Coaching practices for Pre Mortem and Adversarial Review
Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Pre Mortem and Adversarial Review, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.
Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?
- Every time I review how I acted today I catch myself building a defense
- I want to look back from the very end of my life and ask honestly what I actually did with my time
- I’m about to commit to this timeline and on paper it all looks fine, but I have a nagging feeling I’m glossing over the ways it could go sideways because admitting them now feels like talking myself out of it before I’ve even started.
- We did the exercise where we imagined it failing and listed why, but I have a nagging sense the most likely way this actually goes wrong is something nobody was willing to say out loud in the room
- I’m about to commit real time and money to this plan, and it looks solid
Practices that may help
- The Pre-Mortem: Imagine It Already Failed
A pre-mortem, developed by psychologist Gary Klein, has a team imagine that a plan has already failed and then work backward to explain why — before any work begins. The technique exploits "prospective hindsight": research found that imagining an outcome as a certainty makes people generate more, and more specific, reasons for it, surfacing risks that ordinary risk assessment misses. - Seneca’s evening court — judge the day as an honest prosecutor
Review the day as a fair judge would: what was the evidence, what was the verdict, what is the sentence?
The Pythagorean Evening Review - Write a brief final accounting
Write as if you’re reporting on your life: what did you do with your time?
Memento Mori: Using Mortality Awareness to Focus What Matters - Run a premortem before committing
Imagine the project has already failed and work backwards to find why.
The Planning Fallacy — Why Your Estimates Are Always Wrong - Combine the pre-mortem with red team pressure
Run a pre-mortem and then ask the red team to find the failure mode the team missed.
Red Teaming: Stress-Testing Plans Before They Fail - Run a pre-mortem before committing to a plan
Imagine the plan has already failed and ask what went wrong.
Confirmation Bias: Seeing What You Expect to See - Memento Mori: Using Mortality Awareness to Focus What Matters
Memento mori — "remember you will die" — is the Stoic practice of keeping mortality in view as a clarifier: trivial concerns shrink and important ones become urgent when measured against a real deadline. Used well, it sharpens values and action; used badly, it slides into death anxiety. The psychological evidence is genuinely mixed — mortality awareness can produce either defensiveness or value-driven clarity depending on the person and how the awareness is held. - Memento mori as the ultimate premeditation
Premeditate the final loss — your own death — as a clarifier of what actually matters now.
Premeditatio Malorum, in Depth - Include a trusted other in high-stakes AARs
Self-conducted AARs have blind spots; a peer or coach who was not inside the event sees the causal story differently.
After-Action Review: The US Army’s Tool for Continuous Learning - The premortem (imagine the project already failed)
Before starting, assume the plan has already failed and ask why — then fix it now.
Premeditatio Malorum, in Depth
Related concerns
- How To Run A Pre Mortem
A pre-mortem, developed by psychologist Gary Klein, has a team imagine that a plan has already failed and then work backward to explain why — before any work begins. The technique exploits "prospective hindsight": research found that imagining an outcome as a certainty makes people generate more, and more specific, reasons for it, surfacing risks that ordinary risk assessment misses.
- Pre Mortem
A pre-mortem, developed by psychologist Gary Klein, has a team imagine that a plan has already failed and then work backward to explain why — before any work begins. The technique exploits "prospective hindsight": research found that imagining an outcome as a certainty makes people generate more, and more specific, reasons for it, surfacing risks that ordinary risk assessment misses.
- Premortem Process
A pre-mortem, developed by psychologist Gary Klein, has a team imagine that a plan has already failed and then work backward to explain why — before any work begins. The technique exploits "prospective hindsight": research found that imagining an outcome as a certainty makes people generate more, and more specific, reasons for it, surfacing risks that ordinary risk assessment misses.
- Premortem Technique
A pre-mortem, developed by psychologist Gary Klein, has a team imagine that a plan has already failed and then work backward to explain why — before any work begins. The technique exploits "prospective hindsight": research found that imagining an outcome as a certainty makes people generate more, and more specific, reasons for it, surfacing risks that ordinary risk assessment misses.
- Pre Mortem Planning
A pre-mortem, developed by psychologist Gary Klein, has a team imagine that a plan has already failed and then work backward to explain why — before any work begins. The technique exploits "prospective hindsight": research found that imagining an outcome as a certainty makes people generate more, and more specific, reasons for it, surfacing risks that ordinary risk assessment misses.
- Pre Mortem Technique
A pre-mortem, developed by psychologist Gary Klein, has a team imagine that a plan has already failed and then work backward to explain why — before any work begins. The technique exploits "prospective hindsight": research found that imagining an outcome as a certainty makes people generate more, and more specific, reasons for it, surfacing risks that ordinary risk assessment misses.
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