Premortem Analysis: How to Anticipate Failure

is, if you could learn how you might fail without going to the trouble of actually failing? That’s the idea behind a “premortem,” as the psychologist Gary Klein calls it. The idea is simple. Many institutions already conduct a postmortem on failed projects, hoping to learn exactly what killed the patient. A premortem tries to find out what might go

With a premortem, the investigation comes before we have acted, when the actual outcome isn’t known—before we fire the rockets, close the sale, or complete the merger. In a premortem, we travel forward in time and set up a thought experiment where we assume the project failed. We then step back and ask, “What went wrong?” By vividly visualizing a d

a premortem, a process that occurs before a decision is made. You assume you are in the future and the decision you made has failed. You then provide plausible reasons for that failure. In effect, you try to identify why your decision might lead to a poor outcome before you make the decision.

A premortem works backward from an undesired outcome. It forces you to think about what could go wrong before you act. When you conduct a premortem and think through what can go wrong, you should assign probabilities to each potential problem.64 If you quantify uncertainty ahead of time—there’s a 50 percent chance that your new product might fail—y