Pre Mortems

From Harvard Business Review:

As a brainstorming exercise, imagine your project has failed and try to construct the narrative of that failure. This exercise can reveal blindspots and risks you might have missed while focused on solutions and implementations.

Most design exercises are based on hierarchical decomposition. Pre-mortems are not - they’re an exercise in storytelling, building a plausible narrative of what doesn’t go according to plan.

That shift in perspective is what makes them useful.