Pre Mortem Gary Klein: 10 Evidence-Based Coaching Practices
Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Pre Mortem Gary Klein, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.
About 2 minutes
Try it here: list how this plan could fail
Imagine it is a year from now and the plan has failed. List the reasons, the way a pre-mortem asks you to.
A year from now the plan has failed. What were the reasons?
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. - 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 - Deliberate mortality reflection
Briefly contemplate your finite lifespan to surface what actually matters to you.
Terror Management Theory, Made Practical - 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 - Use mortality salience to clarify what actually matters
Regularly reflect on finitude — not to produce dread, but to sharpen the signal-to-noise ratio of your choices.
The Regret of the Dying - 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. - 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 - The eulogy exercise: working backward from the life you want
Write a brief eulogy for yourself that describes who you were and how you lived — then work backward to what that requires today.
Values-Based Action (ACT), Made Practical - Melete thanatou — meditation on death
Briefly contemplate your own death today to clarify what actually matters.
Pierre Hadot’s Spiritual Exercises - Use mortality as a priority filter
Ask: if I were significantly closer to the end, would I still care about this?
Memento Mori: Using Mortality Awareness to Focus What Matters
Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?
- I keep putting off the things I say matter most as if I have unlimited time, and I’m losing days to small grievances and "somedays"
- Lately I keep catching myself aware that my time is running out, and instead of letting it scare me I want to actually sit with it for a few minutes and let it show me what I’d most regret never having done.
- I want to look back from the very end of my life and ask honestly what I actually did with my time
- I’m stuck on a real decision and lost in the noise of it, and I want to step back and ask how the version of me at the very end of life would see this
- I’m about to commit real time and money to this plan, and it looks solid
Related concerns
- Gary Klein 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.
- Gary Klein Premortem
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 Objection
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.
- Pre Mortem Personal
Premeditate the final loss — your own death — as a clarifier of what actually matters now.
Memento mori as the ultimate premeditation
- Deathbed Perspective Exercise
Write as if you’re reporting on your life: what did you do with your time?
Write a brief final accounting
- How To Accept My Own Mortality
Develop a genuinely held relationship with your finitude rather than suppressing or managing it.
Move from terror management to mortality acceptance
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