Graveyard of Gloom: A Pre-mortem Template for Project Risk Management

Uncover potential fatal flaws in your upcoming project with the Graveyard of Gloom template—a powerful pre-mortem exercise that helps development teams identify risks before they become project-killing issues. By imagining your project as already failed, you'll generate valuable insights that can help prevent that gloomy future from becoming reality.

What Is a Graveyard of Gloom Pre-mortem?

A pre-mortem is a strategic risk management technique where team members imagine that their project has already failed and work backward to determine potential causes. Unlike a retrospective that examines past events, this futurespective approach anticipates problems before they occur.

The Graveyard of Gloom template uses a cemetery metaphor to visualize project failure, complete with:

  • A tombstone featuring your project's name and eulogy
  • Four distinct quadrants that help trace the project's demise:
    • The Original Goals (what you aimed to achieve)
    • The Original Plan (how you intended to achieve it)
    • What Went Wrong (the fatal flaws that led to failure)
    • The Result (the consequences of these failures)

Benefits & When to Use

This template is especially valuable:

  • At the beginning of complex or high-risk projects
  • When starting initiatives with significant dependencies
  • Before committing substantial resources to a new effort
  • When your team feels overly optimistic about a project's success
  • To proactively identify blind spots in your planning

Teams using this pre-mortem approach report:

  • More thorough risk identification than traditional planning
  • Reduced cognitive bias in project planning
  • Greater team psychological safety when raising concerns
  • More robust mitigation strategies
  • Higher project success rates through preventative planning

How to Run a Graveyard of Gloom Session

Duration: 45-60 minutes

  1. Set the Scene (5 minutes)

    • Introduce the concept: "We're going to imagine our project has completely failed"
    • Write the project name at the top of the tombstone area
    • Ask the team to adopt a mindset of "this project is already dead"

  2. Define the Foundation (10 minutes)

    • As a team, complete the "Original Goals" quadrant: What were you trying to accomplish?
    • Fill in the "Original Plan" quadrant: How did you intend to achieve these goals?

  3. Imagine Failure (10-15 minutes)

    • Have each team member independently add sticky notes to:
      • "What Went Wrong" quadrant: What factors caused the project to fail?
      • "The Result" quadrant: What were the consequences of this failure?

  4. Share and Group (10-15 minutes)

    • Each team member presents their failure scenarios
    • Consolidate similar ideas and identify recurring themes
    • Look for connections between different failure points

  5. Prioritize Concerns (5-10 minutes)

    • Conduct a voting round to identify the most critical risks
    • Rearrange sticky notes according to likelihood and impact

  6. Develop Mitigations (10-15 minutes)

    • For each high-priority risk, brainstorm preventative measures
    • Create specific action items to incorporate into your project plan
    • Assign owners to each mitigation strategy

  7. Bonus: Write the Eulogy (5 minutes)

    • Collaboratively craft a brief eulogy for your project based on the identified failures
    • This creative exercise often reveals additional insights and adds a memorable element to the session

Tips for a Successful Session

  • Embrace the morbid theme – The cemetery metaphor may feel uncomfortable at first, but leaning into it helps teams think more creatively about risks.

  • Encourage radical honesty – Make it clear that identifying risks isn't negative; it's a sign of commitment to project success.

  • Consider anonymity – For teams that might be hesitant to voice concerns, consider using anonymous contributions for the failure scenarios.

  • Focus on the specific project – Avoid generic risks and encourage concrete, contextual failure scenarios related to your specific initiative.

  • Track patterns – If similar risks appear across multiple pre-mortems, this signals systemic issues in your organization's project approach.

  • Revisit during the project – The value of this exercise extends beyond planning. Return to your Graveyard of Gloom mid-project to check if new risks have emerged or if your mitigations are effective.

By confronting potential failure head-on, your team can transform morbid predictions into proactive solutions—ensuring your project stays among the living rather than ending up as another tombstone in the Graveyard of Gloom.

Use this template