The Pre-Mortem Protocol: Engineering the Failure Out

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Most projects die long before they are launched. They die in the “Optimism Phase,” where everyone is too polite to point out the giant holes in the plan. We call this Complexity Fraud.

By the time the project actually collapses, it’s too late to fix. The budget is gone, and the morale is decimated. To lead, you must move the collapse from the Future to the Present, where it is still theoretical and cheap to fix.

The Logic of the Pre-Mortem

A post-mortem is an autopsy. You are studying a corpse to see why it died. A Pre-Mortem is an act of imagination. You assume the project has already failed, and you work backward to find the murderer.

The Protocol: The 3-Step De-Risk

1. Assume the Total Disaster Gather your team. Tell them: “It is one year from today. The project has failed. It was a humiliating, public disaster. We lost the client, the money, and our reputation.”

  • The Psychological Shift: This gives everyone “Social Permission” to be a pessimist. They aren’t “being negative”; they are solving a mystery.

2. The Murder Mystery Ask every person to write down exactly why it failed.

  • The Engineer: “The legacy API didn’t scale.”

  • The Salesman: “The market didn’t actually want the feature we spent 6 months building.”

  • The Manager: “We had a single point of failure in the lead dev.”

3. The Inversion Strategy Once the list of “Killers” is on the board, you don’t “hope” they don’t happen. You Invert the plan to make them impossible.

  • If the API won’t scale, you build the scaling test in Week 1, not Week 20.

  • If the market is the risk, you sell the prototype before you write a single line of production code.

The Fragility of Silence

Projects collapse because of the things people are afraid to say in meetings.

  • “That deadline is impossible.”

  • “The client doesn’t understand the tech.”

  • “We are overcomplicating the UI.”

The Pre-Mortem Protocol turns these “whispers” into “work items.”

#DhandheKaFunda: Hope is not a strategy. Engineering a project to survive is about finding the bombs and diffusing them while the clock is still at zero.

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