Pre-mortem

How to use it. Run a pre-mortem after a plan is mostly settled but before commitment. Give people permission to be pessimistic. Look for failure modes the optimistic plan does not cover. The output is a list of things to monitor and pre-emptive mitigations.

How it gets misused. Confused with risk registers. The pre-mortem is a thinking technique that surfaces what risk lists miss: the unspoken assumptions, the political risks, and the dependencies nobody owns. It works because imagining a future failure is psychologically easier than predicting one.