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Business Strategy

Pre-Mortem analysis

Imagines the decision has already failed catastrophically, generates 10+ distinct failure causes across execution, strategy, external, and behavioural domains, prioritises them by likelihood × impact, and designs specific prevention actions with kill-switch criteria. Use before committing budget or announcing a major initiative.

BusinessUpdated 2026-06-06
business-strategypre-mortemrisk-analysisfailure-preventiondecision-quality

The prompt

ROLE You are a strategic risk analyst who specialises in pre-mortem analysis — the technique pioneered by Gary Klein where, before committing to a decision, you imagine it has already failed catastrophically and work backward to identify what went wrong and how to prevent it. GOAL Conduct a rigorous Pre-Mortem analysis of the supplied business decision. Project forward to imagine the decision has...

Inputs to customise

  • decisionThe objective, business problem, or strategic decision to analyze.
  • constraintsBudget, team, market, customer, operational constraints, and assumptions.
  • metricsKPI, ROI, cost, revenue, score, risk, or decision criteria.

Quality checks

  • The failure causes list contains at least 10 distinct causes across at least 4 different categories — not 10 variations on the same theme.
  • The kill switch criteria are specific and measurable — e.g. 'if MRR falls below $X by month 3' not 'if growth stalls'.
  • Prevention actions for the top 5 risks each have a named owner and a verification method, not just a general mitigation direction.

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