Pre-mortem

A pre-mortem is a risk workshop technique developed by psychologist Gary Klein, now widely used in project risk management. Rather than asking 'what could go wrong?', the facilitator asks the team to assume it is one year from now and the project has failed badly — costs overran significantly, the programme slipped, the client is unhappy. The team's task is to write down, individually, all the reasons why this failure occurred. The facilitator then collects the answers and works through them with the group. The technique exploits the human tendency to generate explanations more easily when given a reference point — the 'failure' — than when asked to imagine abstract future risks.

Pre-mortems are particularly effective at surfaces risks that team members know about but are reluctant to raise in a conventional workshop setting. When the narrative is framed as 'the project already failed, what happened?', it removes the social inhibition around raising concerns that might seem like criticism of the team's plan or competence. People are more willing to articulate a specific failure scenario than to raise a concern that sounds like pessimism or disloyalty. This is why pre-mortems often generate a different set of risks from a conventional prompt-list exercise — they tap into tacit knowledge that polite group dynamics tend to suppress.

Combining a pre-mortem with a conventional risk workshop gives broader coverage than either technique alone. Run the conventional exercise first to capture the structured risk categories, then run a pre-mortem to surface the less structured, more intuitive concerns. The overlap between the two sets of risks is reassuring — it suggests the obvious risks are being captured. The gaps — risks that appeared in the pre-mortem but not the conventional register — are the most valuable output, because they are the risks that the formal process missed. Treat those gaps as high-priority items for further analysis.