The Pre-Mortem: Finding the Cause of Death Before It Happens

What if you could find out exactly why your project failed before you ever launched it?

You may have heard of the term "post mortem," an examination of a dead body to determine the cause of death. Post mortem literally means "after death." It is a term we associate with endings, with looking backward at something that has already happened to understand what went wrong.

A pre-mortem is quite simply the opposite. It is determining the cause of death before it ever happens. But instead of examining a body, you examine a project.

There is something almost unsettling about applying the language of death to a project that hasn't even started yet. But that is exactly what makes the exercise so useful. A post mortem forces honesty because the outcome is already final. There is nothing left to protect, no reputation left to defend, so people tell the truth about what happened.

A pre-mortem borrows that same honesty and moves it earlier. Instead of waiting for the failure to be real before anyone is willing to talk about it plainly, you manufacture that same bluntness in advance. You give yourself permission to imagine the worst outcome as if it has already happened, which frees you to talk about it with the same clarity you would use after the fact.

There are four steps to this exercise.

Step one: pick your project. This can be a new initiative, a product launch, a strategic decision, or any effort that carries real risk if it goes wrong. The exercise works best on something significant enough that failure would actually cost you something.

Step two: imagine it already failed. Before you launch the project, picture it as if it has already ended in failure. Not "might fail" or "could struggle," but fully, completely failed. This mental shift matters. It is far easier to identify honest reasons for a failure that has "already happened" than to speculate about a failure that might happen someday.

Step three: find the cause of death. Brainstorm every reason that could have caused this project to fail. Be specific. Was it a resourcing problem? A communication breakdown? An unrealistic timeline? A market shift no one accounted for? By coming up with the possible causes of failure before it happens, you are able to prevent it from ever happening at all.

Step four: fix it now. Apply what you learned about why your project "died" before it ever actually gets to that point. Every cause of failure you identified in step three becomes a specific problem to solve in the present, while you still have the ability to solve it.

The power of a pre-mortem is that it turns hindsight into foresight. Normally, the clearest understanding of what went wrong only arrives after the damage is already done, when it's too late to change the outcome. A pre-mortem takes that same clarity and pulls it forward, into the moment when you can still act on it.

It also does something psychologically important: it gives a team permission to voice doubts they might otherwise keep to themselves. It is much easier to say "here's why I think this could fail" when the exercise has already framed failure as the premise, rather than raising a concern that might be read as pessimism or lack of confidence.

The next time you are about to start something significant, don't wait for the post mortem to find out what went wrong. Run the pre-mortem first. Pick the project, imagine it has already failed, find every possible cause of death, and fix it now, while the project is still very much alive.

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