Assume failure has already happened. Work backward to find out why.
Based on Gary Klein's Pre-Mortem technique, this pattern uses three agents:
- Failure Narrator — Writes a vivid, specific story of how the project failed
- Root Cause Analyst — Identifies the causal chain that led to failure
- Mitigation Planner — Turns root causes into concrete preventive actions
Traditional risk assessment asks "what could go wrong?" and gets generic answers. Pre-Mortem asks "it failed — tell me the story of why" and unlocks specific, imaginative failure modes that prospective thinking misses.
The psychological mechanism: prospective hindsight increases the ability to identify reasons for future outcomes by ~30% (Mitchell et al., 1989).
python run.py --prompt "We're launching our AI feature to 10K users next Tuesday"
python run.py --prompt "We're raising a Series A in this market" --scenarios 3