Episode 108

Drill It On Paper: The Pre-Mortem Exercise Every Leader Should Know

60% of employees swallow a concern serious enough to derail the whole plan, and Maartje van Krieken has a 60-minute exercise designed to surface it before it becomes an expensive surprise.

Most business failures trace back to something someone already knew. The signal was there. Nobody moved it to the right table. Maartje calls the fix a pre-mortem, an eight-step exercise borrowed from industries where getting it wrong isn't an option, adapted for anyone about to commit to something big.

What if the plan you're about to execute is only one version of success, and nobody in the room has said out loud what happens if the assumptions underneath it don't hold?

Maartje walks through why most plans collapse under a single path forward, why an outside facilitator changes everything about how honest the room gets, and why naming who has the authority to stop execution matters more than most leaders want to admit. She also makes the case that this exercise builds trust and sharpens a team's ability to improvise when reality diverges, which they usually do.

The next time you're about to greenlight something significant, ask yourself one thing. Has anyone actually been given permission to say what could go wrong?

Episode Breakdown:

00:00 Why 60% of Employees Stay Silent on Workplace Concerns

06:47 The Data Behind Failed Strategy Execution

07:44 What a Pre-Mortem Is and Isn't

10:22 The Single Path to Success Problem

13:30 Defining What's Actually Being Stress Tested

16:56 Naming Decision Points and Go, No-Go Criteria

19:47 Running What If Scenarios on Major Risks

23:30 Naming the Stop Work Authority

26:48 Three Hidden Benefits of Time, Trust, and Improvisation

30:22 When to Use a Pre-Mortem and When Not To

Connect with Maartje van Krieken:

Connect with Maartje on LinkedIn

Visit The Chaos Games Consulting website

Visit The Business Emergency Room website

Subscribe to The Business Emergency Room on YouTube

Subscribe to Maartje’s Substack

Host Maartje van Krieken is a crisis strategist and decision-making expert who thrives in high-stakes business environments. Combining disaster management training, hands-on experience in global industries, and leadership skills honed as a seasoned sailor, she helps businesses navigate chaos with precision. Whether tackling transformation, scaling challenges, or leadership bottlenecks, Maartje delivers actionable insights to turn turbulence into traction.

Podcast production and show notes provided by HiveCast.fm

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The Business Emergency Room: For Leaders Facing Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity & Ambiguity (VUCA)
Triage, Tools & Tactics to recover from or prevent business chaos in this VUCA business environment

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Maartje van Krieken

Maartje van Krieken is a crisis strategist, executive consultant, and your at host of The Business Emergency Room podcast, where growing businesses go when things get messy. With a career that began in frontier oil and gas and spanned war zones, boardrooms, and billion-dollar pivots, Maartje has spent over two decades helping organizations steer through chaos and come out stronger.
Now through her consulting firm, The Chaos Games, Maartje works with medium-sized businesses, especially those scaling rapidly or navigating uncertainty, to diagnose breakdowns in leadership, collaboration, and decision-making before they become business emergencies. Her signature approach blends practical triage, people-first strategy, and blunt Dutch honesty to help teams realign fast.

​The Business Emergency Room delivers high-impact insights for business leaders, board members, and investors who are tired of the symptoms, disconnection, friction, paralysis, and want the tools to fix what’s really going wrong. Maartje’s episodes cut through fluff with stories, frameworks, and metaphors that turn even the most complex chaos into something leaders can act on.
Maartje is based in New Orleans and speaks regularly on navigating organizational storms, building business resilience, and turning reactive firefighting into proactive leadership. Whether you’re scaling a business, running a team, or dealing with dysfunction, The Business Emergency Room is the place to find straight talk and smarter tools.