pre-mortem

Pre-mortem is a workplace planning exercise: before a project starts, imagine it has failed and ask why. Not concerning, useful planning tool. If your kid uses it constantly, ask them where they first heard it, not to police their speech but to understand which online community they are in. Most slang of this kind moves through TikTok and group chats, so seeing it in your child's vocabulary just means they are plugged into normal teen internet culture.

Pre-mortem is a business and project-management technique where a team imagines a project's failure to identify risks proactively. Use in management writing. Formal equivalent: "prospective hindsight" or "failure scenario planning." Common non-native mistake: confusing with post-mortem (review after the fact). Pre-mortem happens before the project begins. Read or listen to the word in context several times before trying it yourself; the right register is harder to learn than the dictionary meaning.