Create intermediate Works with: Any AI

Pre-Mortem Workshop Script

Structured brief Has example

Find failure causes before they happen.

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Facilitate a pre-mortem. Project and goal: [PROJECT_AND_GOAL]. Participants: [PARTICIPANTS]. Time: [TIME].

Provide a 60-minute script: introduction (explain "Imagine it is a year from now and the project failed badly"); silent individual writing of reasons (7 minutes); round-robin sharing, one reason per person at a time; grouping similar causes; voting (each person gets 5 dots); discussion of the top eight causes (what warning signs would we see? what can we do now?); and conversion into actions and risk register entries.

Include prompts that help quiet people, rules (no defending the plan, no blame), a flip chart layout, and a table template: Failure cause | Votes | Early warning | Preventive action | Owner | Date. Add a follow-up plan (review actions in two weeks) and a message to participants (80 words). Offer variations for remote teams.

Add timings for each step that sum to 60 minutes, a script of the instruction to read aloud to participants, and a rule for handling the person who says 'this will not fail' (ask them to imagine it did, and write the cause that would be most embarrassing).

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Prompt read aloud: "Imagine it is October. The launch failed badly. Write down why."
Silent writing 7 minutes. Sample reasons: data migration corrupted records (5 votes); key engineer left (4); sales promised features we lacked (6); training came too late (3).
Dots: each person 5 dots; 12 people = 60 dots.
Top cause: sales promises (6 votes). Early warning: demos mentioning unbuilt features. Preventive action: feature list of what can be promised, approved by product (owner Dana, 10 July).
Second: migration. Action: trial migration on 5 percent of data (owner Joe, 31 July).
Table: cause, votes, warning, action, owner, date.
Follow-up in two weeks.

• pre-mortem
• structured-brief