What is pre mortem analysis?

Pre mortem analysis is a concept in personal epistemology: Imagining failure in advance corrects for optimistic perception biases.

Example: You're about to launch a new product feature. Instead of listing risks, you tell your team: 'It's six months from now and this feature has completely failed. Write down why.' Within ten minutes, a junior engineer surfaces a dependency risk that nobody mentioned in three weeks of planning meetings — because the prompt 'imagine it already failed' unlocked what 'what could go wrong?' never did.

This concept is part of Phase 8 (Perceptual Calibration) in the How to Think curriculum, which builds the epistemic infrastructure for perceptual calibration.