Pre-Mortem Made Simple

By Kimani Upshur, M.Ed.

Pre-Mortem: How to Imagine Failure Before It Happens, Spot Hidden Risks, and Make Better Plans starts from a simple observation: most risk analysis happens after something has already gone wrong. A pre-mortem reverses the order. Instead of asking what could go wrong, a question people answer half-heartedly, it asks a team to assume the plan has already failed and explain why. That shift, called prospective hindsight, makes people measurably better at generating specific, concrete reasons for an outcome. In an introduction, thirteen chapters, and a conclusion, the book treats the pre-mortem as a learnable technique with repeatable mechanics: what it actually is, why it works, when to run one and when not to, how to set up a genuine session, and how to run the core exercise — "It's failed — why?" Later chapters show how to surface hidden risks without groupthink, including anonymous written input, how to prioritize risks by likelihood and real severity instead of treating every concern as equally urgent, and how to turn imagined failures into genuine action items. The book then adapts the method for individual and team decisions, names the common mistakes that undermine the exercise, covers fast-moving and high-pressure situations, and shows how to build pre-mortems into regular planning and develop real skill at imagining failure. Written from a Christian worldview — Scripture first.

More from Kimani Upshur: https://upshurunlimitedllc.com