The Pre-Mortem: Ten Minutes That Save Ten Months

Micah Margolis

Oct 24, 2025

2 min read

Every leadership team has had this experience. A project fails, and in the post-mortem someone says, "Honestly, I had a bad feeling about that from the start." Then three other people nod.

They knew. They just didn't say it, because the meeting where it would have helped was the kickoff, and kickoffs are for optimism.

What is a pre-mortem in decision making?

A pre-mortem is a short exercise, popularized by psychologist Gary Klein, where a team imagines that a project has already failed and then explains why. In pre-mortem decision making, the shift from "what could go wrong?" to "it went wrong, what happened?" makes it socially safe to raise concerns, because you're telling a story about a hypothetical, not attacking the plan.

Why does the pre-mortem work?

It changes the social math. In a normal planning meeting, raising a risk can look like disloyalty. In a pre-mortem, finding risks is the assignment. Klein's work also draws on research showing that imagining an outcome has already happened helps people generate more specific explanations for it.

The ten-minute pre-mortem script

The ten-minute pre-mortem: Run it at the kickoff, before commitment hardens.

The best time to hear the bad feeling is before you spend the budget.

When should you use a pre-mortem?

Before any decision that's expensive or hard to reverse, which is to say any one-way door. It's especially useful when the team has been working on a plan for a while and enthusiasm has started to drown out doubt.

The takeaway

Add ten minutes to your next big kickoff and run the script. You'll hear things nobody would have said otherwise. Practical decision tools like this are a core part of our executive advising work at Kairos Telos.

Frequently asked questions

Who created the pre-mortem technique?

Psychologist Gary Klein developed and popularized the pre-mortem, including in a widely cited 2007 Harvard Business Review article.

What is the difference between a pre-mortem and a post-mortem?

A post-mortem analyzes why something failed after it happened. A pre-mortem imagines failure in advance to uncover risks while there's still time to address them.