The Pre-Mortem Skill: Engineer Failure on a Quiet Tuesday

This is my Pre-Mortem, the Resilience Scaffold method I built as Mayor of Orting and ran through a historic flood, a pandemic, and a city council revolt. It is packaged as an AI skill you run on your own decisions.

It is not a generic risk assessment. You do not ask whether your project will fail. You declare that it already has, then work backward to the exact causes and the fixes. Assuming the failure removes ego and pulls the real truth out of a room.

Run it on any high-stakes decision: a launch, a budget, a negotiation, a policy vote, a grant. It walks your situation through the full method: the declaration of failure, the autopsy of the future by function, the two or three vulnerabilities that actually kill you, the scaffolds that prevent them, singular ownership with a 14-day check-in and a budget line, and the saved-rounds close.

You get the skill itself, ready to run in your AI, plus my departmental prompt matrix and the cadence for when to deploy it. It is the automated version of my Resilience Scaffold Playbook. The same method, on demand.