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Pre-mortem for a plan

Before you launch anything, imagine it has failed spectacularly and work backwards to what went wrong.

How it works

The pre-mortem is a proven technique for surfacing risks the room is politely ignoring. AI is unusually good at running it because it doesn't need to protect anyone's feelings. How to run it well: - Do it before final sign-off, not after. - Share the AI draft with the delivery team and ask them to add three more failure modes it missed. - Turn the top 3 failure modes into design changes before launch. Watch out for: - Fatalism: this is not "let's cancel the plan" — it's "let's make the plan more robust". - Blame: the point is systems, not individuals.

Example prompt

It is 12 months after we launched {INITIATIVE} at our YMCA association and it has failed. Write a candid pre-mortem: (1) the top 5 reasons it failed, split between internal (culture, capacity, comms, leadership attention) and external (funding, participants, partners, environment), (2) the earliest signal we could have spotted for each, (3) one intervention we could have made in the first 90 days to prevent each, (4) which of these we should design against now. Be uncomfortable — this is more useful than reassurance.