Pre-mortem analysis
Pre-mortem analysis
One-line summary: Podcast / speaker claim — gary-klein’s risk method assumes the plan has already failed, then gives the room two minutes to write why; “what could go wrong” is a different (weaker) exercise. Decision-science chip, not a trade.
The insight
Klein’s move is prospective hindsight at kickoff: treat the post-mortem as if the project already died, so people list causes instead of polite risks. Timing (about two minutes) and order (leader first, with a real undiscussed problem) are load-bearing. paul-johnson says the “what could go wrong” paraphrase kills the method. paul-sonkin says the reasons are already at the tip of the group’s tongue; the method plus psychological safety is what lets them be said.
This is adjacent to group-decision-hygiene (candor, leader infection, red teams) and to kill-criteria (imagine failure in advance) but is a distinct ritual: crystal-ball failure, timed writing, forced democracy of one idea each, then later mitigation/replan. Not a newsroom post-mortem and not a stock-market mechanism.
Evidence
- gary-klein in 2026-08-17-podcast-capital-allocators-best-of-pre-mortem-analysis-gary-klein: "Why don't we try to move that up front to the kickoff meeting?"
- gary-klein in 2026-08-17-podcast-capital-allocators-best-of-pre-mortem-analysis-gary-klein: "When we tried three minutes, a lot of people would be finished and they be twiddling their thumbs and it will reduce the energy of the room. So two minutes seemed to be the sweet spot."
- gary-klein in 2026-08-17-podcast-capital-allocators-best-of-pre-mortem-analysis-gary-klein: "it's really important for the leader to come up with a real problem that hadn't been discussed before."
- gary-klein in 2026-08-17-podcast-capital-allocators-best-of-pre-mortem-analysis-gary-klein: "You can't say what could go wrong. You say, I'm looking at a crystal ball. The plan has failed. There's no doubt that changes the mindset that instead of just sort of musing about it, now you're seeing a disaster and you're now in a mode of, of what caused that disaster, it changes the kinds of issues people identify."
- paul-johnson in 2026-08-17-podcast-capital-allocators-best-of-pre-mortem-analysis-gary-klein: "they'll just say, okay, what could go wrong? And they think they're doing a pre mortem, but just that subtle framing kind of kills the effectiveness."
- paul-sonkin in 2026-08-17-podcast-capital-allocators-best-of-pre-mortem-analysis-gary-klein: "So that knowledge is in the group, at the tip of their tongue. They're thinking about all through them, planning meetings, and nobody brings it up."
- paul-sonkin in 2026-08-17-podcast-capital-allocators-best-of-pre-mortem-analysis-gary-klein: "the most important factor for me is psychological safety."
Why it matters to psychology
A named group-judgment procedure with a falsifiable misuse mode (critiquing language) and a safety/leader-buy-in failure mode. Fits the thread’s decision-making subdomain next to Duke’s hygiene tools without collapsing into them.
Contradictions / tensions
- Klein also introduces the method as anticipating “what could possibly go wrong,” then later forbids that phrasing in the facilitation script. Keep the script claim (crystal ball / has failed) as the load-bearing one.
- Show notes say Klein found pre-mortems with fighter pilots; transcript color includes an Air Force / 486-vs-supercomputer story. Do not flatten those as independently verified history.
- Do not mint a stock-market trade or tag this page
project/stock-market. The same source is logged there as craft / zero-novelty only.
Open questions
- How much of the effect is the crystal-ball frame versus forced writing versus leader-goes-first?
- Does the 1989 prospective-hindsight paper (mentioned in-episode) still carry the method, or has practice drifted?
Related
- group-decision-hygiene — overlapping candor / leader-sets-the-room problem; red teams are a different inversion
- kill-criteria — also imagines failure in advance; pre-mortem is a meeting ritual, kill criteria are if-then quit rules
- gary-klein
- paul-johnson
- paul-sonkin