Pre-mortem – finding the risks nobody says out loud

This article was created with the AI assistant Claude and published by Peter Hoenig.

Every project plan has a session on risks. It contains the risks you are allowed to write down: delivery times, technical uncertainties, illness, exchange rates. It does not contain the risks everybody in the room is thinking about – that the departments will have no time, that nobody will decide anything, that after go-live nobody will look after it. Not out of cowardice, but because those things are hard to say in a risk session without meaning somebody.

A pre-mortem solves that with a single change of wording.

Why the reversal works

The method goes back to the psychologist Gary Klein. The trick: instead of asking about a possibility (“what could go wrong?”), it asks for an explanation of a fact (“it went wrong – why?”).

That sounds like word play and changes the conversation considerably. Naming a possibility means exposing yourself: you are making a claim about the future and about people in the room. Explaining a fact, by contrast, is a neutral thinking task. Sentences such as “because the departments did it on the side” or “because nobody decided which special cases would be dropped” can be said without sounding like an accusation.

How a session runs

1. Ask the question – and let the room stay silent for a moment. Everyone writes down for themselves why it failed. Only then does the talking start. Without that silence the first person speaks and everyone else varies what they said.
2. Collect without assessing. Everything goes on the wall. For this part there is the “collect anonymously” setting: new reasons are then created without a name.
3. Assess – together, and only now: likelihood and impact, 1 to 5 each. The reasons move into the matrix.
4. Early warning signs per reason. This step is readily skipped and is often worth more than the measure: “workshop dates get moved or attended only by stand-ins” is a sign you can see six weeks before the damage.
5. Measures for the heavy reasons – or the deliberate decision “accepted: we live with it”. Both are fine. Leaving it lying there silently is not.

Anonymity has to hold

Reasons collected anonymously stay anonymous – in the tool, in the report and in the hand-over to project management. That is not a technical nicety but a promise on which everything depends. Anyone who later attributes an anonymous reason to a person will hear only the harmless ones next time – and then the session could have been skipped.

A hint that often applies

If not a single reason comes from the area “people and collaboration”, the tool says so. The reason: projects rarely fail on the technology. If a room produces nothing but technical reasons, that is usually not a finding about the project but about the room – and a good reason to hold a second, anonymous round.

And then into the risk register

A pre-mortem whose result stays in a file was an interesting hour. So there are two routes into project management:

• Write into a project file: the reasons are added, with likelihood, impact and measures, to the risk register of a saved project file. The extended file is downloaded; your original stays unchanged. The risks then sit in the risk matrix there and are tracked like all the others.
• Hand over as a project brief: in the same browser; project management then shows a banner “create as a project”.

The other way round, the tool fetches an existing project with its known risks. That is the better way in: you see what is already in the register and then ask about what is not.

What a pre-mortem is not

It does not replace risk management, and the assessment is an estimate by the group, not a measurement. It adds to risk management what is systematically missing there: the reasons everybody senses and nobody writes down.

The pre-mortem is free of charge and available as free software under the GPL: open the pre-mortem. If you have a project ahead of you where the unspoken things matter, I am happy to facilitate such a session – get in touch for a free initial consultation.