Why I Run a Pre-Mortem Before Every Kickoff

说明与用途

预先死亡预演识别计划中常被忽视的具体风险，并为主动缓解指定负责人和触发器。

问题

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

结果

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

工作流

• 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.

证据

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

来源

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

来源