practice · all tools
Pre-Mortem Analysis
Before finalizing a significant plan, the team imagines it is months later and the initiative has failed completely — then everyone writes down why. Causes are clustered and the plan modified. Prospective hindsight legitimizes doubt that politeness would otherwise silence.
Practical
- Time
- 20-45 min
- Group
- 3–20 · small-group
- Settings
- in-person, online
- Materials
- Sticky notes or shared doc
- Mechanisms
- perspective-taking, cognitive-reframing
- Change scope
- state → skill · recurring-practice (before significant plans)
Instructions
- Where
- idg.thomasjordan.se/idg-team-scaffolds-webapp.html — Thomas Jordan's IDG Resource Library, open
- Availability
- Open online — published at the link, free to read
Source link checked 29 Aug 2026 — unchanged since we recorded it on 28 Aug 2026
This directory describes and points home; the instructions stay with the people who made them.
Origin
Gary Klein (pre-mortem method, applying prospective hindsight research by Mitchell, Russo & Pennington); team scaffold codification by Thomas Jordan — Decision science / naturalistic decision making
In this directory via Thomas Jordan's IDG Resource Library
status: checked · added 2026-08-25