Performing a Project Premortem¶
Klein, G. (2007). Performing a Project Premortem. Harvard Business Review, 85(9), 103-104.
Cited by¶
21 citations across 21 artifacts.
Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.
Primes¶
- Abilene Paradox
- The compression also sorts the interventions, each attacking the aggregation channel that filters out private disagreement. Anonymous preference elicitation before discussion removes the impression-management cost by hiding who holds which view. Explicit pre-mortems license dissent by making "imagine this failed — why?" a sanctioned move.
This sourceIntroduces the pre-mortem technique, which licenses dissent by sanctioning imagined-failure analysis before a decision is committed.
- The compression also sorts the interventions, each attacking the aggregation channel that filters out private disagreement. Anonymous preference elicitation before discussion removes the impression-management cost by hiding who holds which view. Explicit pre-mortems license dissent by making "imagine this failed — why?" a sanctioned move.
- Cromwell's Rule
- Organizational decision-making — "strong opinions, weakly held," pre-mortems, and red teams each keep organizational beliefs off the 0/1 boundary so disconfirming information can act.
This sourceIntroduces the pre-mortem — assume the project has failed and generate reasons — as an organizational practice that surfaces disconfirming possibilities, keeping group beliefs off the certainty boundary.
- Organizational decision-making — "strong opinions, weakly held," pre-mortems, and red teams each keep organizational beliefs off the 0/1 boundary so disconfirming information can act.
- Feedforward
- The user predicts the outcome from the interface rather than from experiencing the action. Organizational planning and governance. Pre-mortems, environmental-impact statements, and budget projections give decision-makers a model of downstream consequence before resources are committed.
This sourceDescribes the pre-mortem: imagining a project has already failed to model downstream consequences before resources are committed, supporting the organizational-planning use and the pre-mortem example.
- The user predicts the outcome from the interface rather than from experiencing the action. Organizational planning and governance. Pre-mortems, environmental-impact statements, and budget projections give decision-makers a model of downstream consequence before resources are committed.
- Implementation Intention
- The same structure governs organizational tripwires: a board pre-commits "if monthly burn exceeds $X for two consecutive months, we trigger the layoff plan," binding the painful action to a named threshold before motivated reasoning can bend the decision when the moment comes.
This sourcePremortem technique and organizational tripwires that name a threshold and the action it triggers, fixing the response before bias can bend the decision.
- The same structure governs organizational tripwires: a board pre-commits "if monthly burn exceeds $X for two consecutive months, we trigger the layoff plan," binding the painful action to a named threshold before motivated reasoning can bend the decision when the moment comes.
- Planning Fallacy
- The pre-mortem asks the team, before commitment, to imagine the project has already failed and to write its post-mortem, forcing the inside-view simulation to visit the failure modes it would otherwise skip.
This sourceIntroduces the pre-mortem — imagining the project has already failed and writing its post-mortem to surface omitted failure modes.
- The pre-mortem asks the team, before commitment, to imagine the project has already failed and to write its post-mortem, forcing the inside-view simulation to visit the failure modes it would otherwise skip.
- Proof By Contradiction
- And the philosophical reductio transfers to strategy stress-testing: the pre-mortem ("assume the launch failed; what story do we tell?") is reductio applied to forward planning, carrying the same vocabulary of assume-failure, derive-proximate-causes, locate-the-broken-assumption.
This sourceThe pre-mortem assumes a project has failed and works backward to plausible causes — reductio applied to forward planning.
- And the philosophical reductio transfers to strategy stress-testing: the pre-mortem ("assume the launch failed; what story do we tell?") is reductio applied to forward planning, carrying the same vocabulary of assume-failure, derive-proximate-causes, locate-the-broken-assumption.
- Weak Signals & Emerging Issues
- The matching organizational failure mode — that ambiguity-holding capacity is structurally suppressed by operational-clarity pressure — is the central pathology Klein (2007) addresses in his prescription of the project pre-mortem as an explicit institutional permission to entertain failure narratives that decision routines otherwise filter out.
This sourceIntroduces the pre-mortem technique: imagining a project has already failed and working backward to identify how. Establishes the asymmetry between cheap articulation of failure modes and expensive provisioning against them — the structural pattern wild-card analysis exhibits at organizational scale.
- The matching organizational failure mode — that ambiguity-holding capacity is structurally suppressed by operational-clarity pressure — is the central pathology Klein (2007) addresses in his prescription of the project pre-mortem as an explicit institutional permission to entertain failure narratives that decision routines otherwise filter out.
- Wild Cards
- Structural tension: Identifying a wild card is cheap; provisioning for it is expensive — a pattern Klein (2007) names in his HBR treatment of the pre-mortem, where articulating the failure is the inexpensive step and acting on it is the costly one.
This sourceIntroduces the pre-mortem technique: imagining a project has already failed and working backward to identify how. Establishes the asymmetry between cheap articulation of failure modes and expensive provisioning against them — the structural pattern wild-card analysis exhibits at organizational scale.
- Structural tension: Identifying a wild card is cheap; provisioning for it is expensive — a pattern Klein (2007) names in his HBR treatment of the pre-mortem, where articulating the failure is the inexpensive step and acting on it is the costly one.
Mechanisms¶
- Blend Coherence Review
- Its spirit is that of the premortem — deliberately assuming the idea has failed and asking why, to expose weaknesses while they can still be fixed.
This sourceDescribes a premortem in which a team assumes a planned project has failed, generates plausible causes, and surfaces weaknesses before execution.
- Its spirit is that of the premortem — deliberately assuming the idea has failed and asking why, to expose weaknesses while they can still be fixed.
- Bubble Premortem
- Its strength is psychological leverage: the premortem
This sourceA premortem assigns the team to assume failure and generate causes, making it safer to surface reservations and dissent.
- Its strength is psychological leverage: the premortem
- False-Consensus Premortem
- - Stipulate the failure. Rather than asking will the consensus hold?, the exercise asserts it did not, which licenses people to voice doubts they would suppress while defending a live plan — the same unlocking that gives a classic premortem
This sourceIntroduces the premortem by assuming a project has failed, thereby making it safe for knowledgeable dissenters to surface reservations.
- - Stipulate the failure. Rather than asking will the consensus hold?, the exercise asserts it did not, which licenses people to voice doubts they would suppress while defending a live plan — the same unlocking that gives a classic premortem
- Hotspot Tabletop Stress Test
- The corrective borrows from the premortem — assume the failure has already happened and reason backward to why
This sourceDocuments assume the failure has already happened and reason backward to why.
- The corrective borrows from the premortem — assume the failure has already happened and reason backward to why
- Pre-Mortem
- Before breaking ground on a transit-tunnel megaproject, the delivery team runs a pre-mortem, following the structure Gary Klein described.
This sourceDescribes Gary Klein's project premortem: before launch, the team assumes the planned project has failed and generates plausible reasons.
- Before breaking ground on a transit-tunnel megaproject, the delivery team runs a pre-mortem, following the structure Gary Klein described.
- Precommitment Challenge Session
- Before the vote, the chair runs a pre-mortem: the committee is told to imagine it is eighteen months later and the acquisition has failed badly, and a designated challenger is charged with arguing, concretely, why.
This sourceIntroduces the premortem exercise: assume a planned project has already failed, then generate plausible reasons for the failure.
- Before the vote, the chair runs a pre-mortem: the committee is told to imagine it is eighteen months later and the acquisition has failed badly, and a designated challenger is charged with arguing, concretely, why.
- Premortem
- Its strength is uniquely psychological: prospective hindsight measurably loosens the imagination and, more importantly, gives people social cover to voice a doubt they were sitting on.
This sourceExplains that prospective hindsight improves the generation of explanations for failure and that a premortem legitimizes team members’ otherwise unspoken doubts.
- Its strength is uniquely psychological: prospective hindsight measurably loosens the imagination and, more importantly, gives people social cover to voice a doubt they were sitting on.
- Premortem Margin Review
- The disciplines are individual generation first, an owner and a due date on every finding, and a revisit before go-live to confirm the thin margins were actually thickened.
This sourcePrescribes independent individual generation of possible failure causes at the start of a project premortem.
- The disciplines are individual generation first, an owner and a due date on every finding, and a revisit before go-live to confirm the thin margins were actually thickened.
- Premortem Unknowns Round
- Its strength is that prospective hindsight loosens tongues: imagining a failure that has "already happened" makes people far more willing to name risks than asking them to critique a plan still on the table.
This sourceUses prospective hindsight - assuming that a project has already failed - to make it safer for team members to voice risks and reservations.
- Its strength is that prospective hindsight loosens tongues: imagining a failure that has "already happened" makes people far more willing to name risks than asking them to critique a plan still on the table.
- Regret Pre-Mortem
- First, prospective hindsight
This sourceDescribes prospective hindsight as assuming a project has already failed and then generating plausible causes, making threats easier to identify before execution.
- First, prospective hindsight
- Sealed-Bid Premortem
- A valuation model can shade for a known number of rivals and a known noise level; the premortem
This sourceUses imagined failure to surface threats and suppressed concerns before commitment.
- A valuation model can shade for a known number of rivals and a known noise level; the premortem
- Stakeholder Transition Workshop
- Triangulation Red-Team Review
- It operationalizes the premortem: imagining the conclusion has already failed, then working backward to the cause, surfaces failure paths that forward-looking review suppresses.
This sourceDefines a premortem as assuming a plan has failed and working backward to surface possible causes that ordinary review may suppress.
- It operationalizes the premortem: imagining the conclusion has already failed, then working backward to the cause, surfaces failure paths that forward-looking review suppresses.
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