Premortem

So geht's

1. 1

   Set the context: briefly describe the project, decision, or initiative under review. Ensure everyone has the same understanding of the plan.

2. 2

   The time-travel prompt: tell participants to imagine it is 12–18 months from now, and the project has failed completely. It did not just underperform — it was a disaster.

3. 3

   Individual writing: give each person 5–7 minutes to silently write as many specific reasons for the failure as they can think of. No filtering — even paranoid or unlikely causes are welcome.

4. 4

   Round-robin sharing: go around the room and collect one failure reason per person per round. Write each on the board. Continue until all unique reasons are captured.

5. 5

   Group and prioritise: cluster similar failure modes together. Vote on the top 5–7 most likely and most damaging risks.

6. 6

   Develop countermeasures: for each top-ranked risk, discuss: Can we prevent this? Can we detect it early if it starts happening? Can we limit damage if it occurs?

7. 7

   Update the plan: assign owners to the most critical countermeasures and build them into project milestones.

Tipps

• The facilitator's job is to create psychological safety — explicitly normalise 'paranoid' or 'unlikely' failure modes.

• Some of the most valuable insights come from people who privately worried but never voiced their concern.

• Keep the premortem output visible throughout the project, not just at kickoff.

• Run a postmortem against the premortem predictions at the end to sharpen future risk identification skills.

Variationen

Run a 'Pre-success' variant alongside the premortem: imagine the project succeeded beyond all expectations — what made it work? This balanced lens reduces excessive negativity. Combine with Scenario Planning: run a premortem for each of the four scenario quadrants.