1 · What's it about?
Short and concrete — one sentence is enough, but more helps the quality of the next steps.
2 · How does this fail, guaranteed?
For each category: an honest answer to the leading question. Imagine the project has already failed — what was the reason? Multiple entries per category are allowed.
3 · Fold back every failure path
For each failure path collected: one concrete safeguard that defuses it before project start — not "we'll watch out for it," but a real, concrete step.
4 · The Goodhart Layer
The step most pre-mortems skip: can passing this test itself become a failure mode?
Question A
How would a team notice that it has only learned to pass this pre-mortem — without actually fixing the underlying risk?
Question B
Which metric from this project could be optimized without the real outcome improving?
5 · Result
Summary of all failure paths, safeguards, and the Goodhart check — as text to save or share.