Doom & Boom

Everyone has a storyline in their head about the future. Harnessing these thoughts with Doom & Boom is a powerful way to get buy-in for change.

What’s Doom & Boom?

Boom & Doom is an exercise we can use with our team at our next planning offsite. It’s simple but galvanizing if done well. There are 4 steps:

Prior to the meeting, ask everyone to carve out 30-40 minutes to write out Doom & Boom on a piece of paper:

Start by writing out a 4 chapter “Doom” story. Each chapter represents one of the next 4 quarters. The “Doom” story is about everything going wrong in the business. Each quarter, bad things get worse.
Then write the “Boom” story. In this story, everything goes write. Good things compound over the course of 4 quarters.
Both controllable and non-controllable factors can contribute to each storyline. “We fail to build enough pipeline” is a controllable factor. “Macro conditions worsen” is an external force. Discussing how you’ll respond to both will be part of the exercise.

Once assembled as a team, translate the stories to a whiteboard.

Start with “Doom”. Have each person read out their 4 chapters and capture the key points on the whiteboard (don’t worry, this will start to go quickly after the first person as you’ll find a lot of repeated themes).
Then repeat with “Boom”. Our team will go through the highs and lows of emotions as these stories play out. Ending on a high note is important!

Discuss the themes.

What are the recurring ideas?
What surprised people? How did people feel going through the exercise?

Translate the discussion to implications and priorities:

What are “Doom” pitfalls that need to be avoided at all costs?
What are some easy wins from the “Boom” story? i.e. Small investments that have compounding returns over time?

When to Use Doom & Boom?

Doom & Boom is ideal when we’re planning over a long horizon: perhaps a year or more. It could be a company or business unit’s strategy, a major product launch, a messaging roll-out, or anything with material impact that we want to really think through. A few unexpected things happen during this exercise:

The team feels heard and validated. Everyone has a slightly unique view of the future, and a lot of anxiety can build up when we think others don’t share that view. Allowing the team to both express their view while listening to others can bring a group to a much deeper sense of shared understanding.
We’ll gain a deeper understanding of our business. Getting a rolled-up perspective from everyone on the team is a powerful way to get a more wide-ranging and detailed view of the business. We may also see the cause and effect of certain courses of action more clearly as our team articulates how they see actions playing out. This is an especially insightful exercise for a new leader.
Urgency dials up. The storytelling will bring end-state emotions to our present world. We’ll experience the pain of future failure and the euphoria of future success as a team. This will dial up our collective motivation to manifest the Boom and avoid the Doom.
The team will have a deeper appreciation for core priorities. “Doom” pitfalls tend to result from failing on the fundamentals: hiring too slow, failing to manage performance, neglecting site reliability, etc.. Shiny objects will likely become less attractive as a result.

How do we use Doom & Boom?

James:

First of all, this might be my favourite framework name of all-time! The Five Forces and The Pyramid Principle are pretty cool too, but they’re no match for Doom & Boom!

I’ve used a similar concept of having teams conduct a premortem to outline what could go wrong with a major product launch (as they do with a post-mortem after something does go wrong). But I prefer Doom & Boom because a) a premortem is only the Doom scenario, and b) I like the specificity of writing out each quarter as a distinct chapter. I’ve usually looked ahead for 1-2 years to identify what went wrong, which is helpful, but I like the specificity of the quarters. [BTW, as a sister topic, during interviews, I love it when interviewers ask, “Imagine it’s 12 months from now, and we’ve hired you and it hasn’t worked out. What do you think would be the most likely reasons?”]

I’m curious, where did Doom & Boom come from?

John:

In my early days of sales leadership, we were beginning fiscal planning and I was looking for a novel way to learn everyone’s thoughts about the upcoming year. I was thinking a lot about storytelling at the time so the narrative structure felt like a fun experiment. The exercise was memorable because it had such a big emotional component so I’ve used it almost every year since.

One thing to watch out for: sometimes a team can get spun up around a Doom scenario that is caused by people not in the room. For a sales team this might sound like “the marketing team doesn’t produce enough leads” or for a Product team “the Engineering team doesn’t meet hiring goals.” While it’s useful to give air to these risks, prioritization should focus on what people in the room can control. One year, we embraced the mantra “No Limiting Beliefs” to take on challenges that seemed insurmountable at first.

James:

“No Limiting Beliefs” would make a great tattoo! Overall, Doom & Boom brings me back to the importance of prioritization.

Since we’ve already published them as Blueprints, we’re both huge fans of:

The Priority Matrix (PMAT) with LinkedIn COO Dan Shapero.
Jeff Bezos’s 1-Way vs 2-Way Doors.

For 1-Way Door Decisions, I can see even more reason to use Doom & Boom ahead of time.

Want to learn more?

WANT TO GO DEEPER ON SIMILAR TOPICS?

Here’s an HBR piece on conducting a premortem:

Performing a Project Premortem

Reprint: F0709A In a premortem, team members assume that the project they are planning has just failed—as so many do—and then generate plausible reasons for its demise. Those with reservations may speak freely at the outset, so that the project can be improved rather than autopsied.

hbr.org

And here’s a similar, very recent guide from Asana on the same topic:

How to Conduct a Project Premortem [2024] • Asana

During a premortem, your team imagines what could go wrong before a project even begins. Learn how to use this knowledge to run a better project.

asana.com

How to Conduct a Project Premortem [2024] • Asana

WANT TO GO DEEPER ON WRESTLING SUPERSTARS “THE LEGION OF DOOM”?

As children of the 80s and 90s, how could we write about Doom & Boom without referencing The Legion of Doom, one of the defining wrestling tag teams of all-time!