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 premortem leverages prospective hindsight to surface risks that optimism bias typically obscures.
Klein's research showed that premortems increase the ability to identify reasons for future outcomes by roughly 30%. The technique is especially powerful in multi-expert AI systems where different experts can independently generate failure scenarios from their unique cognitive frameworks.