The Pre-Mortem

The team imagines the project has already failed, and writes the post-mortem for it. Framing it as a certainty rather than a risk removes the social cost of pessimism, and teams surface things in forty minutes that a risk register would never have caught.

What it is good for

• Problem solvingStructuring an ambiguous problem under a time limit.
• Trust & safetyLowering the cost of admitting a mistake or asking for help.
• CommunicationPractising clear hand-offs, active listening and saying the hard thing early.
• Leadership practiceGiving people a low-stakes place to direct, delegate and decide.

What you need

• Sticky notes or a shared board
• The project plan, visible

The run sheet

1. State the failure as fact (3 min)

   'It is December. The project shipped late, and the thing we were afraid of happened. We are writing the post-mortem.' Past tense throughout, and correct people who slip into 'might'. The tense is the technique.

2. Silent writing (10 min)

   Everyone writes causes individually, one per note, no discussion. Silence protects the quiet and the junior, who in most teams know exactly what is going to go wrong.

3. Read every note aloud, cluster (20 min)

   Read them all without editorialising, then cluster by cause. Count the clusters — repetition is signal.

4. Rank by plausibility, not severity (10 min)

   Dot vote on 'most likely to actually happen'. Severity rankings produce dramatic answers; plausibility produces useful ones.

5. Owners and first actions for the top three (20 min)

   Each of the top three gets a named owner and one concrete action with a date. Anything without those is a feeling, not a finding.

Facilitator notes

• The most senior person must not speak during the silent write and should write the most uncomfortable note themselves. Everyone is watching to see what is allowed.
• Run it after the plan exists but before anyone is committed to it publicly. Too early and it is vague, too late and it is unwelcome.
• Keep the clustered board. Reviewing it at the actual post-mortem is uncomfortable in exactly the right way.

Debrief questions

Ask these immediately afterwards, not next week. Fifteen minutes of these is what turns the activity into something the team refers back to — see the debrief guide.

1. Which cause came up on more than one person's note?
2. Was there anything on the board that people already knew but had not said out loud?
3. What is the earliest signal we would see if the top risk were starting to happen?

Variations