Architecture & practice·Making and recording decisions
before starting, everyone wrote down why this will have failed in six months, and two of the reasons were the same.
Pre-mortem
A structured exercise where the team imagines the project has already failed and writes the story of how. It works because prospective hindsight loosens tongues: people who would not object to a plan will happily explain a failure, especially in writing and in parallel. The output is a list of risks with owners, and it is cheap enough that skipping it on a large project is hard to justify.