Pre-Mortem
2 min read · Reviewed 17 Oct 2026
In short
Imagining your plan has already failed, then working backwards to find out why.
In plain English
A way of finding the holes in a plan before you commit to it. Instead of asking "what could go wrong?", which tends to produce a polite list, you assume it has gone wrong: it is twelve months later, the plan failed badly, and your job is to explain what happened.
The change in wording does real work. "What could go wrong" invites caution. "It failed, why?" invites honesty, because you are no longer defending the plan, you are explaining it.
A real example
You are about to put your prices up. A risk list says "some customers might leave". A pre-mortem says: "Eighteen of the twenty-two left within two months. They left because the new price put us next to a competitor we do not actually beat on the thing those customers cared about, and nobody had checked."
That second version tells you exactly what to go and verify this week.
Why it matters
People are far better at explaining a failure than predicting one. A pre-mortem borrows that skill and uses it while there is still time to act.
It is also the one exercise that gets easier with AI, because a model has no stake in your plan being right and will not soften the answer to spare your feelings. That makes it a good partner for this and a poor one for reassurance.
