Project Pre-Mortem
Assumes the project already failed and works backwards to the causes, which surfaces risks that a forward-looking risk register reliably misses.
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Running it, start to finish
- Describe the project, the real deadline and the dependencies you do not control.
- Read the failure narrative before the cause list — the order matters.
- Do the one thing from section 5 this week, and post section 3 where the team will see it.
What you get back
The output this produces, every time.
- States the failure as fact and works backwards, which surfaces risks that forward-looking registers miss.
- Separates when each cause started from when it first became visible — the gap where projects are lost.
- Ranks the cheap interventions by risk removed per hour, and names the single one to do this week.
Getting better results
Where this usually goes wrong, and how to avoid it.
- Do not skip the narrative. It feels indulgent and it is the mechanism. A vividly described failure produces specific causes; an abstract one produces a generic risk list.
- Run it with the team. and have everyone write causes before anyone reads them out. Pre-mortems done in open discussion converge on whatever the most senior person says first.
- Put the early signals somewhere visible. Section 3 is only useful if someone is watching for them once the project is under way.
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Written for The AI University. Every prompt in this library is original work — authored, tested and revised here, not collected from elsewhere. 365 of them, free with an account.