you look back on your life and you go, Oh, if only I had known that this was a thing, I wouldn't have, you know, changed my degree so many times or dropped out or anything.

SPEAKER_01 2:33

I've heard it described as almost a period of mourning, like I think relief with the diagnosis, but then also this morning of like, oh, this would have been so good to have known and understood and been able to work around earlier.

SPEAKER_00 2:45

100%. So if we then think about this idea of okay, how do we solve this retrospective trap? This idea of now in hindsight, I realize what I should have done. Like, no one wants to be in that position. What we want to do is we want to do a pre-mortem. So do you want to take us through what that is?

SPEAKER_01 3:06

Yeah, the pre-mortem's like a tool for basically trying to access that retrospective clarity at the start of the project when it's actually, or or near the start of it, when changing or fixing the issues are still cheap where most of the work hasn't already been done. And pre-mortem is basically imagining that the project's already failed.

SPEAKER_00 3:22

And figuring out why.

SPEAKER_01 3:24

If a post-mortem is figuring out what killed the patients after death, a pre-mortem is basically trying to trying to run the same analysis before they even get sick. And so a project that's instead of doing post-mortem on the project, figuring out why did this go wrong afterwards when the information's useful for the next project, I guess, still worth doing if your project has failed, but it's trying to bring those insights earlier in the process when they're actually useful, when it's cheap to fix those problems. Yeah, and so what it what it looks like is imagining the project's already failed and writing down all of the reasons why it failed.

SPEAKER_00 3:57

Yeah, 100%. And one of the reasons that this is so useful, particularly if you are an ADHD founder, is because we have a tendency to have a bunch of good ideas and a ton of not great ideas. And so it is a lot easier to run a pre-mortem on your ideas than it is to actually try all of them. This is sort of the sim, I guess the sibling conversation to the idea of minimum viable product. Instead of even doing a minimum viable product, why don't we run a pre-mortem and see if this business would have even done, you know, this shift, this business, this project would have even done what you wanted it to. And I've done this quite a few times in our, I think I did like what, three of them this month.

SPEAKER_01 4:46

Yeah, I think you heard about it from Dan Martell recently because he's actually recommended running it at sort of multiple scales. But yeah, I mean, some of the reasons it works is because it's pushing back against the overconfidence that people sometimes have at the start of a project, or that optimism, especially ADHD founders with a new idea. And also the groupthink, the the group harmony, almost a sense of loyalty to like this is gonna be great. There's a like, I guess, a loyalty to that optimism and positive attitude, and this sort of gives them permission to really get into let's hear some of those concerns you have at the start of the project rather than have them turn out to be true at the end of it.

SPEAKER_00 5:22

100%. And this is actually one of those things, as a founder who has introduced a few interesting ideas over the past few years. I really want my team to tell me what's wrong with the ideas. Like, genuinely want that. I mean, sometimes it's hard to hear, but like that is the point. So there's nothing, I wouldn't say there's nothing worse, but there's a certain kind of feeling you get when you present an idea and then everyone goes, That sounds good, and you go, I think they're lying. Or not lying, but like, I think they're I think this isn't good. I think it needs work.

SPEAKER_01 5:57

That's the same feeling I get with you sometimes.

SPEAKER_00 6:00

Why? Just you want a full-scale pre-mortem.

SPEAKER_01 6:06

Telling your wife something, and she's like, mm-hmm, yeah. You're like, okay. Okay, well, something's off here. I'm happy to better investigate further. Let's do a pre-mortem on this.

SPEAKER_00 6:17

Well, yeah, I mean, that's the great thing about having a stage where you're gonna do a pre-mortem because it allows you, it allows the team, it sort of diffuses that energy of okay, now we have to support this person, or you know, we we it we're not attacking the person if we're attacking the idea, essentially. Because the idea is already dead.

SPEAKER_01 6:44

The idea died, yeah. This is this already failed. Yeah, we're just doing an investigation as to why.

SPEAKER_00 6:49

Exactly, exactly, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 6:51

Yeah, no, you're running an exercise, you're not saying this because you think it's a bad idea or a bad project or a bad plan, you're just running a you know, a pre-agreed template to investigate it fully. You can sort of be saying the whole time, I think this is a good idea, but let's let's run this anyway.

SPEAKER_00 7:09

Exactly, exactly. And everyone could be like, I totally believe in your idea, and hopefully that's true, but if I was going to give a reason why this didn't work, this would be my reason.

SPEAKER_01 7:21

Yeah, it gives that permission to give pushback without being sort of an obstructionist. So let's talk a little bit about Yeah, I think brief shout out to academia for coming up with the idea in cognitive psychology, Gary Klein 1992, published in Harvard Business Review 2007, and then shout out to Daniel Kahneman for popularizing it.

SPEAKER_00 7:42

He was a cognitive psychologist, which I think is interesting.

SPEAKER_01 7:46

Yeah, it came out of academia.

SPEAKER_00 7:48

Yeah, which happens a lot. I remember when I was I took management courses and like business courses in my last years of psychology, and I was introduced to a whole bunch of concepts that I'd already learnt in depth in psychology. I think often there's this connection between the two. So yeah, Daniel Kahneman was a noble laureate, and he talked about the he wrote the book Thinking Fast and Slow, which is a super popular book.

SPEAKER_01 8:15

Because he's the one that popularized it, not the one who came up with the idea.

SPEAKER_00 8:18

Yes, yes, he popularized it, but he popularized it a lot, so yeah, worth worth mentioning as well. I mean, who among us has not taken things from academia and popularized it on the internet?

SPEAKER_01 8:28

Okay, shoot the academics aren't gonna do it.

SPEAKER_00 8:30

Yeah, yeah, somebody has to do it. Okay, so do we want to talk about the family of tools?

SPEAKER_01 8:36

Yes, yes, this is a business concept episode, so we're gonna touch on some similar, some sort of opposite direction type tools as well.

SPEAKER_00 8:44

Um, so basically tools for those of you who are like, okay, I'm sold, but how do I do this? And if you don't have a business, this is still super useful, but it's specifically designed in this context to work with business owners.

SPEAKER_01 8:58

Yeah, well, the first one's actually doing the opposite of a pre-mortem in that it's sort of working backwards from imagining the success. So this is an Amazon technique. I think the Kindle was the first major product that was developed that way. And so, yeah, this is basically the instead of imagining that it died, this is the opposite, imagining that it succeeded, doing the mock press release, what is it, who is it for, uh, what problems did it solve? And I think one of the big parts of this is writing the FAQ for us.

SPEAKER_00 9:25

That's an interesting one. I mean, uh why do you think they chose what if it succeeded? Is there a is there something to that that we should pay attention to?

SPEAKER_01 9:36

I think it's just a different approach to the same tool because they're still running an FAQ, they're looking at anticipated objections, they're looking at risks, things that could go wrong. So they're kind of they're doing the same thing. They're they're working from the end, they're working, they're imagining the endpoints, they're just not imagining that the whole thing collapsed, they're imagining that it worked, but like what went wrong.

SPEAKER_00 9:58

Yeah. I just think about it in terms of uh like the thing that comes to mind for me is I thought about running a podcast podcast agency. Do you remember? Yeah. And and then I ended up not doing it because I did the pre-mortem exercise on this, and there were way too many holes, and it was way too much work.

SPEAKER_01 10:15

Pre-ADHD founder, by the way, is like anytime you hit resistance trying to get something done, you're just like, maybe I could do it better, maybe I'll do that too.

SPEAKER_00 10:23

Yeah, and it turns out that was not a good idea, so that is never gonna happen, at least not now. But I but I think that if I had tried to imagine it working, I don't know if I would have ultimately dropped it, which was ultimately the right thing to do.

SPEAKER_01 10:37

Yeah, I think you're right. I think I prefer pre-mortem to just working backwards from a imagining success.

SPEAKER_00 10:44

I think especially because I I can make it work, you know what I mean? I can always if I'm if my end goal is success, I can usually track back some form of success. It's more about at the cost of what time and energy do I get that success.

SPEAKER_01 11:02

Yeah, fair. Amazon's doing it wrong.

SPEAKER_00 11:04

No, no, Amazon is clearly doing it well. Okay, I'm not even gonna go there. You know what? I'm not even gonna go there. I don't I don't want to get into whether Amazon is doing it right or wrong. Okay, so let's talk about what Dan Martell said. Because originally this idea came to us from Dan Martell and his video on how to use AI specifically, where he talked about doing a pre-mortem with AI.

SPEAKER_01 11:31

Yeah, not just using AI. Well, I don't know if he mentioned um reverse prompting in relation to pre-mortems with AI, but I think they're kind of a related idea.

SPEAKER_00 11:43

I don't think to them. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 11:46

Either way, we heard about them both from him. And so reverse prompting is basically at the like smaller scale, at the like, I'm trying to get at the smaller scale, trying to get AI to figure out how your prompt is going to take you in the wrong direction, ask the questions that you need to answer to make sure that you are aligned, and then proceed with generating whatever you're trying to generate. And it really does save a lot of time. Um I think it's one of those things where AI, once you've gone in the wrong direction, it can be quite hard to pull it back into the ro into the direction you originally intended to go. And then you'll find little artifacts still resurfacing later.

SPEAKER_00 12:24

Yeah, one of those. Well, I think this is the this so the reverse prompt is like, I want to get this outcome, ask me questions, and I personally prefer ask me open-ended questions one at a time to figure out how to get there. So we sort of, again, it's like reverse tracking, but the pre-mortem is the idea that I'm like, this is already failed. So this outcome I'm trying to get to is already failed. Ask me questions to help me understand how to get there.

SPEAKER_01 12:52

That was the other thing is using AI to run these pre-mortems, I guess, a lot faster.

unknown 12:57

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 12:58

So you're you're saying to the AI, either here's the project I'm running, again, reverse prompt it to get a whole lot to get a lot more clarity on what the project is, and then ask it that question. Now assume this project has failed. Why did it fail? Break it down.

SPEAKER_00 13:12

It works really well on a on an AI that's trained on an understanding of you. Like it's the one that you've used a lot, so it knows a lot about you, it can kind of bring that information.

SPEAKER_01 13:22

More additional context that it can pull in. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 13:24

But I do want to say if you have a mentor, try and run this pre-mortem with them as well. Because, you know, as somebody who has tested AI and and worked with mentors, uh, one of the things that mentors do really, really well is that they will bring something to the table that neither you nor the AI have thought of. You're kind of playing in a pool of things you already know. Whereas a good experienced mentor can kind of come in and say, Well, actually, I don't think it'll work for this reason over here, that is at a level that you haven't even conceived of yet because you didn't get to that problem.

SPEAKER_01 14:00

Yeah, telling you the things you didn't know you didn't know, I think is where AI really falls short.

SPEAKER_00 14:05

Yes, yeah. It doesn't seem to have that ability, at least not what I've seen, compared to a a real life mentor who can just sort of see the forest um for the trees. We've got the prompt, we've got the project.

SPEAKER_01 14:17

And then another one of Dan's ideas was running it. I think he was running it for your role, your sort of position in the job. I don't think was he also suggesting running it for the business, like at that level?

SPEAKER_00 14:30

I'm pretty sure, yeah, yeah. It's been a minute since I watched that video, but we'll give it to you, Dan. You did all of those things.

SPEAKER_01 14:37

Yeah. Running it for your role, running it, I think running it for your entire career, and then also running it if you're obviously an ADHD founder, running it for your business. Like, why has my business failed five years from now? I think with the role he was particularly saying, how has AI replaced me?

SPEAKER_00 14:50

Yes, yeah, that was a really good one. That changed my entire business. Asking that question was uh, you know, was is it was very, very helpful because AI has a pretty good idea about how it's gonna replace you, I will say. It's pretty good at that one. There are two reasons why this works specifically for ADHD founders. Two things that we have already talked about, and one of which I have already referenced in this podcast. Do you want to take us through the first one, Robbie?

SPEAKER_01 15:18

Yeah, so the brief gap episode, founder struggle that we talked about was all about how ADHD founders will struggle to construct sort of a sufficiently detailed plan at the start. They'll they'll get the broad strokes of it, but it's a lot easier for us to miss a lot of the like setup tasks, a lot of the cleanup tasks, a lot of the sort of final nuances and dependencies that are all in there. We don't, we often are not transmitting all of those details at the start of a project. And that's why often the team is not on the same page and why you're then sort of coming back in and micromanaging because that sort of that vision wasn't fully communicated. And this is a tool for stopping analyzing the project. Why did it fail? And sort of in doing so, you're creating a concrete something concrete to react to.

SPEAKER_00 16:02

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Even if you know you are talking to somebody or you're talking to an AI and and it says, Oh, I think it failed because of this, and you're like, Well, that would never happen because of ABC. Now you have an idea, you have a little bit more concrete information than you did before.

SPEAKER_01 16:19

It's helping you fill in all those extra details, making sure that the team's on the same page. And yeah, one of the big solutions was the vision for all those little extra pieces isn't triggering until you've got something concrete to react to. Even if it's the wrong thing, that's still great. That gives us like not like that, like this.

SPEAKER_00 16:34

Yeah. And and one of the things we should mention is that if you do this, the one of the benefits of this is that you end up in a position where your thing did not fail, you know, or you were able to like go back and and like go, okay, well, if it failed, this would be why. So I'm just gonna make these adjustments, and now I have a really good idea and a really good project to go after. The answer, this is not, we're not doing this so that everything you do is gonna be a failure, so why even try? We are doing it because there will be some things here that are really, really good, and with a few tweaks, they can be really great.

SPEAKER_01 17:08

Yeah, I mean, I guess there's there's several outcomes. I it can identify why you shouldn't move forward with the project, but ideally it's just helping you avoid some of those pitfalls. I think most of the time, though, it's just helping you identify the things that could go wrong earlier in the process and fixing for them.

SPEAKER_00 17:25

Okay, so the second reason that this is helpful is what we just talked about. I just referenced earlier, which is minimum viable product. So this is two things. It allows you to understand a little bit better what your minimum viable product would be, because you can say, well, it would fail for these reasons, and you're you know, some of those reasons could be it's too complicated, you've got your team is too big and they're misaligned, and it doesn't make sense from a cash flow perspective, or the math doesn't math when it comes to the revenue, total revenue that you would get. All of these things can help you understand what your minimum viable product is going to be.

SPEAKER_01 18:03

Yeah, ideally, one of the failure conditions you're always considering would be no one wants it. And then you're going, okay, well, what can we do to test that early as early as possible?

SPEAKER_00 18:12

Exactly. Or no one wants it at your price point, or nobody, you know, wants it in your space or whatever it is. And then we're going in and we're saying, okay.

SPEAKER_01 18:22

And then so you're redesigning the project to either test one idea quickly or test a bunch of different ideas and see which one sticks in the like minimum viable way.

SPEAKER_00 18:29

100%. And like I said before, it was it there's also the idea that the most minimum viable product thing you can do is spend an afternoon talking to an AI about an idea that you had, or a mentor about an idea that you had, and then decide not to do it. I did that a couple of weekends ago. It was that was it. I didn't do anything, I didn't launch anything, I just spent like I think half a day going back and forth about this idea, and ultimately decided it wasn't it wasn't the right thing for us to do. And that saved many, many things, and it was in many ways the minimum viable idea process, I guess.

SPEAKER_01 19:05

Yeah, that's the minimum viable tip. I guess that is like the minimum, minimum viable tip is does it even make sense in my head if I think about it long enough?

SPEAKER_00 19:13

And if I think about it with a thinking partner, because again, with ADHD, we struggle with time blindness, working memory, breaking things down. And so having a tool or a person that can help you with that action of breaking things down can really, really help pull those issues out before they become the issue. I mean, you know, sometimes people will say about things in business, if I'd known how hard it is, I wouldn't have done it. So we're not necessarily trying to take away from the fact that a lot of cool things get made because people just kind of went in gung-ho, but it's also helpful to maybe do that less.

SPEAKER_01 19:48

The idea is you're still gonna move forward with the idea. You're just gonna check it's not one of the dumb ones first. Yeah, I think I think also related somewhat to minimum viable product is this like hyper focus misallocation. So again, yeah, ADHD founders, ADHD people in general, very prone to sort of tunneling in to a new project, getting completely lost in it, getting all the way through to completion, and then emerging and realizing they've kind of tunneled in the wrong direction.

SPEAKER_00 20:10

Yeah, yeah, 100%.

SPEAKER_01 20:12

Yeah, working backwards, pre-mortem. It sort of gives us a tool for just checking we're tunneling in the right direction before we start. Just to be clear, neither neither of these tools was designed for ADHD founders or ADHD people in particular. But this is these are sort of the reasons why it's a particularly useful tool for us.

SPEAKER_00 20:31

Yeah, yeah, like so many things, we're kind of grabbing things that are useful in other places and putting them into ways that will work for us. I mean, for those of you who don't know, the Pomodoro method, which I know a lot of people know about, was not originally designed to help people with ADHD. So if you're gonna run this with a team, what you wanna do is you wanna give them a little bit of individual time to write this down.

SPEAKER_01 20:54

Right, you know, if you give them a few years, write down every every reason they can think of as to why the project failed.

SPEAKER_00 20:59

Yeah. And again, the reason we're going with an individual thing is because it's gonna remove groupthink. We don't want people to all kind of lock together on one idea. We can do coming together later. We don't have we don't want to do that. We don't want to do that at the beginning.

SPEAKER_01 21:15

Yeah, give them permission to say the things that they would normally suppress for the sake of group harmony.

SPEAKER_00 21:19

Exactly, exactly. And this then allows you to get a whole bunch of information about what could go wrong, uh just as a as a gathering information exercise without sort of and then you can go through okay, what can we do to solve this problem? So the first step is just to gather all of that information. Yeah, so like we said, with AI, you want to reverse prompt, you want to say, like, it's one year from now, this has failed, here's what happened, you know, take me through why this failed, ask me questions to get a sense of why this failed, and then ultimately you get an output that is similar to what you would get with a team, which is a list of things that you're now gonna have to go through and say, okay, how do we solve this problem?

SPEAKER_01 22:04

And I I would actually say get it to ask you the questions to understand the situation first, then run the post-mortem prompt. Make sure it's fully understanding the situation first, then tell it we're gonna try and figure out how this failed now.

SPEAKER_00 22:17

So if you had one thing to take from this episode, it would be that thing that is probably in your head right now that you're thinking, maybe I should do it, maybe I should go for it, you know, take 20 minutes and do a pre-mortem. Do a pre-mortem now. It doesn't even matter if you're halfway through the project. Like if you have anything that you're doing that's taking up a lot of your time and energy that you're trying, you're not 100% confident about, this is probably a really good exercise for you. In fact, I think I'm gonna go and do that this afternoon. I think I've been sold on my own system.

SPEAKER_01 22:52

Well, it's good, you know. We've just run minimum viable product on the uh podcast outlines as well, and it's working a lot better.

SPEAKER_00 22:58

You should do minimum, you should do this on the podcast.

SPEAKER_01 23:01

A pre-mortem on why it doesn't hit.

SPEAKER_00 23:04

On no, not on every episode, God be here forever. Just the podcast in general. Just the podcast system in general, yeah. But yeah, be like, you know, it's three years from now, and yeah, for some reason, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 23:16

Here's all of our scripts and and notes.

SPEAKER_00 23:18

We stopped doing it for some reason. Why did we stop doing it? You do that, I'll do that for my program, and you guys go do that for whatever you're doing, and then tell us what happened. Did you change something? Did you find that it worked? Did you find it helpful? Did you not find it helpful? I'm really curious to, I guess, as an entire community, try this pre-mortem and see what happens. So let me know. You can find me on Instagram at unconventional organization.com. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the ADHD Skills Lab. If you liked it, leave us a five star review. It helps other people learn more about us. And thank you so much to our wonderful team for making us sound good, look good. We couldn't do it without you.