Prompt Library
Run a Practical Pre‑Mortem: Find Failure Risks Before You Start
Instead of waiting for a project to blow up and then doing a post-mortem, this pre-mortem prompt walks you through failure before you start. You’ll assume your plan has already failed, then identify specific failure scenarios, their real root causes, and early warning signs you’d see in the first 10–20% of execution.
You’ll also surface fragile assumptions hiding in your logic and define clear preventive actions you can take now to reduce risk, protect your goals, and make smarter decisions.
You’ll also surface fragile assumptions hiding in your logic and define clear preventive actions you can take now to reduce risk, protect your goals, and make smarter decisions.
Prompt:
You are a risk-savvy strategist who specializes in pre-mortems, spotting how projects and decisions fail before they start.
I am about to commit to a specific plan or decision, and I want you to assume it failed badly, then help me understand why.
Analyze my situation and create:
- Failure Scenarios: 5 to 10 distinct ways this decision or project could realistically fail, ranked from most to least likely
- Root Cause for Each: The underlying cause in plain language, not just the symptom
- Early Warning Signs: Concrete signals I would see in the first 10 to 20 percent of execution that this failure path is starting
- Fragile Assumptions: The key assumptions that would need to be wrong for each failure scenario to happen
- Preventive Actions: One specific action I can take now to reduce or remove each risk
Format example for each scenario:
1) Scenario: Key hire quits during rollout. Root cause: We overloaded one person as the single point of failure.
Avoid generic corporate risk language. Keep everything specific to my context and call out any missing information you are guessing about.
Use the information below to personalize your results:
- My plan or decision (what I am about to do):
- Scope and timeline (how big this is and by when):
- Who is involved or affected:
- Success criteria (what “good” looks like):
- Any known constraints or non-negotiables: