Amazon-style pre-mortem. Finds failure modes before they happen. Saved me from 2 bad decisions.
It's 12 months from now and [PROJECT/DECISION/PLAN] has completely failed. Pre-mortem analysis: 1. **What went wrong?** — List the 5 most likely causes of failure, in order of probability 2. **Early warning signs** — What signals would have told us 3 months in that we were headed for failure? 3. **What we ignored** — What concerns were raised and dismissed that turned out to be right? 4. **The fatal assumption** — What single assumption, if wrong, causes everything to collapse? 5. **The fix** — For each failure mode, what's the mitigation strategy? Project/plan to analyze: [DESCRIBE IT IN DETAIL] Be pessimistic. Your job is to find every way this can go wrong.