Imagine your project has already failed. Work backwards to find the risks you haven't thought of — while there's still time to fix them.
A pre-mortem works by harnessing prospective hindsight — research shows that imagining an event has already occurred increases your ability to identify causes by 30%.
Step 1. Name your project, decision, or plan.
Step 2. Imagine it has failed completely. Use the prompts to generate specific failure scenarios — the more concrete, the more useful.
Step 3. Rate each risk by severity. Focus your mitigation effort on the high-severity, high-probability risks.
Step 4. For each serious risk, define one specific action you can take to reduce it.
The pre-mortem is especially powerful in groups, where it gives team members explicit permission to voice concerns that social pressure would normally suppress.