Pre-Mortem

Say this

It's six months out and this went wrong. Why?

Do this now 5 min

It's six months from now and this failed badly. Write three specific reasons why it failed — not vague risks, but concrete scenarios. Check: are any preventable right now?

Use when

You're about to lock in a significant decision.

Avoid when

The decision is minor, reversible, or you've already run a structured risk review.

Why it works

Assuming failure produces more honest scenarios than asking whether the plan might fail.

Optimism makes plans easier to start and harder to inspect. A pre-mortem changes the prompt: assume the project has failed, then explain why. That reversal makes risks easier to name because nobody has to argue against the plan directly. In groups, the question “Assume this failed — why?” brings doubts into the open without making dissent feel disloyal. The aim is not pessimism. It is to catch preventable failure while there is still time to remove it.

Go deeper · 8 min read

The Pre-Mortem: Why Assuming Failure Produces More Honest Planning

Forward planning is optimism in disguise. The pre-mortem exploits a simple temporal trick: imagining that the project has already failed, then explaining why, unlocks a level of honest risk assessment that prospective analysis consistently misses.