Premortem: 5 AI prompts to find why your plan will fail
Run these in order, in the same chat, with Claude, ChatGPT or Gemini. Replace [my plan] with two or three lines about your plan: the goal, the deadline and how you will do it.
What a premortem is
Instead of asking whether a plan will work, you assume it already failed and explain how. Psychologist Gary Klein created the method, and Daniel Kahneman describes it in Thinking, Fast and Slow. Explaining a failure that already happened makes it easier to name risks that optimism usually hides.
The story
It is one year from now and [my plan] failed badly. Tell the story of how it failed, step by step, as if you watched it happen.The causes
From that story, list the 5 most likely causes of failure. Rank them by how likely they are and how much damage they do.The weak spot
Which assumption in my plan is most likely wrong? What would I see in the first 30 days if it is?The fix
Rewrite my plan so each of those 5 causes is prevented or caught early. Keep the plan simple.The alarms
Give me 3 warning signs, each with a number and a date I can check, and what I do if one of them goes off.How to get better answers
Be specific about the plan, the budget and the deadline. Ask the AI to be blunt. Run it again after you change the plan. The AI does not know your market better than you: treat the answers as a list of things to check, not as a forecast.
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