@elasticdotventures/pre-mortem

---

name: pre-mortem type: skill hint: Imagine the project failed; work backward to identify why; surfaces risks before they happen version: 1.0.0 tags: [transferable, pre-mortem, risk, failure, planning, prospective, hindsight, mitigation] tier: sm0l complexity: 3 description: |- Pre-mortem (Gary Klein): before starting, assume the project has catastrophically failed.

What

The pre-mortem (coined by Gary Klein) is a prospective failure analysis technique. Before starting a project, assume it has catastrophically failed. Ask: "It is 6 months from now. This project failed completely. Why?" List every plausible cause and rank by likelihood × impact. This technique works because prospective hindsight activates different reasoning than standard risk analysis — people are more honest about failure causes when asked "why did it fail" vs "what might go wrong."

Steps: (1) State the goal clearly. (2) Fast-forward to failure. "It failed. What happened?" (3) List all causes — suppress optimism bias, allow pessimism. (4) For each top-3 cause, add a mitigation to the plan now.

When to Use

Use pre-mortem before any significant project, feature launch, or deployment. It is especially valuable in high-stakes situations where optimism bias might cause teams to underweight tail risks.

How

1. State the goal clearly.
2. Fast-forward: assume the project has failed completely.
3. List every plausible cause, suppressing optimism bias.
4. Rank causes by likelihood × impact.
5. Add mitigations for the top 3 causes to your plan.
6. Beware the anti-pattern: only planning for success and ignoring tail risks.