premortem

Describe your plan and success criteria, then ask for a pre-mortem. The analysis imagines the launch has failed completely, generates 8-12 failure causes across five categories, prioritizes them by likelihood and impact, and defines mitigations with owners for the top three risks.

A pre-mortem assumes failure has already occurred and works backward to explain it, which bypasses optimism bias and surfaces uncomfortable possibilities. Traditional risk assessments ask what could go wrong prospectively, which often filters out unlikely-seeming but critical scenarios.

Use it before launches, major decisions, or risky initiatives where hidden risks carry high cost. It is most valuable when the plan is defined enough to have concrete success criteria but early enough to act on the mitigations it reveals.

The output includes a plan summary, a vivid failure narrative, a categorized table of 8-12 failure modes, a likelihood-impact prioritization matrix, detailed mitigations with early warning signs and owners for the top three risks, and a revised confidence assessment.

Pre-mortems depend on the quality of imagination applied and cannot predict truly unforeseeable events. They identify plausible risks for mitigation planning but do not quantify probabilities precisely or replace ongoing monitoring during execution.