Working definition
Pre-mortem is the deliberate imagination of failure before the Battle is run — used to surface every plausible friction now, so the corrective moves get installed upstream instead of becoming wounds downstream.
How it works
The post-mortem looks at a failure and asks what happened. The pre-mortem looks at a future that has not yet happened and asks what will have caused this to fail. The reversal turns the brain’s powerful narrative-completion engine into a debugging tool.
Three steps:
- Project failure. Stand at the end of the week and declare the current Battle has failed. Not partially — failed. Visualise the specific scene: the message that did not land, the protocol that was not respected, the moment of drift that produced the result you did not want.
- Generate every plausible cause. Friction in the environment, predictable objection, weak link in your communication, drift moment you let through, unprepared response, surprise that wasn’t actually surprising. The 80% of the failure that was foreseeable.
- Install the corrective move now. For each reason, write down what you put in place today to prevent it. The corrections live in the Conditioning stack, in the Drift Bumpers you set, or in the explicit parce que you prepare in advance for the communication.
The pre-mortem is the failure-imagery layer of preparation — the dynamic complement to the Three Types of Imagery sequence. Where descriptive imagery rehearses the move, dynamic imagery rehearses the body, and positive imagery rehearses the win — the pre-mortem rehearses the loss, so the loss does not arrive unprepared for.
The trap to avoid: pre-mortem is not pessimism. It is anticipated friction with corrective intent. Spending fifteen minutes imagining failure once is the cheapest insurance available against spending a week recovering from it.
Signature
The image is the boundary already broken in rehearsal — Céline names the term on 2026-02-16: Je vais préparer… à ce qui va se passer si ce que je communique n’est pas respecté. Ce n’est pas parce que je vais leur communiquer qu’ils vont le respecter.
More room passes mention this doctrine in replay narrative — search the Codex for Pre-mortem or start from the latest entry on Weekly Sessions.
Spatial split — surprise (boundary breaks live) versus pre-mortem (rehearse the break · install corrective move now). Your move: Your move this week.
Your move this week
This week’s micro-action (24–72 hours):
- The Battle has failed by Friday because: three reasons, ranked by probability.
- The corrective move I install now, before the week starts: one concrete action per reason.
- The first lead-measure check tonight: how do I know the correction is being honoured?