⚡ Advanced Techniques·Works on: claude, chatgpt

Pre-Mortem Failure Analysis

Technique: Pre-Mortem

Imagine the project failed 6 months from now. Work backwards. (Used at Amazon.)

Advanced#pre-mortem#risk#strategy#amazon

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Conduct a pre-mortem analysis. Imagine my project has FAILED 6 months from now. We are now writing the post-mortem, looking backwards.

Project: 
Launch date assumption: 
Definition of failure: 

Write the post-mortem from 6 months in the future:

1. **The headline** — one sentence summarizing why we failed.
2. **Timeline of disaster** — month-by-month, what went wrong:
   - Month 1: …
   - Month 2: …
   - Month 3: …
   - Month 4: …
   - Month 5: …
   - Month 6 (failure recognised): …
3. **The earliest warning sign we ignored** — the specific moment when we could have caught this.
4. **The decision that locked the failure in** — the single point of no return.
5. **Who saw it coming** — which team member or stakeholder, in retrospect, was raising the right concern that we dismissed.
6. **The cheap intervention we didn't make** — the small action in Month 1 that would have prevented this.

Now snap back to today. The post-mortem above is FICTIONAL but plausible. List the 3 concrete things I should change THIS WEEK to make this exact failure mode less likely.

Inputs0 of 3

1Paste description

2Date

3e.g. "<10 paying customers", "team disbanded", "shipped late and broken"e.g. "<10 paying customers", "team disbanded", "shipped late and broken"

›See the lazy version this template replaces

Before — the lazy prompt

Will my project succeed?

Why it works

Pre-mortems exploit a known psychological asymmetry: humans are vastly better at explaining failure than predicting it.
Forcing a month-by-month timeline catches gradual decay that single-point analysis misses.
'Who saw it coming' surfaces team-dynamics risk that purely strategic analysis misses.
Ending with 'this week' actions turns the exercise from theatre into intervention.

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