Run a pre-mortem on this plan

Before committing to a plan that people are already enthusiastic about.

It is twelve months from now and this plan has failed badly. Everyone agrees it was a mistake. Write the story of how that happened.

1. Tell the failure as a narrative with dates. Not a risk register, a story: what happened first, what that caused, when we noticed.
2. Give me three separate failure stories with different root causes. At least one should be a failure of execution, and at least one a failure of the underlying premise.
3. For each, name the earliest moment we could have seen it coming and the signal we would have had to be watching.
4. Which of these is most likely, and what would you do this week to make it less so?

Do not reassure me at the end. The point of the exercise is the failure.

The plan:

Stress-testing a plan. Pre-mortems, arguing the other side, and following the consequences past the first order.