Prospective hindsight — imagine the project already failed, then diagnose why. Surfaces hidden risks before commitment.
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What the file says
# Pre-Mortem
**Imagine the project already failed. Now find out why.**
Gary Klein's prospective hindsight technique — forces the brain into a different mode than optimistic planning. Retrospective analysis of a hypothetical failure produces 2× more failure causes than prospective analysis.
---
## When to use
- Before committing to a plan, architecture, or major decision
- When the team is too confident or too aligned (groupthink risk)
- Before a launch, migration, or irreversible change
- When someone asks "what could go wrong?"
---
## Step 1 — Set the scene
State the project, plan, or decision clearly. Then say:
> "It is [6 months / 1 year] from now. We went ahead with this plan. It failed completely. What happened?"
If the subject is unclear, ask:
```
AskUserQuestion: "What plan or decision are we stress-testing?"
```
---
## Step 2 — Generate failure causes
Spend 5–10 minutes generating every plausible failure cause without filtering. Use these lenses:
| Lens | Prompt |
|------|--------|
| **Technical** | What broke, crashed, couldn't scale, or had a hidden bug? |
| **Human/team** | Who burned out, left, got blocked, or misunderstood? |
…
The line at the top of this page pins the label git:20260615.6d899e8, which is what most people want. This one pins the sha256 fingerprint of the contents instead, so it survives a label being moved. Either way the exact version is written to mdr.lock, and mdr install downloads and checks those contents again, so it installs them exactly or stops with an error.
GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/artifacts/art_27kidmrazycdldvv
GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/resolve?ref=martineserios/thebrana/pre-mortem
GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/blob/c1b99c7fef55c0038033224a2b0d1f41d3b8ae49926642f7f37dc88e9feda3f7
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