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.
Studies show that pre-mortems increase the 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.