A pre-mortem meeting flips the usual retrospective: instead of looking back at what went wrong, the team imagines a future where the project has already failed and works backward to explain why. This technique, sometimes called prospective hindsight, makes people far more willing to voice doubts they would otherwise keep quiet. A good pre-mortem template turns those doubts into preventive action before any damage is done.
Run a pre-mortem at the start of a significant project, before a major launch, or ahead of any high-stakes decision where failure would be costly. It is most powerful when the team is confident and momentum is high, exactly when blind spots hide best.
The core project team plus key stakeholders, roughly five to twelve people. Diversity of perspective matters: include people close to delivery, to the customer, and to the risks, so no single viewpoint dominates the failure story.
Set the scene clearly: it is months from now and the project has failed badly. Give people quiet time to write the story of that failure in concrete detail. Collect every cause without debate first, so the list stays generous. Then cluster related risks and rank them by likelihood and impact. For the top few, agree on mitigations or early-warning signals, each with an owner and a date, and decide how you will revisit them as the work unfolds.
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75 minutes total · 6 sections
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