Pre Mortem Questions: 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 Questions, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.
About 2 minutes
Try it here: answer the pre-mortem questions
Answer three questions as if the plan has already failed: what happened, what did we miss, and what would we do differently.
If this failed, what would we have missed?
Practices that may help
- 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 - 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: 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. - 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 - Deliberate mortality reflection
Briefly contemplate your finite lifespan to surface what actually matters to you.
Terror Management Theory, Made Practical - Apply the deathbed test to current decisions
When facing a trade-off, ask which option the future you will wish you had chosen.
The Bucket List Method - The Regret of the Dying
Bronnie Ware, an Australian palliative care nurse, documented the most common regrets of dying patients in her book The Top Five Regrets of the Dying. The themes — especially living others’ expectations, working too hard, suppressing feelings, and neglecting friendships — are consistent with broader research on regret and well-being. The evidence is qualitative and self-reported; treat it as wisdom data, not clinical data. - Ask the legacy question
What will this effort have been part of, when you look back?
Memento Mori: Using Mortality Awareness to Focus What Matters - 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 - 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
Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?
- I want to look back from the very end of my life and ask honestly what I actually did with my time
- I’m burning my days on this grudge, this inbox, this thing that wound me up
- 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’m sitting on a real chance to do something that matters to me, and the safe, comfortable, convenient choice is quietly winning by default
- I’m pouring myself into this work and it feels like it’s just disappearing into nothing
Related concerns
- 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
- 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.
- Pre Mortem Exercise Meaning
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 Meaning
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.
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