Practice : Pre-Mortem Analysis
Purpose and Strategic Importance
Pre-Mortem Analysis is a decision-making practice in which a team imagines that a plan or decision has failed — and then works backwards to understand why. Proposed by psychologist Gary Klein, it is one of the most effective techniques for surfacing risks, blind spots, and assumptions before they become problems. It counteracts the optimism bias and group think that cause leaders to underestimate failure probability in plans they are invested in.
Pre-mortems do not predict the future. They reveal the risks that are already present in the plan but are too uncomfortable or too low-status to raise in normal planning conversations. Making it safe to imagine failure creates conditions for honest risk assessment.
Description of the Practice
- Before committing to a plan or decision, the team is asked to assume it has failed one year from now.
- Each person independently writes down the reasons for the failure.
- Reasons are shared, clustered, and assessed: which risks are credible, which are material, and which can be mitigated?
- The plan is revised in response to the most significant risks identified.
- The exercise is documented so that risk owners and mitigations are explicit.
How to Practise It (Playbook)
1. Getting Started
- Choose a plan or decision that is high-stakes, high-uncertainty, or both.
- Set the scene: "Assume it's one year from now and this has failed badly. What went wrong?"
- Give everyone 5–10 minutes to write their failure reasons independently — before sharing.
- Share and cluster without attribution initially, then discuss: "Which of these do we think are most likely?"
- Identify the top 3–5 risks and ask: "What would we do now to reduce the likelihood or impact?"
2. Scaling and Maturing
- Build pre-mortem exercises into major investment decisions, programme launches, and significant strategic choices.
- Assign risk owners for each material risk identified — someone accountable for monitoring and mitigation.
- Revisit pre-mortem outputs at regular intervals during execution to check whether predicted risks are materialising.
- Use post-mortems to compare: which pre-mortem risks actually occurred? What did we miss?
3. Team Behaviours to Encourage
- People contribute honest, specific failure scenarios rather than diplomatic hedge statements.
- Senior voices do not dominate — everyone's failure imagination is equally valid.
- The pre-mortem findings are treated as input to improve the plan, not as criticism of it.
- Leaders respond to pre-mortem concerns with curiosity, not defensiveness.
4. Watch Out For…
- Pre-mortems conducted as a formality, where challenging failure scenarios are softened to avoid discomfort.
- Leaders who visibly react badly to negative scenarios, suppressing honest contribution.
- Pre-mortem findings that are documented but never acted on.
- Using pre-mortem as a tool to delay or kill a plan rather than to improve it.
5. Signals of Success
- The pre-mortem surfaces risks that were not in the original plan — the exercise is adding value.
- Plans are meaningfully revised following pre-mortem analysis, not just validated.
- Teams feel free to imagine failure honestly, without social penalty.
- Predicted risks that are mitigated do not materialise — proactive risk management works.
- The practice becomes routine for high-stakes decisions — not a special event.