premortem

Name

premortem — premortem — convene the autopsy before the patient has finished dying

Synopsis

premortem --assume-dead [--blameless] [--spectacular] PLAN
premortem --already-failed < plan | sort -u > causes.txt
reasons(certain_death) ≈ 1.3 × reasons(possible_death)

Description

premortem runs the post-mortem inspection against a plan that has not yet been executed. It fixes the outcome to FAILED before reading any input, then asks every attendee to explain the failure it has just declared. Because the death is stated as fact rather than forecast, the objections that PLAN could not surface at kickoff are returned as ordinary description.

The command operates on the living. Standard post-mortem tooling requires a corpse; premortem accepts a plan still under active development and issues findings against it regardless. Output is a list of causes, each of which is, at the time of invocation, still an argument you are permitted to win.

premortem is idempotent in name only. Each run against the same PLAN tends to return more causes than the last, since the failure it assumes grows more detailed the longer the room stares at it.

Options

--assume-dead

State the failure as accomplished fact. Downgrades every "might" in the input to "did." This is the whole program; the other flags are decoration.

--blameless

Strip the names off the causes. The system is the defendant. Nobody in the room is on trial, which is the only reason anybody talks.

--spectacular

Assume the failure was total and public, not quiet and survivable. Raises cause yield. Lowers morale by the same margin.

-q, --quiet

Suppress the doubt everyone already had. Restores the kickoff meeting. Defeats the purpose. Accepted.

--circle-back

Defer the autopsy to a later sprint. No-op. Returns PLAN unchanged and the funeral unrescheduled.

--sign

Emit a death certificate for PLAN and file it under PREVENTABLE. Requires the Coroner. The Coroner is always in.

Exit Status

0

the plan died on paper; paper is the cheapest place to bury it

1

the room agreed the plan was fine and adjourned; no causes were written down

30

prospective hindsight engaged; cause count rose the expected third

137

the failure was named, minuted, and shipped anyway

History

From Latin prae, before, and mortem, death — the mirror of post-mortem, which examines a body already cold. In 1989 Mitchell, Russo and Pennington coined prospective hindsight, showing that imagining an outcome as already certain raised the number of concrete explanations for it by roughly thirty percent. Gary Klein packaged the technique as the premortem in the Harvard Business Review in 2007; Daniel Kahneman later endorsed it as a cheap corrective to a decided team's overconfidence.

Bugs

A plan can pass its premortem and die anyway of a cause nobody imagined. The exercise only surfaces the deaths the room can already picture; the interesting ones decline to attend.

--blameless is advisory. The system cannot prevent an attendee from reading a cause aloud while looking directly at Dave.

Running premortem after launch is supported but returns a post-mortem. The clock does not accept --assume-dead once the death is real.

See Also

tombstone(5), velleity(3), bikeshedding(1). The living exhibit demonstrates the word in motion:

▸ operate premortem

Author

Maintained by the Coroner, who performs autopsies on patients still breathing, signs each certificate CERTIFIED PRE-DEAD, and files it under PREVENTABLE before the wake begins.