Business Scaling Premortem
Imagine future failure, trace its causes, and prevent them today
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~days to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 99%
The Business Scaling Premortem uses imaginary time travel to reveal how a venture could fail. Start with a real scaling challenge, move mentally one year into the future, and assume the venture has collapsed: stakeholders are disappointed, employees are unhappy, and customers are leaving. Instead of compiling a risk list, write a short narrative that reconstructs the downward spiral, including the obstacles, omissions, and decisions that produced it. The story format forces individual risks into a causal sequence and makes vague concerns concrete. Once the imagined failure is visible, work backward to identify what must change now. The output is not merely a forecast; it is a decision aid that converts feared future consequences into immediate preventive actions.
Origin
Presented in The Jasmine Star Show as an assignment from Stanford's Latino Business Action Network scaling program, drawing on the premortem technique described in Scaling Up Excellence.
Core principles
- 01Imagining failure exposes risks that optimism can conceal.
- 02A narrative reveals causal chains better than a disconnected list.
- 03Future consequences clarify which decisions must be made today.
- 04Honest reflection turns latent concerns into preventable problems.
How to run it
- 1
Select the scaling challenge
Choose a real venture or business initiative currently facing a meaningful scaling challenge. Anchor the exercise in an actual decision rather than a hypothetical project.
Pro tip Use a challenge important enough that failure would affect customers, employees, investors, or family.
Watch out A trivial or abstract scenario will not expose consequential risks.
- 2
Travel one year forward
Imagine meeting one year from now and learning that the venture has failed. Treat the failure as an established fact rather than a possibility.
Pro tip Picture concrete consequences for each major stakeholder group.
Watch out Do not soften the scenario by assuming the venture merely underperformed.
- 3
Reconstruct the downward spiral
Write a story explaining how the venture reached failure. Include the obstacles, decisions, delays, and omissions that pushed events in the wrong direction.
Pro tip Connect each event causally by asking what happened next and why.
Watch out Do not substitute a bullet-point risk register for the narrative.
- 4
Name what was not done
Identify the actions, conversations, or decisions that were avoided in the imagined timeline. Focus especially on truths already suspected but not confronted.
Pro tip Notice which omissions feel emotionally difficult to write; they may contain the strongest signal.
Watch out Do not limit the analysis to external circumstances beyond your control.
- 5
Work backward into action
Translate each preventable cause into a decision or safeguard that can be implemented today. Prioritize changes that interrupt the earliest links in the failure chain.
Pro tip Assign an owner and near-term deadline to each critical preventive action.
Watch out Insight without a present-day decision leaves the imagined failure path intact.
In the wild
Jasmine Star spent roughly two and a half hours writing a future story about her venture's failure. Describing the challenges, pitfalls, and actions she had failed to take made her current business mistakes and necessary decisions clearer. She then used those insights to make difficult changes during an especially hard personal and professional season.
→ She reported feeling lighter, joyful, confident, and hopeful after making decisions she previously believed she lacked the strength to make.
Common mistakes
Writing a risk list instead of a story
Disconnected bullets do not show how obstacles, omissions, and decisions compound into failure. Build a chronological narrative with clear causal links.
Blaming only external forces
A useful premortem examines controllable decisions and neglected actions, not merely market conditions or bad luck.
Stopping after identifying the risks
The exercise creates value only when imagined causes are translated into preventive decisions in the present.
Is it for you?
Best for
Entrepreneurs and leadership teams facing consequential growth, restructuring, or resource-allocation decisions.
Not ideal for
Teams unwilling to examine uncomfortable risks honestly or act on what the exercise reveals.
From the transcript
“Imagine that we are meeting you a year from now.”
“Write a story of how the venture spiraled downward into failure.”
“And then I was forced to make very hard decisions about what I was going to do today to ensure that my future story did…”
From the episode
The Exercise that Changed My Business