Coaching practices for Pre Mortem Leadership
Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Pre Mortem Leadership, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.
Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?
- Part of me wants to keep my best people in roles that serve me and to pick a successor who won’t outshine me
- I keep making the call that looks good this quarter and quietly costs the team a year out, and I want to start deciding like someone holding all this in trust for the long run rather than spending it to hit the number in front of me.
- If someone stood up at my funeral tomorrow and told the truth about how I actually treat people, I’m not sure I’d like what they’d have to say
- I keep abandoning things the moment it’s clear I won’t personally see them pay off, and I want to be able to pour myself into something that matters even knowing I’ll be long gone before it’s finished.
- 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.
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. - Develop successors who will surpass you
Invest in your successor’s success as a deliberate act of institutional ambition.
Level 5 Leadership: Humility and Will in Great Leaders - Practice foresight and stewardship
Hold the team’s resources and future in trust — decide for the long game, not just this quarter.
Servant Leadership, Made Practical - Write your own eulogy first
Draft what you want said about your character at your funeral — then measure the gap against your life now.
The Eulogy Virtues: Building a Life of Character - Cathedral thinking
Commit to projects whose benefits you will not live to see, as medieval builders committed to cathedrals.
The Good Ancestor: Long-Path Thinking for a Meaningful Life - Deliberate mortality reflection
Briefly contemplate your finite lifespan to surface what actually matters to you.
Terror Management Theory, Made Practical - Generativity: investing in what outlasts you
Invest in the next generation or in work that outlives you.
Self-Transcendence: Beyond the Self - 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 - Use the deathbed perspective to clarify what matters
Imagine yourself at the end of your life looking back — and use that perspective to evaluate today’s choices.
The Legacy Letter: Writing What You Want to Leave Behind - Reflect on the legacy you are building
Considering how you wish to be remembered connects present actions to a meaning that extends beyond your lifespan.
Meaning-Centered Therapy, Made Practical
Related concerns
- End Of Life Perspective
Imagine yourself at the end of your life looking back — and use that perspective to evaluate today’s choices.
Use the deathbed perspective to clarify what matters
- 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.
- Immortality Projects Meaning
Channel the drive to "live on" into work that actually benefits others rather than mere legacy-seeking.
Redirect symbolic immortality into genuine contribution
- Pre Mortem Personal
Premeditate the final loss — your own death — as a clarifier of what actually matters now.
Memento mori as the ultimate premeditation
- Premortem Personal Goals
Write as if you’re reporting on your life: what did you do with your time?
Write a brief final accounting
- The Good Ancestor Long Path Thinking For A Meaningful Life Before Bed
Roman Krznaric argues that most modern thinking is acutely short-term, and that cultivating "long-path thinking" — making choices with deep consideration for people not yet born — is both a path to personal meaning and a basis for wiser decisions. The practices draw on well-documented psychology of time perspective and legacy motivation, though the framework itself is relatively new.
Describe your situation in your own words to search the complete practice library.