Most people spend their last five minutes before a meeting re-reading their own slides. There's a much more useful thing you could be doing.
"What's the worst that could happen?" Famous last words, excellent movie trope, and a question that commercial operators tend to skip until the answer has already arrived in the meeting and is staring back at them across the table.
It's the day of the negotiation. You've got five minutes before you walk in. The real prep happened weeks ago. The deck is fine. The numbers are fine. You already know there'll be ten minutes of small talk about somebody's kid's latest soccer game before anyone even pretends to look at the agenda. So what should you do with the five minutes you actually have left?
Almost everyone reaches for their own slides. They flip through, skim their talking points, maybe rehearse a phrase or two. This feels productive. It is not.
The slides are what they are. You wrote them, or signed off on them, or have read them six times since Tuesday. Re-reading them in the corridor is recognition, not production. Your brain is already familiar with the material; familiarity isn't preparation, it's just a feeling. And that feeling is exactly what makes most last-minute prep useless. It scratches the itch without doing the work.
There's a much more useful thing you could be doing with those five minutes, and almost nobody enjoys it: imagining the meeting going wrong.
No need for melodrama. Nobody walks out, nothing blows up, the deal doesn't die. Just the everyday flavor of wrong where, twenty minutes in, they ask a question you didn't quite see coming. You hesitate, you try to dodge, you fumble. Not badly enough that the room shifts. Just badly enough that you'll be replaying it on the drive home. Then again at 2am, staring at the ceiling. Then again on Tuesday in the shower, wondering why on earth you couldn't have just said "I'll get back to you on that one."
Three questions worth running through:
What's the question you reeeeeally don't want them to ask?
What's the move from their side that would have you running defense for the rest of the hour?
What's the concession your boss made you pinky-swear not to bring up, let alone offer, that's going to start sounding kinda sorta reasonable around minute 43, when the coffee's cold and everyone's a bit tired and the other side has just made what sounds, in that specific moment, like a really fair point?
That last one is where the damage usually lives. A surprise question is recoverable; you punt and follow up. An aggressive opening move stings, but most experienced operators can ride out a rough first ten minutes. The slow drift toward a concession you swore you wouldn't make, dressed up as reasonableness by the back half of a long meeting, is the one that costs real money. By the time you notice you've drifted, you're past the point of pulling back without looking unreasonable yourself. The concession got cheap precisely because you were tired enough to make it sound expensive to refuse.
The fancy management science term for this is "pre-mortem," which by the way is a really great phrase to slip into your corporate Bullshit Bingo card. The mechanism is simple though: counterfactual thinking is harder to do live than it is to rehearse. When you've imagined a bad moment once, even briefly, your brain tags it as familiar. The next time it shows up for real, the threat response is dialed down a notch. You're not surprised, you're not improvising, you've been here before, at least in your head.
The reason hardly anyone does this isn't that it's complicated. It's that it feels worse than re-reading your slides. Slides are reassuring. Imagining your own fumble, in detail, is mildly unpleasant. So people optimize for feeling prepared rather than being prepared, and the unpleasant five minutes get traded for the comfortable five minutes. Then minute 43 of the meeting arrives, and somebody has to pay for that trade.
Five minutes is the budget, not a target. The 5MP pre-mortem isn't an exercise in cataloguing every possible disaster; that's a different kind of prep, and it has its time and place. This version is one bad question, one bad move, one weak concession. If you can't surface those three inside five minutes, you're overcomplicating it.
And don't script comebacks. The point isn't to walk in with a list of zingers. The point is that when the zinger moment shows up, you've sat with it once already, in private, with nobody watching. That's usually all the edge you need.
If a quick mental rehearsal isn't going to cut it and you actually want to get into proper risk assessment, get in touch. We can throw you the best pessimism party you've ever been to.
We work with commercial teams on exactly these kinds of problems.