Run a pre-mortem before a major life change (template included)

Gary Klein introduced the pre-mortem to help teams surface risks without blame. The format is simple: imagine it is a year from now and the decision failed. Tell the story of how it failed. Then walk backwards to what you could have done this month to prevent each chapter of that story.

For personal life decisions, the same structure works better than vague anxiety. Anxiety loops; narratives end. A pre-mortem turns “I am scared” into “I am scared of three specific things, and two of them have mitigations.”

The 45-minute version (solo)

1. Pick a decision with a clear date (“we move on August 1” / “I sign by Friday”).
2. Set a timer for 10 minutes and write a failure story in past tense: “By next spring, we regretted X because…” Do not edit while writing.
3. Circle the top five causes mentioned in the story.
4. For each cause, write one mitigation you control, one you half-control (partner, employer), and one you do not control (market, health).
5. Pick two mitigations to schedule this week. Put them on a calendar, not a to-do list.

The 60-minute version (with a partner or co-decider)

Each person writes a separate failure story silently, then you read them aloud. The overlap is your risk map; the differences are your communication gaps. Many “big fights after the move” were visible in mismatched pre-mortems months earlier — one person feared isolation, the other feared money. Both fears can be true; the pre-mortem makes them discussable without assigning villain roles.

Common failure stories worth rehearsing

• We underestimated cash runway by three months.
• We assumed remote work policy would stay flexible.
• We ignored the health insurance gap between jobs.
• We moved for a partner’s career and did not negotiate what happens if that career shifts again.
• We optimised for short-term relief and traded away long-term optionality without noticing.

When a pre-mortem should change the decision vs. the plan

If the mitigations are cheap and high-leverage — an emergency fund top-up, a contract review, a two-week trial visit — you usually keep the decision and improve the plan. If the mitigations are impossible or depend on someone else changing character, the pre-mortem is telling you something louder. Character-based bets rarely belong in the “likely case” column.

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