Pre-mortems are a great way to generate assumptions. They leverage prospective hindsight—a technique where you imagine what might happen in the future. A pre-mortem encourages you to ask, “Imagine it’s six months in the future; your product or initiative launched, and it was a complete failure. What went wrong?” As you generate reasons for why your

Knowing that criticism will come your way drives you to make your idea as strong as possible beforehand. Researchers will do all they can to pick holes in their own paper before sending it to a discussant. This practice is known as a premortem. In a post-mortem, a decision has flopped and you try to figure out why. In a pre-mortem, you imagine that

Conduct a Pre-Mortem