Naming a risk is not the same as doing anything about it. A list of things that might go wrong, however thorough, is still just a list. Somewhere between "here is what could kill this plan" and "here is what I am doing about it", something has to happen. That something is not a mood or a mindset. It is a sequence.
Five Stages, Each Building on the One Before It
The approach behind this guide moves through five escalating stages, and the order is not incidental. Skipping one weakens the ones that follow.
- The Autopsy — the plan is assumed to have failed completely at a fixed point in the future, and the most likely causes of death are ranked, not just listed.
- The Verdict — a ranked list is forced into a decision: which failure mode is most likely, which is most dangerous, and which hidden assumption sits underneath both.
- The Rebuild — the diagnosis becomes a blueprint, with every identified failure mode closed off in a revised plan.
- The Adversary — the stage almost nobody volunteers for: role-playing whoever benefits most from your failure, and asking exactly where they would strike.
- The Tripwire — every failure mode is converted into a dated, measurable early-warning signal, because a plan tends to fail quietly before it fails loudly.
Why the Sequence Is the Point
Each stage exists to close a specific gap the previous one could not close on its own. An autopsy without a verdict produces a pile of worries with no decision attached. A rebuild without an adversary produces a plan that only survives friendly conditions. A rebuild without a tripwire produces a plan that looks solved on paper and drifts quietly off course in practice, unmonitored.
None of these five stages is complicated to describe. Running them well, especially the fourth one, is a different matter entirely, and it is where most of the real work — and most of the value — actually sits.
Learn more and read the full book Pre-Mortem for Founders.
