Individual skill
thinking-pre-mortem
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.
skills/thinking-pre-mortem/SKILL.md
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- ai-tools Repository topic
- anthropic Repository topic
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- decision-making Repository topic
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# Pre-Mortem Analysis
**Core rule:** Prospective hindsight beats "what could go wrong?" Assume the plan has already failed (past tense), generate concrete failure paths, reverse them into prevention requirements, and bind each top path to a verifiable plan change.
## 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.