── ── Decision-making
Pre-Mortem
A Pre-Mortem is a planning exercise where you imagine the project has already failed badly, then work backward to explain why. By treating failure as a given rather than a possibility, the team surfaces risks that optimism normally suppresses — and can address them before any resources are committed.
How it works
Before launching, gather the team and state: 'It is one year from now and this project has failed completely.' Each person independently writes the story of how the failure happened. Framing it as certain, not hypothetical, frees people to voice doubts they'd otherwise withhold.
Collect the failure stories, cluster the recurring causes, and convert the most plausible and damaging ones into concrete mitigations or kill criteria. The exercise turns vague unease into a specific, actionable risk list.
When to use it
- Before committing to a major product launch or platform migration
- At the start of a fundraise or large hiring push
- When a plan has strong team consensus and little visible dissent
- Before signing a contract or partnership that is hard to unwind
When not to use it
Not worthwhile for small, reversible decisions where the cost of failure is low and quick correction is easy.
Worked example
Gary Klein's prospective hindsight technique
Research psychologist Gary Klein popularized the pre-mortem after studies on 'prospective hindsight' found that imagining an outcome has already occurred makes people markedly better at identifying reasons for it. By assuming the failure as fact, teams generate concrete causes that standard 'what could go wrong?' brainstorming tends to miss because no one wants to seem negative.
Why it matters for founders
Founders are selected for relentless optimism, which is exactly why their teams underweight the failure modes everyone privately suspects. A pre-mortem legitimizes dissent and converts gut-level worry into a checklist before the irreversible bet is placed. deciqAI's agents reason through how an action could fail before executing it, so the failure analysis happens upfront rather than in the post-mortem.
Install this skill (free, MIT)
npx skills add deciqAI/knowledge-skillsFAQ
How is a pre-mortem different from a risk assessment?
A standard risk assessment asks what might go wrong, which invites hedged, polite answers. A pre-mortem asserts failure as a fact and asks why, which produces sharper, more honest causes.
When in the process should we run it?
Right before committing significant resources — late enough that the plan is concrete, early enough that you can still change course or set kill criteria.