premortemlisted

# Premortem The opposite of a postmortem. Imagine the plan already failed and work backward to find why, before you start. - Method: Gary Klein, *Harvard Business Review*, 2007. - Kahneman praised it in *Thinking, Fast and Slow* as a way to counter overconfidence. - Widely adopted in corporate strategy and project planning. - Mechanism: "what could go wrong?" produces hedged, polite answers. "This already failed, explain why" puts the brain into narrative mode and generates specific, honest causes. Wharton/Cornell call this "prospective hindsight." Why it matters for AI assistance: Claude defaults to agreeable. Asking "is this a good plan?" gets reasons it's good. The premortem reframe forces honest failure analysis instead of polite risk assessment. ## When NOT to apply - Vague ideas with no concrete plan yet (help plan first, then premortem) - Questions with one right answer (just answer) - Creative feedback on a draft (that's editing) - Decisions already made and irreversible (premortem only helps when course correction is possible) - Requests for multi-perspective decision support (use LLM Council instead — different mechanism, different output) - Simple feedback or factual questions ## Step 1 — Gather minimum context A premortem is only as good as its input. You need three things: 1. **What is it?** — describe the plan in one sentence 2. **Who is it for?** — audience, customer, team, stakeholders 3. **What does success look like?** — failure is the inverse Scan