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> how do you choose the right one for the pre-mortem for maximum value discussion?

Isn't that where domain expertise comes in? It sounds pretty sensible and important to me to try to imagine various realistic failure modes and preemptively try to prevent them. To not let the website go down, pre-empting hard drive failure or DDoS makes a lot more sense than worrying about network cables spontaneously disintegrating, or the outbreak of nuclear war.

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I always try to aim for the "Most Likely Worst Case Scenario"... not the worst thing that can happen, but the most likely bad thing that can happen.

Then in reality the website is down due to the simplest things that's so common we don't reconsider it, such as user input some special characters that makes the server error.

Edit: I'm not downplaying the importance of prevention

> server error

Seems to me that bugs is then a high risk in that project. And to prevent or reduce the number of failures, the project needs an auto test suite

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