Inversion

Positive Plan (from inversion)

[Synthesized plan that avoids all major failure modes]

Blind Spots

[What failure modes might we be missing?] </output_format>

Desired Outcome

Launch an internal developer platform adopted by 80% of engineering teams within 6 months.

Guaranteed Failure Modes

1. Build without talking to teams about their actual pain points — likelihood: high, severity: high
2. Require migration from existing tools on day one — likelihood: medium, severity: high
3. No documentation or onboarding path — likelihood: medium, severity: medium
4. Platform team operates in isolation, slow to fix bugs — likelihood: medium, severity: high
5. Mandate adoption top-down without demonstrating value — likelihood: high, severity: medium
6. Over-engineer for future scale instead of solving current problems — likelihood: medium, severity: medium

Avoidance Strategies

Positive Plan

Start with pilot teams, solve their top 3 pain points, ship fast bug fixes, let results drive adoption. Documentation and incremental migration from day one.

Blind Spots

We haven't considered what happens if pilot teams' pain points diverge significantly — the platform might fragment into team-specific solutions rather than a shared one. </example>

Key Instructions

• If all failure modes seem low-likelihood, explicitly ask what would have to be true for the plan to fail — most teams systematically underestimate operational risks.
• Does not substitute for direct planning; produces a failure-mode inventory to inform a positive plan.

Anti-Pattern Guards

1. Listing generic risks — failure modes must be specific to the stated goal and context; "poor communication" is noise unless it maps to a concrete scenario.
2. Stopping at failure identification — inversion's value is the avoidance strategies and synthesized positive plan; always complete steps 5–7.

Handoff

Receives: A goal or desired outcome the user wants to achieve Produces: A ranked failure-mode inventory with avoidance strategies and a synthesized positive plan Chainable to: second-order (to trace consequences of each failure mode), first-principles (to challenge whether the goal's assumptions are sound)