Pre-Mortem Failure Scenarios Analysis

The primary goal of a pre-mortem prompt is to eliminate unhelpful optimism. If you hand over a plan and ask, "What do you think?", you usually get three generic compliments followed by a mild "The timeline might be tight." By firmly declaring upfront that the project has already failed, the entire trajectory of the response shifts. An investigator assigned to find root causes has no reason to list positive aspects.

The role in the first paragraph is not a consultant or advisor, but a post-mortem investigator. While an advisor tries to offer a balanced perspective, an investigator searches exclusively for fault lines. The context paragraph is the core engine of this prompt. Shifting the tense to "it has already failed" rather than "it might fail" stops the AI from evaluating probabilities and forces it to reconstruct a narrative of events.

The step-by-step framework paragraph forces a trace back from the final symptoms to the very first decisions. Asking open-ended questions about failure causes often results in surface-level excuses like "lack of resources." By enforcing this four-step sequence, the analysis exposes which specific decision triggered that resource shortage—and actionable changes today are almost always found at that initial decision point.

The format paragraph requires three distinct scenarios to prevent the analysis from converging on a single generic issue. When only one scenario is requested, it almost always ends up being a predictable schedule delay. Mandating distinct root causes forces the AI to explore different angles, such as technical debt, human factors, or external dependencies. The concluding summary paragraph reveals overarching patterns across all three narratives. Limiting preventative actions to two per scenario is also intentional; receiving ten action items rarely leads to executing even one.

Asking like this typically yields two paragraphs of praise followed by a generic line like "The timeline seems slightly tight." This is far from proactive risk identification. Even if critiques are offered, they usually just echo the phrases written in the plan itself, leaving completely omitted blind spots entirely unaddressed.

Some models may ignore the assumption of failure and attempt to list success factors alongside risks. If this happens, follow up with: "Remove all success factors and rewrite only the failure investigation narrative."