Free tool · no sign-up

Pre-mortem: find the holes before you decide

Five short steps for a decision that matters. Each one comes from a decision tool we traced to its source in Deciding under uncertainty. Ten minutes, and your answers stay in this browser.

The decision

What are you deciding?

What are the options? (including doing nothing)

Can you undo it?

If you change your mind later, how hard is it to go back?

Hard or impossible to undo Easy to undo Not sure

From Jeff Bezos's 2015 letter to Amazon shareholders: "Some decisions are consequential and irreversible or nearly irreversible – one-way doors – and these decisions must be made methodically, carefully, slowly". Most others "are changeable, reversible – they're two-way doors." He was writing about decisions inside a company. More

Imagine it went wrong

Picture yourself a year from now. You made the choice, and it turned out badly. Write down why it went wrong, one reason per line. Then, for each one, what you could do now to make it less likely.

This is Gary Klein's premortem, described in Harvard Business Review in September 2007: team members "assume that the project they are planning has just failed", and then explain why. More

How do things like this usually go?

Forget your plan for a moment. When other people make a choice like this, how does it usually turn out?

Daniel Kahneman and Dan Lovallo (1993) wrote that "Decision makers have a strong tendency to consider problems as unique", and that forecasts anchored on your own plan tend to be too optimistic. Looking at how similar cases went is the counterweight. More

What would you regret?

Picture yourself much older, looking back. Which choice would you regret not having made?

Bezos described this as his "regret minimization framework" in a 2001 interview: "I wanted to project myself forward to age 80". It is one person's account of one choice, so treat it as a question to ask, not a rule. More

Your summary

Fill in the steps above and your summary appears here.

The worksheet needs JavaScript. You can do the same steps on paper: the decision, can you undo it, imagine it went wrong, how things like this usually go, and what you would regret.

Your answers are kept in this browser only, so you can come back to them; nothing is sent to us. This worksheet helps you think a decision through. It is not financial, legal or medical advice; for those, talk to someone qualified who knows your situation.

Coming soon

A printable decision journal, with this worksheet and space to look back on how each decision turned out. Newsletter subscribers hear first.

Get the newsletter