Why I Run a Pre-Mortem Before Every Kickoff

Description and use

Pre‑mortem identifies concrete risks often missed in planning and assigns owners and tripwires for proactive mitigation.

Problem

Planning sessions often miss concrete, actionable risks that can derail a project, especially in AI and software development.

Outcome

The pre‑mortem surfaces specific, actionable failure scenarios that are often missed in traditional planning, enabling early mitigation through owners and tripwires.

Workflow

• Read the framing sentence: "It is six months from now, the project has failed badly, and we are explaining what happened."
• Five minutes of silent writing: each participant lists reasons for failure alone.
• Round‑robin readout: each person shares one reason per turn until all lists are empty.
• Group the reasons on a board and select the five that would hurt most.
• Assign an owner and a tripwire to each of the five risks before leaving the room.

Evidence

A pre‑mortem produces sentences describing something a person actually watched happen once, named in enough detail to be plannable

Source

The exercise has also become the first thing I bring to a new software consulting engagement, ahead of the plan

Source