# Pre-mortem A pre-mortem is a planning exercise where a team imagines that its project has already failed, then works out what caused the failure. Gary Klein described it in "Performing a Project Premortem" (Harvard Business Review, 2007). A post-mortem asks what went wrong after the fact; a pre-mortem asks the same question while there's still time to change the plan. The shift in framing matters. Asked "what might go wrong?", people stay polite and optimistic. Told "it failed; why?", they're invited to name doubts they would otherwise keep to themselves. That makes the exercise a counter to [[Groupthink]], overconfidence and the planning fallacy. Klein builds on research on prospective hindsight (Mitchell, Russo and Pennington, 1989): imagining that an event has already happened. His article reports that it raises the ability to identify reasons for outcomes by 30%. Critics point out that the study measured how many reasons people generated, not whether those reasons were correct, so "more reasons" is the safer reading. A simple format: everyone writes reasons for the failure silently, the team groups them, votes on the biggest threats, and agrees on at least one mitigation per top threat, each with an owner. Atlassian publishes a free 60-minute version of this play for 3 to 11 people. ## References - Gary Klein, "Performing a Project Premortem", Harvard Business Review, September 2007: https://hbr.org/2007/09/performing-a-project-premortem - https://www.atlassian.com/team-playbook/plays/pre-mortem - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-mortem - https://concepts.dsebastien.net/concept/premortem/ ## Related - [[Project charter]] - [[Groupthink]] - [[Cognitive biases]] - [[Murphy's Law]] - [[Decision Making]] - [[Sunk Cost Fallacy]] - [[Project Management (MoC)]]