Premortem
An exercise in which, before deciding, one assumes the decision has failed and writes down the causes, to bring out the doubts the group keeps quiet.
The premortem reverses the autopsy: instead of asking afterward why a project failed, the team is asked, before the decision, to imagine that it has failed and to write down, each separately, the reasons for that failure. Gary Klein described it in 2007 in the Harvard Business Review. The method rests on a simple mechanism: it is socially costly to doubt a project the group supports, but it becomes legitimate to explain a failure presented as a given. In underwriting, the exercise applies before accepting a large line or entering a new class: one assumes the account has produced a total loss within three years, and lists the scenarios leading there. Those that are plausible and not addressed by the terms become questions for the client, exclusions to draft or reasons to decline, and they go into the underwriting file note.
Before writing a first political risk line on a mine in a Sahel country, an underwriting team runs a premortem. Among the imagined causes of failure is a coup followed, months later, by the withdrawal of a permit and then a nationalization: the sequence Orano went through in Niger, from the July 2023 coup to the withdrawal of the Imouraren permit in June 2024 and the nationalization of Somair announced in June 2025.
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