Y12W09WR The pre-mortem
Choose a real project or decision you’re currently committed to, and run a pre-mortem on it — then reflect on what the exercise revealed.
1Retrieval check
Q1.What does Gary Klein’s pre-mortem ask you to do?
- AGrade a decision after it’s finished
- BBefore committing, imagine the plan has failed in six months and work backward to the most likely reasons — a prospective-hindsight frame
- CIgnore risks
- DConsult an astrologer
Q2.What’s the article’s counter-thread on pre-mortems?
- AThey always find real risks
- BThey can tip an already risk-averse group toward excessive caution — best used as a structured counter-weight, not the sole criterion
- CThey work only in business contexts
- DThey have no research support
Show answer key
Q1 → B. Before committing, imagine the plan has failed in six months and work backward to the most likely reasons — a prospective-hindsight frame.Teams using pre-mortems identify roughly 30%+ more risks than teams not using them, and the risks are more specific and actionable.
Q2 → B. They can tip an already risk-averse group toward excessive caution — best used as a structured counter-weight, not the sole criterion.Pre-mortems work when you take the failure seriously; self-criticism dressed up as analysis doesn’t surface real structural vulnerabilities.
2Prompt deconstruction
- Command verb
- OBSERVE — run a pre-mortem, then reflect on what it revealed
- Project you pick
- something real, specific enough that failure would matter
- Must include
- at least four distinct failure modes, each with its mechanism; what this surfaced that planning hadn’t
- Check
- caution-bias risk — the exercise leaning you toward excessive caution
3Pick nudge
Which real project or decision will you test before it fails?
4Planner — for each of your picks
5Sentence stems
- I noticed that ___ when ___.
- The specific moment it stood out was ___.
- Before paying attention, I had been assuming ___.
- [Researcher’s] finding that ___ captures what I saw, because ___.
- The pattern across my cases is ___.
- What this tells me about [wider topic] is ___.
6Exemplar paragraph (not about this article)
(1) The project is my exam-prep plan across the three weeks before mid-year. (2) Imagining it has failed in six months, the four most plausible causes, in order, are: (2-a) I didn’t leave enough time for the weakest subject because I planned around a study timetable built from Term 1’s strengths, not the current picture; (2-b) I over-scheduled past 9 p.m. and burnt through focus for the actual exam days; (2-c) I relied on one practice exam to gauge readiness, and that exam happened to land on a topic I’d just reviewed; (2-d) a personal commitment I haven’t factored in (a relative’s birthday week) eats a study block I’m silently counting on. (3) Before doing the pre-mortem, I had assumed my main risk was motivation; running the exercise made visible that motivation is not the variable — allocation is. (4) The specific moment it stood out was writing ‘personal commitment’ — I almost didn’t include it because it felt trivial, and then noticed that if it does eat that block, the whole plan is short two days of maths. (5) The pattern across my failure modes is that they are quiet and administrative, not dramatic. (6) What this changes is specific: I’ll rebuild the timetable from weakest-subject first, cap evening study at 9, and make the family commitment explicit in the schedule.
What this paragraph does, move by move
- Names the project concretely.
- Supplies four specific failure modes with mechanisms.
- Reveals the assumption the pre-mortem contradicted.
- Names the moment a near-missed mode surfaced.
- States the pattern (quiet, not dramatic).
- Closes with specific, actionable changes.
- Choosing a selection results in a full page refresh.
- Opens in a new window.