What’s a pre-mortem?
A pre-mortem is a thought experiment that you can use to make better decisions. You imagine your plan has already failed, then work backwards to explain why. Where a post-mortem examines a failure after it happens, a pre-mortem surfaces the risks while there’s still time to do something about them. Psychologist Gary Klein developed the technique, Daniel Kahneman championed it, and it’s now widely used well beyond advocacy.
The prompt
Context: [ONE OR TWO SENTENCES ON YOUR ORGANIZATION AND WHAT IT DOES]
Plan: [PASTE YOUR CAMPAIGN OR PROJECT PLAN — GOAL, KEY STEPS, TIMELINE, AND
TARGET — OR UPLOAD IT AS A FILE]
Conduct a pre-mortem on this plan. Imagine it is 12 months from now and the
plan has failed completely. First, tell the story of how it failed. Then list
the most likely causes of failure, ranked by probability, and what we could do
now to reduce each risk. Be critical. Do not assume our plan is good, and do
not take my framing as true.Why it works
Advocacy teams are passionate, and passionate teams are optimistic. A pre-mortem asks the AI to explain a failure that has already happened, which gives a model trained to be agreeable permission to be critical.
You don’t have to act on every risk it raises. But don’t dismiss one without being able to say why it’s wrong.
Customize it
- Campaign plan already written up as a Google Doc or Word document? Upload it alongside the prompt instead of pasting. If your materials live in a folder, Claude Cowork or ChatGPT can work inside that folder and find the relevant documents themselves.
- Run it inside a project or Gem that holds your campaign documents, so the failure story draws on your real constraints rather than generic ones.
- Change the horizon to match the plan: 6 months for a short campaign, 2 years for a program.
- Follow up on the top risk: “What early warning sign would tell us this failure is starting?”
Go deeper
Pre-mortems are one of several decision-making frameworks we covered in Session 3 of our recent Amplify for Animals course, AI for Strategic Decision Making. If you’d like live training on using AI as a strategic thought partner, sign up for Amplify.
