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