---
name: premortem-analysis
description: Use when reviewing a plan or decision before it is committed — imagine it has already failed and work backward to enumerate the causes, surfacing risks that optimism and politeness normally suppress.
domain: risk-analysis
lifecycle: ["review"]
agents: ["shostakovich"]
standard_refs: []
---

# Pre-mortem analysis

Assume the plan under review shipped and failed badly, then reason backward to why. The pre-mortem (Klein)
flips planning optimism into a licence to voice concerns, and reliably surfaces blind spots a forward
review misses.

## When to load

Load when critiquing a Define plan or a Deliver task set before its human gate.

## Review focus

- State the failure out loud: "It is six months later and this failed." Then have each concern named as a
  concrete cause, not a vague worry.
- Enumerate causes across the obvious axes: wrong assumption, missing dependency, integration gap,
  operational surprise, security hole, adoption failure, timeline collapse.
- For each cause, estimate its likelihood and impact, and check whether the plan already addresses it.
- Prioritise causes that are both plausible and unaddressed — those are the plan's real risks.

## Findings to raise

- A plausible failure cause the plan does not acknowledge or mitigate.
- A mitigation the plan claims that would not actually prevent the failure.

## Evidence to cite

- The failure scenario, the cause, its likelihood and impact, and whether the plan addresses it.