Premortem

A premortem — Gary Klein's move, sharpened by Kahneman — flips the risk conversation. Instead of asking "what could go wrong?" (which invites polite, hedged answers), it asserts the project has already failed, months from now, and asks the room to explain why. Prospective hindsight loosens tongues: naming a concrete failure that has happened is socially far cheaper than raising a doubt about a plan everyone's committed to, and it surfaces the risks the optimism of a kickoff buries. Silent writing before any discussion keeps the first confident voice from anchoring everyone else — the wisdom of the room only shows up when its guesses start independent.

A pre-parade uses the same independence in the opposite direction: assume the effort became a runaway success, then name the conditions the team deliberately made true. Those conditions are commitments, not a probability-weighted upside forecast. Keeping them separate from the risk register is the point: optimism becomes concrete work rather than a green version of certainty.

The output is where most premortems fail: a flip-chart photo nobody looks at again. This one lands each risk in a register with two honest ranges — how likely, and how much it costs — sampled as 90% intervals, not a false 3×3 red/amber/green. Exposure is likelihood × impact run as a Monte Carlo, so the ranking reflects genuine uncertainty and a portfolio line shows the sum (with the honest caveat that correlated risks stack higher than independent ones). Every risk carries owned actions, dot-voted so the room's attention goes to the mitigations worth doing first.

And a register only earns its keep if it stays alive. Each entry ages — fresh, then ageing, then stale past 90 days — with a visible fade and a nag, because an unreviewed register quietly lies: it reads as "we're on top of this" when really nobody has looked. Review it or close it. Everything lives in this browser (no accounts, no server); a link exports a copy so you can hand it on, never bind two people to one list. Sources: Klein, "Performing a Project Premortem"; Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow.