What it corrects
Once a group likes a plan, “what could go wrong?” is a weak prompt. People stay anchored on the plan and criticism becomes socially expensive. A pre-mortem uses prospective hindsight: it treats failure as if it has already happened and asks for the causes.
The shift makes specific failure stories easier to generate while the team can still act on them.
How it works
- Set a date and state that the decision failed badly.
- Generate causes independently before anybody debates them.
- Combine overlapping causes and identify the most plausible.
- Turn each priority cause into prevention, a tripwire, or a contingency.
In a Business Case Weekly case
In the Bloomberg case, imagine the proposed product is abandoned after a year. The useful causes are case-specific: a workflow it never fits, a dependency the company cannot control, or economics that fail before adoption compounds.
In your answer
- “It is twelve months later and this failed because …”
- “That explanation depends on the assumption that …”
- “The earliest warning signal is …; if it appears, I would …”
Common misuse
A list of dramatic disasters is not a pre-mortem. Prioritise plausible failure modes connected to the decision, then change the plan or its monitoring. Otherwise the exercise produces anxiety rather than judgment.