# Pre-Mortem Analysis

> 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.

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## Definition

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. 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.

## Related

- [AI Pre-Mortem](https://www.synthboard.ai/ai-pre-mortem)


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