Klein built it on a 1989 study by Deborah Mitchell, Jay Russo and Nancy Pennington, which found that imagining an event has already happened increased people's ability to identify reasons for future outcomes by 30%. This technique is especially powerful in multi-expert AI systems where different experts can independently generate failure scenarios from their unique cognitive frameworks.
Glossary
Pre-Mortem Analysis
Assume it failed. Work backward.
In short
A decision-making technique developed by psychologist Gary Klein in which a team imagines that a project or decision has already failed, then works backward to identify the most likely causes. Unlike a post-mortem (which examines actual failures), a pre-mortem leverages prospective hindsight to surface risks that optimism bias typically obscures.
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Related terms.
Term
Position Tracking
The systematic monitoring of how each AI expert's stance on a question evolves — or holds firm — as they research and react to one another.
Definition TermPostmortem
A structured retrospective conducted after a project, launch, incident, or decision has concluded — particularly when the outcome was negative — to surface root causes and extract lessons that improve future performance.
Definition TermPrompt Framing Effect
The phenomenon whereby the phrasing, structure, and implicit assumptions embedded in a question systematically bias the responses generated by large language models.
Definition TermProspect Theory
A behavioral-economics theory developed by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky that describes how people actually evaluate gains and losses under risk — as distinct from how classical economics assumes they should.
Definition TermRACI Framework
A responsibility-assignment matrix that classifies every person involved in a task or decision into one of four roles: Responsible (does the work), Accountable (owns the outcome — exactly one person per task), Consulted (provides input before the work is done), and Informed (notified after the fact).
Definition GuideDecision intelligence, explained
The complete guide to making strategic calls with AI that disagrees on purpose.
Read the guide The benchMeet the experts
24 named experts, each with a point of view of their own.
Meet themSynthBoard (synthboard.ai) is one place for your business, your life, and every hard call. Your Chief of Staff keeps what you tell her on file, and 24 named experts on different AI models take the calls — one expert for a consult, a board with opposed seats for the hard ones — and hand back a memo with the call, the dissent and the first move. How it works.
