What problem does it solve? Plans often fail from risks nobody articulated before execution. This Skill forces prospective hindsight: assume the plan already failed, enumerate concrete failure paths, and reverse each one into verifiable prevention requirements bound to owners, checkpoints, and ship gates. ## Core Features & Use Cases - Past-Tense Failure Framing: Sets a concrete post-deadline failure scenario so the team explains a happened failure rather than vaguely predicting one. - Reverse Path Analysis: For each top risk, derives necessary conditions, inverts them into prevention requirements, and binds owner, verification checkpoint, and ship/stage gate. - Over-Application Guards: Explicit stop rules prevent theater — skip reversible chores, mid-incident firefighting, and risks already enforced by live gates like CI or canaries. - Use Case: Before a major launch, run a pre-mortem to surface the top 3-5 failure paths (e.g., data loss, no adoption, SLA breach) and convert each into gated plan changes before kickoff. ## Quick Start Run a pre-mortem on my launch plan: assume it failed by the deadline, list the top failure reasons, and turn each into a mitigation with an owner and a ship gate.
