Pre-Mortem Template

Why pre-mortems beat risk brainstorms

A standard kickoff risk session goes like this: someone asks "any risks we should flag?", three people contribute generic risks ("resource constraints", "shifting priorities"), the team nods, the risks get logged, nobody believes them.

A pre-mortem inverts the framing. You tell the team: "It's six months from now. The program failed. We're doing the post-mortem. What happened?" Suddenly people are specific. They name the executive who lost interest in month three. They name the workstream that depended on a team that's already overloaded. They name the assumption that's load-bearing and untested.

"Optimism is the enemy of useful risk identification. Pre-mortems are how you make the team safe enough to be honest."

This template structures the workshop so the framing is right and the output is usable. The cheat sheet covers the facilitation moves that surface the real concerns instead of the polite ones.

When to run a pre-mortem

The default answer is "at kickoff." That's right but incomplete. The three best moments:

• Kickoff. Before the team is invested in the plan, before optimism calcifies. Highest-leverage moment.
• After a major scope change. The original pre-mortem covered the original program. New scope = new failure modes worth surfacing.
• Before a high-stakes phase. Going into beta, into a regulatory review, into an exec demo: a 60-minute pre-mortem can catch the failure mode that nobody wanted to be the one to name.

The output of the pre-mortem feeds your RAID log (the surfaced risks), your program charter (the constraints and assumptions), and your communication plan (the stakeholders who need previewing on the top risks).