Pre-mortem and pre-victorum: plan goals by imagining both outcomes

Executive overview

Most people repeat the same unmet goals year after year because they set them without stress-testing them. The pre-mortem — projecting yourself into a future failure state and narrating what went wrong — surfaces non-obvious blockers before they happen. Pairing it with a pre-victorum (narrating roaring success) adds a second lens that reveals what actually drives results, not just what kills them.

Writing both stories uncovers surprises that straightforward goal-setting misses.

How the pre-mortem works

• Project yourself to a future date (e.g. end of year) and write a story as if you're already there
• Write two versions: roaring success and total disaster
• Frame each as a short article — specific, narrative, present-tense
• Identify what contributed to each outcome; the non-obvious factors are the point

The Stanford Medical School example

• Goal: create world-changing medical innovations
• Initial assumption: attract more top-tier medical researchers
• Pre-mortem revealed: bottleneck was nurse shortage, not researcher shortage
• Nurses were overwhelmed with grant compliance work, blocking all research progress
• Without fixing support capacity, adding researchers would have changed nothing

Pre-mortem vs pre-victorum

• Strictly, pre-mortem covers failure; success version is the pre-victorum
• Stanford runs both sides; many insights differ between the two
• Energetically, focusing on positive outcomes is preferable for personal use
• Focusing on failure scenarios can inadvertently reinforce the wrong future
• For teams: include diverse voices, not just leadership; anonymous input helps

When to use it

• Personal annual goal-setting
• Team or project planning before a major initiative
• Any situation where you keep repeating the same pattern without improvement