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thinking-pre-mortem
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Before committing to a plan or launch, assume it already failed and reason backward through concrete causes — convert failure paths into mitigations, gates, and stop checks.
When to use
- Before kickoff, major technical commitment, high-risk sprint work, launch, or release.
- After a plan looks solid but before execution, especially when optimism or overconfidence is likely.
- When a decision is costly to reverse and risks are still implicit rather than enforced.
When not to use
- Work is small, local, and cheaply reversible — skip the ceremony.
- You are mid-incident under time pressure — act now (OODA / scientific method); pre-mortem is pre-execution.
- You would only emit generic risks ("scope creep", "requirements unclear") that do not bind to this plan.
- Risks are already enforced by live gates (CI, canary, rollback, alerts) with no residual unlisted path.
- A mature risk register already covers the same specific failure paths with owners and checks.
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