Pre-mortem
Imagining a project has already failed, then working backward to expose the risks before they happen.
What it means
A pre-mortem is a structured planning exercise in which a team, before committing to a plan, imagines that it is some months in the future and the project has failed spectacularly, then each member independently writes down all the reasons why. By licensing the expression of doubts as a creative task rather than disloyalty, it surfaces risks that groupthink, optimism bias, and reluctance to dissent would otherwise suppress. It is a form of prospective hindsight, which research suggests increases people's ability to identify reasons for future outcomes. The technique is cheap and fast but only works if leaders genuinely act on what it reveals rather than treating it as theater. It matters because most plans are evaluated only for how they could succeed, and the pre-mortem is a disciplined antidote to overconfidence that strengthens the plan while it can still be changed.
Examples
Before launching a product, the team runs a pre-mortem; one engineer's imagined 'failure' — a supplier delay — prompts a backup contract that later saves the timeline.
Before a hospital switches to a new records system, staff imagine the rollout has already failed; a nurse's 'nobody could find the allergy field' scenario prompts a redesign before go-live.
A couple planning a house move each list why moving day went wrong; 'the van didn't fit down the lane' turns out to be entirely plausible, so they book a smaller van.
First described in Gary Klein (2007); prospective hindsight, Mitchell, Russo & Pennington (1989).