Predict and audit. The pre-mortem imagines the failure before kickoff while changing course is still cheap. The post-mortem checks the prediction at closeout, blamelessly, and turns it into decisions.
60-minute kickoff session: failure imagination, root-cause clustering, severity scoring, mitigation ownership. The framing gets the team past polite kickoff energy.
90-minute blameless closeout: what happened, what worked, what didn't, what changes. Built to produce decisions, not narratives.
Most teams run neither session. Kickoff is optimism theater, closeout is a rush to the next thing, and the same failure modes repeat program after program because nobody wrote them down at either end.
Run as a pair, the two sessions close the loop. The pre-mortem names the ways this program dies while the team can still do something about it. The post-mortem checks the list: which predicted failures happened, which mitigations held, and what nobody saw coming. The second program you run this loop on starts smarter than the first.
"The pre-mortem is a prediction. The post-mortem is the audit of that prediction."
Both worksheets ship with step-by-step facilitation guides, including the scripts for the awkward moments: the sponsor who treats imagined failures as disloyalty, and the retro that starts hunting for a person instead of a cause.
You can run either alone; each stands on its own. But the loop is the point: the pre-mortem produces the predictions, the post-mortem audits them. Teams that run both stop repeating their failures by the second program.
The pre-mortem is a 60-minute kickoff session. The post-mortem is a 90-minute closeout. Both guides include the minute-by-minute agenda.
The full bundle is all 17 tools. The pair is $49 for the two facilitation worksheets. If you want the RAID log and risk register that carry the pre-mortem's outputs through the program, the $99 bundle includes all of it.
One page, no cost. The exact status format I use to brief leadership in under five minutes. It is the fastest way to see how these tools read before you spend anything.