It’s three months from now and your project has failed.
What happened?
It’s an uncomfortable question. But it might be one of the most powerful questions you can ask before starting something important.
Imagine you’re about to launch a new initiative at work. Or begin a major personal goal—a training program, a business idea, a big creative project. The energy is high. The planning feels solid. Everyone involved is optimistic.
Now pause for a moment and imagine something different. Fast-forward three months.
The project didn’t work. The goal collapsed. The initiative stalled out. Looking back from the future, it’s clear that something went wrong.
What was it?
That simple mental exercise is known as a pre-mortem, and it has become one of the most useful decision-making tools in behavioral science and organizational leadership.
The idea may sound pessimistic at first. But in practice, it does the opposite. A pre-mortem helps people anticipate problems early enough to avoid them.
Learning From the Future
The concept of the pre-mortem was popularized by psychologist Gary Klein, who studied how people make decisions in high-stakes environments such as firefighting and military operations. Klein noticed that teams often struggled to speak openly about potential risks when planning a project. Optimism and group dynamics made it difficult to challenge the prevailing narrative that everything would work out.
His solution was simple and clever.
Instead of asking people to predict problems, have them envision them. Ask them to look forward and imagine that the project has already failed.
Once people mentally step into that future, their thinking changes. Instead of defending the plan, they begin searching for explanations.
- What might we have overlooked?
- Where could things fall apart?
- What risks did we underestimate?
Decision scientist Annie Duke, known for her work on decision-making under uncertainty, has been a strong advocate of this approach. In her writing and teaching, Duke often emphasizes that the goal of good decision-making is not perfect prediction. The future is too uncertain for that. Instead, the goal is to make decisions that are resilient to the many ways things might unfold.
Pre-mortems help us do exactly that.
They expand our thinking before a decision is locked in.
The Problem With Optimism
When we set a new goal or launch a project, our minds tend to focus on the path to success. We imagine the milestones we will hit. The progress we will make. The outcome we are working toward.
This optimism can be motivating. But it also creates blind spots.
Psychologists have long documented what is known as the planning fallacy, a bias first described by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. People consistently underestimate how long tasks will take and overestimate how smoothly projects will unfold.
We assume the best-case scenario and we forget to plan for the small obstacles that inevitably appear along the way.
Deadlines slip. Communication falters. Energy fades. Competing priorities emerge. None of these problems are unusual, but they are often ignored during planning because we are focused on the desired outcome.
A pre-mortem deliberately interrupts that optimism. By imagining failure ahead of time, we temporarily shift from hope to curiosity.
The goal is not to become pessimistic; the goal is to become realistic.
What a Pre-Mortem Reveals
One of the surprising benefits of pre-mortems is how quickly they surface risks that were hiding in plain sight.
Someone may point out that the timeline is unrealistic. Another person might raise concerns about unclear responsibilities. A third might highlight dependencies that could slow the entire effort down.
These insights often exist in the background of people’s minds, but they rarely surface during traditional planning conversations. Social dynamics, hierarchy, and optimism bias can all discourage people from raising concerns.
The pre-mortem changes the context of the discussion.
If failure has already occurred in the imagined future, pointing out risks no longer feels like criticism. It becomes a form of problem-solving.
Instead of asking, “What might go wrong?”—a question people sometimes hesitate to answer—the pre-mortem asks, “Why did this fail?”
That subtle shift unlocks much more honest thinking.
Preventing Problems Before They Start
Once potential failure points are identified, the real value of the pre-mortem emerges and you can begin designing around those risks.
Maybe the timeline needs more flexibility. Maybe roles need to be clarified. Maybe additional checkpoints are needed to catch issues earlier. Sometimes the pre-mortem even reveals that a project should be redesigned before it begins.
In this way, the exercise functions like a mental simulation.
Instead of learning from mistakes after they happen, you learn from imagined mistakes before they occur.
This approach aligns closely with Annie Duke’s broader philosophy of decision-making. In uncertain environments, good decisions do not guarantee good outcomes. But thoughtful preparation dramatically improves the odds.
A pre-mortem strengthens the process that leads to the outcome.
Using a Pre-Mortem for Personal Goals
Although pre-mortems are widely used in organizations, they are just as valuable for personal goals.
Consider the kinds of ambitions many people set each year: improving fitness, launching a side project, writing regularly, building a new skill, or changing a long-standing habit.
These goals often begin with enthusiasm but gradually lose momentum.
A pre-mortem can reveal why.
Imagine it is three months in the future, and the goal did not stick. Maybe the schedule became too crowded. Maybe the effort required more energy than expected. Maybe motivation faded once early excitement wore off.
By identifying those risks early, you can build safeguards into the plan.
A running routine becomes easier to maintain if it is tied to a specific time of day. A writing habit becomes more sustainable if expectations are realistic. A side project becomes more manageable if milestones are broken into smaller steps.
The future rarely unfolds exactly as we imagine. But thinking through possible obstacles ahead of time makes us far better prepared for what actually happens.
A Five-Minute Pre-Mortem Exercise
You do not need a team or a formal process to run a pre-mortem. A simple version can be done in just a few minutes.
- Start by writing down a goal or project you are about to begin.
- Now, imagine that it is three months in the future and the effort has clearly failed.
- Write a short explanation of why it failed. Be honest. What went wrong? What obstacles got in the way? What did you underestimate?
- Next, review the risks you identified and write one action you could take now to reduce the likelihood of each one happening.
Sometimes the adjustments are small like adding a phone reminder, setting clearer expectations, or building more time into the schedule.
But those small adjustments can dramatically change the trajectory of a project.
The exercise works because it allows you to learn from the future before you arrive there.
The Loop That Drives Better Decisions
In last week’s article, we explored the power of post-mortems—the practice of reflecting on completed projects to extract lessons for the future.
Pre-mortems complement that process perfectly. They help us learn from the past and anticipate the future.
Together a pre- and post-mortem create a powerful feedback loop. Each project becomes both an experiment and a teacher.
Over time, that habit of reflection and anticipation leads to better decisions, stronger plans, and fewer surprises.
Progress rarely comes from perfect foresight.
More often, it comes from asking better questions—both before and after the work begins.
Keep on shifting,
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References
- Klein, G. (2007). Performing a Project Premortem. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2007/09/performing-a-project-premortem
- Duke, A. (2018). Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All the Facts.
- Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. Research on the planning fallacy and forecasting errors.