Knowledge Base · Tools & Terms
What is a pre-mortem, and how do I run one?
A pre-mortem is a short exercise run before a project launches: the team imagines the project has already failed, works backwards to list the ways it could have failed, rates those risks, and turns the serious ones into mitigations while there is still time to act on them.
The timing is the whole idea. A post-mortem examines a failure after the fact, when the lessons are expensive. A pre-mortem runs the same honest conversation at the start, when acting on it is cheap. Imagining failure first also changes what people are willing to say: concerns that sound like disloyalty in a planning meeting become useful contributions when the exercise explicitly asks for them.
- Set the scene: it is some months from now and the initiative has failed. Ask the team to take that as fact, not as a prediction to argue with.
- Have each person write down the ways it could have failed: the causes they can already half-see, from resources and timing to people and assumptions.
- Share and group the failure modes, then rate the risk of each: how likely, and how damaging if it happens.
- Convert the serious risks into mitigations: a change to the plan, an early warning sign to watch, or a named owner. Write at least one mitigation for each of the top risks.
ClarionEX frames its Pre-Mortem tool the same way: anticipate project failure modes and create mitigations before problems happen, because anticipation is cheaper than reaction. Its starter exercise is three ways an initiative could fail and one mitigation for each. Run the full version whenever a launch matters and failure would be costly to unwind.
Run a Pre-Mortem in ClarionEX (free in Lite)
Related questions
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Source: ADX site content: ClarionEX tool guidance (Pre-Mortem).