Premortem
A premortem is a planning exercise — formalised by Gary Klein in a 2007 Harvard Business Review article — where, before starting a project, the team imagines the project has failed and works backward to identify what could plausibly cause that failure. Premortems surface risks that consensus-driven planning suppresses.
The technique exploits a quirk of human cognition: people are markedly better at generating reasons something has gone wrong than reasons something might go wrong. The framing 'imagine it failed; explain why' produces a more honest risk list than 'what could go wrong?' — partly because publicly disagreeing with an active plan has social cost, while autopsying a hypothetical past failure does not. Practical use: 30-60 minutes at project kickoff, each person individually writes their top three failure causes, the team consolidates and ranks, mitigations are added to the project plan. Premortems pair naturally with sprint or quarter retrospectives — failure modes identified in the premortem can be tracked over time.
Related terms
- Blameless postmortem
A blameless postmortem is an incident review structured to identify systemic causes — flawed processes, missing alerts, fragile dependencies — rather than individual fault.
- Planning fallacy
The planning fallacy is the cognitive bias toward predicting that one's own task will take less time than past tasks of similar scope.