Tell me about a deadline you missed outright. When did you know it was gone, and what did you do once you did?
Why this works
The miss itself is ordinary — the signal is in the timeline. How early they saw it coming, who heard it from them and when, and what the replan changed: that sequence separates a planning failure the candidate metabolized from one they merely survived.
Follow-up probes
- Looking back, what was the earliest warning sign?
- Who found out from you, and who found out otherwise?
- What did the replan actually change?
- What do you estimate differently now?
What good looks like
A warning sign named in hindsight and watched for since, the miss announced by them ahead of the date rather than discovered after it, a replan with a new date that held, and a changed estimating habit.
Red flags
The deadline died silently and the story starts after the wreck, the causes live entirely in other people and bad luck, the recovery date slipped too, or — the classic — they have never missed one.
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