David S. Kidder

What would cause confidence in your most important initiative to collapse?

That is the provocative question David S. Kidder asks every room. And the answer almost always lives in the beliefs and assumptions that everyone holds but nobody names. When evidence is absent, biases dominate, narratives form, opinion becomes story, momentum looks like progress, and by the time the truth surfaces, the cost of reversal has compounded beyond recovery.

The PreMortem is an empowering mindset and system for replacing that pattern with a new powerful decision discipline. In this keynote, David demonstrates how leadership teams can surface over 100+ hidden risks and opportunities in less than a day, compress them into the 2 or 3 that actually determine success, that build commercial conviction, and are anchored in evidence rather than consensus. Drawing on real outcomes where his partners have saved hundreds of millions in misallocated capital, unlocked $1.6 billion in new revenue, and compressed two years of work into 12 weeks, David animates what becomes possible when organizations commit to commercial truth.

Leaders walk away radically invigorated, with a new applied system they can apply immediately to any high stakes initiative, and a shared language for how to decide faster, allocate smarter, and grow with conviction.

Best for:

• Executive teams navigating high stakes strategic decisions where the cost of misalignment is measured in hundreds of millions.
• Industries facing geopolitical, regulatory, technology, or competitive disruption and seeking a new commercial decision framework.
• Organizations building Human + AI execution capability and seeking systems that compound institutional intelligence over time.