Pre-mortem

How to run it

1. State what you are about to commit to, in a few lines, and when you would know whether it had worked.
2. Announce it. "It is a year from today. This went badly. Not slightly, badly." Say it as a fact.
3. Everyone writes, alone and in silence, every cause they can think of, in the past tense. Two minutes. Nobody talks.
4. Go round the room. Each person reads one cause. Keep going round until the lists are empty. No discussion yet, and no defending the plan.
5. Judge each cause against the others: how likely is it really, and how bad would it be? Fatal means the whole thing fails. Serious means a major delay or cost. Annoying means you’d recover.
6. For each cause worth acting on, write something you could start this month, and say whether you are preventing it, reducing it, or accepting it. An accepted risk gets its reason written beside it.

Where it falls down. Done as a discussion instead of silent writing first, the loudest voice sets the list.