The Pre-Mortem: Using Intuition to See Failure Before It Happens

Everyone on the team has concerns about the plan. Nobody is voicing them.

If you've spent more than a year in any organization, you've sat in this meeting. A plan has momentum. Leadership is committed. The slide deck is polished. And the team -- your smart, experienced, well-intentioned team -- has concerns. Gut feelings. Nagging doubts. Half-formed worries they can't quite articulate. But the social pressure to align, to be a team player, to not be the person who slows things down and earns the reputation of "always negative," keeps those concerns locked in their bodies and out of the conversation.

Everyone nods. The plan moves forward.

Then the project fails in exactly the way three people on the team sensed it would. And at the post-mortem, someone says "I had a feeling about this" -- and everyone else nods again, this time with that particular grimace of recognition.

The pre-mortem is a technique designed to extract those suppressed intuitions before it's too late -- to give the quiet worriers a microphone before the fire, not after the ashes. It was developed by Gary Klein, the psychologist whose research on expert intuition showed that experienced professionals often know things they can't explain. And it's one of the most powerful bridges between individual gut feelings and collective decision quality. The Decision Intelligence course covers the pre-mortem alongside other structured methods for integrating intuitive signals into group decisions.

How It Works

A pre-mortem is the inverse of a post-mortem. Instead of analyzing a failure after it happened, you imagine that it already happened and work backward. It's time travel for pessimists -- and it's remarkably effective.

The setup is simple. Before a major decision is finalized -- a product launch, a strategic initiative, a hiring commitment, a significant investment -- gather the team and say:

"Imagine it's six months from now. This project has failed spectacularly. It's a disaster. Your job is to explain why. What went wrong?"

Then give everyone five minutes to write their answers independently, before any group discussion.

That's it. The entire technique fits on an index card. The magic is in what it unlocks.

Why It Works

The pre-mortem succeeds because it changes the social dynamics around dissent -- and it does so with the elegance of a judo move, using the group's own energy.

In a normal planning meeting, expressing doubt is a social risk. You're challenging the plan, potentially challenging the leader who proposed it, and positioning yourself as negative or unhelpful. The gut feeling that says "this won't work" gets translated into silence because the cost of voicing it feels higher than the cost of suppressing it. (It never is, of course. But in the moment, the math feels right.)

The pre-mortem reverses this dynamic completely. It explicitly asks for negative predictions. It makes dissent the task, not the deviation. People who would never raise a hand to say "I have concerns" will readily write a paragraph explaining how the project died -- because now skepticism is the assignment. You're not being difficult; you're being helpful. The social incentive flips, and with it, the floodgates of honesty.

Klein's research showed that pre-mortems increased the ability to identify potential problems by 30%. That's a striking number, and it likely understates the real effect, because the most valuable insights that surface in pre-mortems are often the ones no one would have voiced otherwise -- the gut-level concerns, the pattern recognitions from past experience, the "something feels off" signals that people have been sitting on like an uncomfortable secret.

The Intuition Extraction Mechanism

The pre-mortem works as an intuition-extraction tool because of a psychological phenomenon called prospective hindsight. The name is clunky. The effect is profound.

When you ask people to predict whether a project will succeed, they tend to be optimistic. They anchor to the plan, assume it will work, and struggle to generate reasons it might not. Hope is sticky, and it sits on the analytical mind like a thumb on a scale.

But when you tell people to assume the project has already failed and explain why, their cognitive frame shifts entirely. Suddenly their brain is doing what the default mode network does naturally -- running simulations, searching for patterns, surfacing analogies from past experience. The scenario of failure gives the unconscious permission to report what it's been noticing all along: the timeline is unrealistic, the key dependency is fragile, the team has a communication gap nobody wants to name, the customer segment is wrong.

It's like the difference between asking someone "Do you think this bridge is safe?" and asking "The bridge collapsed. Why?" The second question bypasses optimism and goes straight to the engineering.

Much of what surfaces in a pre-mortem has the quality of intuitive insight rather than analytical conclusion. People write things like "I think we underestimated how resistant the sales team would be" -- a judgment based on interpersonal pattern recognition, not data analysis. Or "the technology just wasn't ready" -- a technical gut feeling based on years of experience with similar systems that they couldn't put in a spreadsheet if their career depended on it. These are exactly the kinds of signals that get suppressed in normal planning processes because they can't be backed up with a chart.

Running an Effective Pre-Mortem

A few practices make the difference between a pre-mortem that changes outcomes and one that becomes another box to check.

Individual writing before group discussion. This is non-negotiable. If you skip straight to group discussion, social dynamics will reassert themselves within thirty seconds. The loudest voice will set the frame, and quieter team members will conform like iron filings around a magnet. Written individual responses capture each person's independent intuitive assessment before groupthink takes over. Pens before mouths. Always.

Include the body. Before people write, ask them to take 30 seconds to sit quietly and notice what they feel in their body when they imagine the project failing. This isn't standard pre-mortem technique -- it's an upgrade. It primes interoceptive awareness and surfaces somatic signals that might otherwise stay below conscious threshold. The knot in the stomach. The tension in the jaw. The subtle "ugh" that doesn't have a spreadsheet row but has real information in it.

Take all inputs seriously. Some pre-mortem responses will be analytical -- "We'll run out of budget by Q3." Others will be intuitive -- "I just don't think the market is ready." Both are valuable. The analytical ones are easier to act on. The intuitive ones are often more important. Don't dismiss the gut-level inputs because they lack supporting data. Instead, ask the person to elaborate: "What makes you sense that? What patterns are you drawing from?" Often, the elaboration reveals specific, actionable risks hiding inside what first sounded like a vague feeling.

Look for convergence. If three independent people identify the same risk -- even in different language -- that signal is strong. Very strong. It means multiple pattern-recognition systems, trained on different experiences, are flagging the same issue. This is collective intuition, and it's remarkably reliable. When the fire alarm in three different brains goes off at the same time, don't debate whether to evacuate.

Update the plan. A pre-mortem that doesn't change anything is theater. Expensive, well-intentioned theater. Use the identified risks to modify the plan, build in contingencies, or -- in some cases -- kill the project before it wastes resources. The whole point is to act on the intelligence your team's collective intuition is providing. Recording these insights in a Decision Journal creates a valuable archive for calibrating intuitive risk assessments over time.

Beyond Projects

The pre-mortem framework applies anywhere you're making a decision with uncertain outcomes and where concerns might be going unvoiced -- including the conversations you have with yourself.

Before accepting a job offer, run a personal pre-mortem: "It's one year from now and I regret this decision. What happened?" Then sit with what comes up. Your gut may have been trying to tell you something your excitement was drowning out.

Before entering a partnership: "The partnership dissolved badly. Why?" Write your answer before your inner optimist can edit it.

Before launching a product, moving to a new city, committing to a major expense -- the same frame works. It gives your unconscious mind explicit permission to report what it knows, and it does so in a structured way that produces actionable insight rather than vague anxiety. Anxiety says "something is wrong." A pre-mortem says "here's what might go wrong, specifically, and here's what we could do about it."

The information is usually already there. Someone on the team -- or some part of yourself -- already senses the risk. The pre-mortem is just a method for getting that intelligence out of the body and onto the table while there's still time to use it. When the pressure is already on and you need to act without the luxury of a structured exercise, the skills explored in Clear Decisions Under Pressure become essential. The Intuition Under Pressure course trains both the proactive and reactive sides of high-stakes intuitive judgment.