What is a pre-mortem in this context?

A pre-mortem is an exercise where you imagine a decision has failed spectacularly one year in the future and work backward to identify the likely causes of that failure.

When should I use this skill in my workflow?

Use it during the final stages of a decision-making process for high-stakes projects, such as choosing a new tech stack or committing to a major product direction.

What is the primary goal of the Contrarian Analysis skill?

The goal is to actively attack a decision to find its strongest reasons for failure, ensuring the final choice is robust and well-vetted against biases.

How does the 'steel-man' process work?

Instead of dismissing rejected options, this skill helps you build the strongest possible argument for them to ensure you aren't ignoring a better alternative due to bias.

Contrarian Analysis & Decision Stress-Testing

Name: Contrarian Analysis & Decision Stress-Testing
Author: wme3

bywme3

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Productivity & Workflow

Stress-tests critical decisions by identifying failure modes, steel-manning opposing views, and auditing for cognitive biases.

The Contrarian Analysis skill implements Gate 5 of the Deliberate Decisions framework, providing a rigorous adversarial layer for high-stakes decision-making. By facilitating structured pre-mortem exercises and building the strongest possible case for rejected alternatives, this skill helps users escape confirmation bias and groupthink. It is particularly useful for software architects and product leads who need to validate complex technical strategies, map second-order ripple effects, and identify 'decision killers' before resources are committed.

Key Features

013 GitHub stars

02Steel-mans rejected alternatives to ensure the chosen path is truly superior

03Facilitates pre-mortem exercises to imagine and mitigate future failure scenarios

04Audits for common cognitive biases like anchoring, sunk cost, and overconfidence

05Maps second-order effects to identify indirect consequences on stakeholders and systems

06Identifies high-probability catastrophic risks that act as 'Decision Killers'

Use Cases

01Reviewing complex team reorganization or process change proposals

02Evaluating high-impact product pivots or new feature prioritizations

03Validating major architectural shifts or infrastructure migration plans

What are Skills?·How to Install

Install with 🐟 Skill.Fish

npx skillfish add wme3/deliberatedecisions contrarian-analysis

For use in Claude.ai and ChatGPT

Download Skill