Back to the Future: Temporal Perspective in the Explanation of Events
Back to the Future: Temporal Perspective in the Explanation of Events is a journal article by Deborah J. Mitchell, J. Edward Russo, Nancy Pennington (1989), published in Journal of Behavioral Decision Making. IX Coach's practice library cites it in 9 practices across 9 concepts; each one is listed below, so you can see exactly where this journal article is put to use.
Where to find it
Practices on IX Coach that cite Back to the Future
- Define your nightmare outcome before your ideal outcome
Write a vivid description of the life you don’t want — this clarifies the anti-goals that protect you from sleepwalking into it.
Anti-Goals: Defining Success by What You Refuse to Accept
- Use feedforward to align team members on goals before projects begin
At the start of a project, invite feedforward on how to succeed — before any performance to critique.
Feedforward: Future-Focused Feedback That Actually Changes Behavior
- Run a pre-mortem before you start
Before a project begins, ask: assume it failed — what went wrong?
Hindsight Bias: Why Everything Seems Obvious in Retrospect
- Run a pre-mortem from the outside-view perspective
Imagine the project has failed — then ask which base-rate failure type caused it.
The Outside View
- Run a premortem before committing
Imagine the project has already failed and work backwards to find why.
The Planning Fallacy — Why Your Estimates Are Always Wrong
- Run a mental simulation before committing to a course of action
Before acting on a recognized situation, mentally run through how your intended response plays out.
Recognition-Primed Decision Making
- Black hat: identify risks and why something could fail
Apply the most rigorous critical scrutiny to the idea — the black hat is the voice of caution and evidence-based pessimism.
Six Thinking Hats, Made Practical
- Run a premortem before committing
Imagine the decision has already failed — then ask why.
Thinking in Bets
- Run a pre-mortem to interrupt forward narrative construction
Before committing to a plan, imagine it failed completely — then generate the most plausible story of why.
The Narrative Fallacy: Why We Can’t Stop Making Stories
How this page was checked
- The citation was matched to its Crossref record, and the title, authors and year above are taken from that record — not written by us.
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