pre-mortem

A pre-mortem risk assessment helps identify potential failure modes for strategic initiatives by generating cross-functional failure scenarios grounded in market and team context. The exercise categorizes these risks to ensure deal-blockers are addressed before launch.

During initiative planning, business risks are classified into Tigers (deal-blockers), Paper Tigers (manageable risks), and Elephants (accepted trade-offs). This structured risk classification prioritizes mitigation efforts for critical deal-blockers.

To create a mitigation action plan for strategic risks, run a pre-mortem exercise that generates an action register detailing rollback or mitigation steps. This specifically targets categorized Tiger risks that threaten your initiative.

Yes, you can apply scenario planning and risk management to GTM pivots through a pre-mortem risk exercise. This process requires initiative details to surface failure scenarios and develop targeted rollback action plans.

From a structured pre-mortem risk assessment, you receive a Tiger summary highlighting deal-blockers, a full risk table categorizing scenarios, and an action register detailing mitigation steps for your initiative.