Use for a pre-mortem, or before committing to a plan, launch or migration: "what could go wrong?", "stress test this plan", "how might this fail?", "risks before we ship". Assumes failure, lists causes, ranks them and sets mitigations. Skip for explaining a failure that already happened.
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What the file says
# Pre-mortem
Gary Klein's technique: imagine the plan **has already failed**, then work backward to explain why. Assuming failure makes it safe to name risks that optimism hides.
## When to use
- Before a launch, migration, reorg, contract, hire, architecture change or any hard-to-reverse commitment.
- "What could go wrong?", "stress test this", "play out the failure".
- A plan everyone likes and nobody has attacked.
Skip: explaining a failure that already happened, or reviewing the logic of an argument rather than a plan.
## Before you start
1. State in one block: **Plan** (what, who, by when), **Failure definition** (what "failed badly" means, observable), **Horizon**, and **Pass** (Imagine, Causes, Rank, Mitigate, Decide).
2. **Gather first.** Read the plan, timeline, dependencies, past incidents and similar launches before generating causes. Ask up to 3 questions only for what tools cannot answer.
3. **Light path.** Small ask: 6 causes, top 3 ranked, one mitigation each.
## Steps
### 1. Imagine
Write one sentence in the past tense: "It is [date]. The [plan] failed badly: [failure definition]."
### 2. Causes
…
The line at the top of this page pins the label v2026.10.5, 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_z22k64dh3ufqfetn
GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/resolve?ref=ysskrishna/ai-agent-skills/pre-mortem
GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/blob/79af74bbc4df3a56aa7c1ca5f9b46ebd6d2ccfd910a8c0e185ce8d7205b2f9fd
Your AI assistant does the legwork. You hear about the deals worth your word. Hand yours the standing instructions at modelranch.com and it joins the network that reads files like this one.
ysskrishna/ai-agent-skills · skills/analytical-thinking/SKILL.md · Use for analytical thinking, or when a question needs breaking down and evidence: "why did metric X drop?", "what…
ysskrishna/ai-agent-skills · skills/creative-thinking/SKILL.md · Use for creative thinking, or when the user wants many fresh options before choosing: "give me ideas", "brainstorm…
ysskrishna/ai-agent-skills · skills/critical-thinking/SKILL.md · Use for critical thinking, or when the user wants a claim, plan or decision checked for weak spots: "is this right?"…
ysskrishna/ai-agent-skills · skills/design-thinking/SKILL.md · Use for design thinking, or when a product or service problem needs user understanding before solutions: "what do users…
ysskrishna/ai-agent-skills · skills/ethical-thinking/SKILL.md · Use for ethical thinking, or when a plan could harm or unfairly burden people: "should we do this?", "is this fair?"…
ysskrishna/ai-agent-skills · skills/fermi-estimation/SKILL.md · Use for Fermi estimation, or when a rough number is needed fast: "roughly how many...", "ballpark the cost", "estimate…
ysskrishna/ai-agent-skills · skills/first-principles-thinking/SKILL.md · Use for first principles thinking, or when the user questions an inherited default: "why do we do it this way?", "is…
ysskrishna/ai-agent-skills · skills/five-whys/SKILL.md · Use for the 5 Whys, or when the user wants the root cause of a failure: "why did this happen?", "this keeps breaking"…
ysskrishna/ai-agent-skills · skills/lateral-thinking/SKILL.md · Use for lateral thinking, or when ideas feel stuck or incremental: "we've tried everything", "need a surprising angle"…
ysskrishna/ai-agent-skills · skills/prioritization/SKILL.md · Use for prioritization, or when there are more tasks than capacity: "what should we do first?", "rank this backlog"…
ysskrishna/ai-agent-skills · skills/six-thinking-hats/SKILL.md · Use for Six Thinking Hats or de Bono's parallel thinking, or when a decision or idea needs facts, gut feel, risks…
avelikiy/great_cto · skills/pre-mortem/SKILL.md · Imagine the project has already shipped and failed catastrophically — work backwards from the failure to identify the…
rjmurillo/ai-agents · .claude/skills/pre-mortem/SKILL.md · Guide prospective hindsight analysis to identify project risks before failure occurs. Teams imagine the project has…
stefanoskarakasis/product-marketing-skills · pmm-execution/skills/pre-mortem/SKILL.md · Runs a cross-functional pre-mortem on a strategic initiative (product launch, pricing change, GTM pivot, new market…
broomva/skills · skills/strategy/pre-mortem/SKILL.md · Assumes a project has already failed, works backward to identify the top causes, scores them by likelihood and impact…
martineserios/thebrana · .agents/skills/pre-mortem/SKILL.md · Imagine your project has failed spectacularly—then work backward to identify why. Apply Gary Klein's "prospective…
