Imagine it failed. Work out why.
A structured risk-identification technique in which a group imagines that a plan or project has already failed, then works backwards to identify what caused it. Developed by psychologist Gary Klein, it gives teams a practical way to surface concerns and weak points that might otherwise go unspoken in the enthusiasm of planning, before commitment is too deep to act on what is found.
The pre-mortem works because it reframes dissent as contribution. In most planning conversations, raising doubts can feel like disloyalty or pessimism. The pre-mortem removes that barrier by making scepticism the task. Everyone in the room is asked to think of reasons the plan might fail, which means concerns arrive as analysis rather than as opposition.
The exercise typically runs in two stages. First, participants write down individually all the reasons they can imagine for the failure. Individual generation before group discussion prevents early voices from anchoring the conversation and gives quieter participants an equal footing. The group then shares and clusters what it has found, looking for patterns and prioritising the risks that are both likely and consequential.
The pre-mortem is most valuable when run just before a plan is finalised, while there is still room to revise it. It works as a pressure-testing tool for existing ideas, making it a natural close to a strategy or project planning session. The output is a short list of the highest-priority risks and an agreed set of mitigations or early warning signals to watch for during delivery.
Participants leave with a clearer, more honest picture of where a plan is vulnerable and which risks deserve attention before execution begins. The technique tends to surface concerns that people held privately but had not raised, and it converts vague anxiety into specific, actionable observations. Teams finish more confident in what they are about to do, or better prepared to adapt it.
Ask the group to imagine it is a year from now and the strategy has failed, then work backwards to name what caused it. Making scepticism the task lets people voice concerns they might otherwise hold back, and the specificity of the causes is what makes it useful.
The group is about to imagine a specific future: it is twelve months from now, and the strategy has not delivered what the room committed to today. The task is to work backwards and identify what caused the failure. Explain why this framing helps: in most planning conversations, raising doubts can feel like disloyalty, and the pre-mortem removes that barrier by making scepticism the task. Concerns arrive as analysis, and people who held reservations privately can now voice them as contributions.
Ask people to write privately: we are twelve months from today, and the strategy has not delivered. What went wrong, and why did it fail? Ask for specific, named causes. 'Poor execution' is not specific enough; 'the two business units could not agree on priorities and kept reverting to their existing agendas' is. The specificity is what makes the exercise useful.
People share what they have written, and you cluster the failures into themes, typically three to five categories: execution failures, capability gaps, external factors the strategy did not account for, internal alignment failures, and resource or timeline assumptions that proved wrong. Ask: of these, which are most likely, and which would be most consequential?
For the two or three highest-priority risks, ask what can be done now, before execution begins, to reduce the likelihood of each happening. Are there early warning signals the team should monitor? Does the strategy itself need to change in response to any of these findings?
Ask whether any concerns raised in this exercise have not yet been addressed directly, and give space for anything that remains unsaid. Some pre-mortem conversations surface concerns about individual leadership, internal politics, or cultural dynamics. If these come up, name them as important, since they often point to the most significant delivery risks.
Use Pre-Mortem when a plan is about to be finalised and you want to surface its risks while there is still time to act. The group imagines the plan has already failed and works backwards, turning private doubts into specific, named causes to guard against.
Using this tool with a skilled facilitator means that discussions are focused, time is used efficiently, and the group moves toward consensus, making the session productive and impactful.
