February 5, 2026
Hi Everyone,
Before your next project kicks off, try this question with your team:
"It's six months from now. This project failed. What went wrong?"
That's it. The shift from "what could go wrong" to "what did go wrong" changes how people think.
Research from Wharton and Cornell found that imagining that failure has already occurred increases the ability to identify reasons for it by 30%.
Psychologists call this prospective hindsight. When failure is hypothetical, optimism filters out the uncomfortable possibilities. When failure is assumed, those filters drop.
How to run one in 20 minutes
You don't need a full offsite or a facilitator. Here's a version you can run before any project or initiative.
Set the frame (2 min)
Gather the people involved – not just your direct team, but anyone who'll touch the work.
Tell them: "Imagine it's [deadline]. The project failed. We're here to figure out why."
Silent brainstorm (5 min)
Everyone writes down reasons for the failure – one post-it note per reason.
No discussion yet (this keeps louder voices from anchoring the room and lets people surface concerns they might not say out loud).
Share and cluster (8 min)
Go around the room. Group similar risks together. You'll probably end up with 6-10 items on the board.
Pick the top 2-3 (5 min)
Vote or discuss, but converge quickly.
For each one, write down a trigger (the early warning sign that tells you this risk is materializing) and an owner (who's watching for it and responsible for escalating).
The output is a short table: Risk → Trigger → Owner.
That's what makes this different from a vague brainstorm.
Why this works better than "what might go wrong"
When you ask a team what might go wrong, you get vague answers. People don't want to seem negative or disloyal. They filter their concerns through social risk.
When you tell them the project has failed and ask why, you're not asking them to predict or criticize.
You're asking them to explain.
That's a different cognitive task, and it produces more honest answers.
Gary Klein, the psychologist who developed the method, put it this way: the pre-mortem gives people who have reservations a safe way to voice them.
In a normal planning meeting, raising concerns can feel like obstruction.
In a pre-mortem, it's the whole point.
Go deeper
👉 Harvard Business Review: Performing a Project Premortem
👉 McKinsey: Bias Busters: Premortems – why it reduces overconfidence
👉 Atlassian: Pre-mortem Playbook
Coming up tomorrow
We'll look at where AI is actually working in talent decisions and share case studies from companies seeing measurable results.
That's it for today!
P.S. Have you ever run a pre-mortem? Or been in one that surfaced something you wouldn't have caught otherwise? Let us know – we're curious how this plays out in practice.