What this video covers
A pre-mortem flips the usual planning meeting on its head: instead of asking why a plan will work, you assume it already failed a year from now and work backward to every cause — because most of those causes were visible before you ever launched. This video teaches the method using one of the starkest examples in business history: Kodak invented the digital camera in 1975 and its own executives dismissed the prototype as a curiosity, thirty-seven years before the company filed for bankruptcy.
The video walks through exactly what a 1975 pre-mortem would have found — the margin math that made digital an existential threat to film, the internal incentives that rewarded protecting the old business over building the new one, and the recurring-revenue model that digital eliminated outright. None of it required predicting the future; the causes were sitting in Kodak's own numbers. For contrast, the video also covers Fujifilm, which faced the identical threat and chose to redeploy its own chemistry expertise into healthcare and advanced materials instead of protecting film — and survived.
It closes with the actual method, in four steps: write next year's failure headline as if it already happened, list every cause, rate their likelihood, and find the one assumption that takes the whole plan down if it's wrong. The Pre-Mortem Worksheet, linked below, lets you run the exercise on your own plan before you launch it.
Sourced to CNN Money, Kodak's own historical record, and reporting on Fujifilm's turnaround.