Pre-Mortem

Prospective failure analysis that defeats optimism bias by assuming failure first, then working backward to surface risks, early warnings, and escape hatches.

Based on Gary Klein's pre-mortem technique: Instead of asking "will this work?" (which triggers optimism bias), this skill forces the question: "It's 6 months from now and this has completely failed. What went wrong?"

Key distinction from adversarial-review:

• adversarial-review examines the CURRENT state — "what's wrong NOW?"
• pre-mortem examines the FUTURE — "what will go wrong LATER?"
• Adversarial review finds existing flaws. Pre-mortem anticipates flaws that don't exist yet.

Rules (Absolute)