Premortem

Minutes

Before committing, imagine the decision has already failed a year from now and write the story of how it failed, which surfaces risks that ordinary "what could go wrong?" discussion suppresses.

How to do it

  1. 1Set the scene in the past tense: "It is twelve months later and this went badly. It is now obvious why."
  2. 2Give everyone (or yourself) two minutes to write, independently, the most plausible reasons for the failure. Independence matters; do not discuss first.
  3. 3Read the reasons aloud, one per person per round, until the list is exhausted. Do not debate them yet.
  4. 4Sort the list into risks you can mitigate, risks you can monitor, and risks that should stop the decision.
  5. 5Revise the plan or the decision, and record which premortem items changed it.

When to use it

  • •A team is about to commit to a campaign, product, or investment that everyone likes.
  • •You are about to join a group, sign a long contract, or send money to someone new.
  • •A pitch has made the future feel certain.

Counters

Groupthink ManipulationOptimism BiasPlanning FallacyFuture FakingHope PeddlingIllusion of ControlOverconfidence EffectWishful ThinkingSpiral of Silence ExploitationBandwagon Effect

Evidence and how strong it is

Klein (2007) proposed the premortem for organizations; its mechanism rests on Mitchell, Russo & Pennington (1989), who found that "prospective hindsight" (imagining an outcome as having already happened) increased the number of specific reasons people generated for it by roughly 30 percent compared with imagining it as merely possible. The exercise also gives dissenters license to speak without appearing disloyal, which addresses the self-censorship mechanism in groupthink (Janis 1972). Evidence strength: moderate. The prospective-hindsight effect is a replicated lab finding; the organizational premortem is practitioner-endorsed (Kahneman recommends it in Thinking, Fast and Slow) but has little controlled outcome research of its own.

Cautions
  • A premortem run by the person who owns the plan, in front of the boss, will be polite. Have someone without a stake collect the reasons anonymously.
  • Listing failure modes can create false comfort that they have been handled; each item needs an owner or a decision.
  • Do not run it after the commitment is made; it then becomes a ritual that validates the choice.
  1. Klein, G. (2007). Performing a Project Premortem. Harvard Business Review, 85(9), 18-19
    The premortem procedure as described by its originator.
  2. Mitchell, D. J., Russo, J. E., & Pennington, N. (1989). Back to the Future: Temporal Perspective in the Explanation of Events. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 2(1), 25-38
    The prospective-hindsight finding that imagining an outcome as certain increases the number and specificity of explanations generated.
  3. Janis, I. L. (1972). Victims of Groupthink. Houghton Mifflin
    The self-censorship and illusion-of-unanimity mechanisms that a structured dissent exercise is designed to interrupt.
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