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.
Why it works
Pre-mortems work by inverting the narrative fallacy: instead of building a story of success after the fact, you deliberately construct a failure narrative before the fact. This interrupts the planning fallacy (which is itself narrative-driven — optimistic stories about future execution) and surfaces risks that the success narrative suppresses. Imagining the failure makes concrete the specific ways the plan could break.
How to do it
- After building a plan, tell your team or yourself: "Imagine it is one year from now and this plan failed completely. Write the story of why."
- List the specific failure modes that story reveals.
- Adjust the plan to address the most plausible and damaging failure modes before executing.
Evidence
Pre-mortem analysis was developed by Gary Klein and tested in forecasting contexts. Prospective hindsight (imagining a future as already happened) improves the identification of failure modes compared to direct risk listing. (observational)
Sources
- Mitchell, Russo & Pennington (1989), back-to-the-future prospective hindsight study
- Klein (2007), "Performing a Project Premortem," Harvard Business Review
Common mistake
Running the pre-mortem as a formality and only generating failure stories that are already expected — the value comes from surfacing failures you weren’t considering.
Practice this with IX Coach
7 days free, then $40/month (~$1.30/day).
More practices for The Narrative Fallacy: Why We Can’t Stop Making Stories
- Identify what the narrative leaves out
After hearing or constructing a causal story, deliberately list the facts it doesn’t explain.
- Generate alternative histories for past outcomes
For any past success or failure, construct two or three plausible alternative paths that could have led to a different outcome.
- Conduct a randomness audit of outcomes you’re explaining
Before attributing an outcome to skill, strategy, or character, estimate how much of it could be chance.
- Separate the data from the narrative you’ve built around it
List the raw facts, then list the story you’ve layered on top — and check whether the story actually follows.
- State a prediction before looking at the outcome
Commit to a prediction before the result is known to prevent the narrative from rewriting your memory of your forecast.
- Be skeptical of clean lessons extracted from messy outcomes
When a story produces a neat takeaway, ask whether the lesson is actually in the data or in the narrative shaping.
Related concepts
- Thinking, Fast and Slow, Made Usable
Two systems, the biases they create, and when to slow down
- Base-Rate Neglect: Why We Ignore the Odds
How to let prior probabilities do their real work in your decisions
- Hindsight Bias: Why Everything Seems Obvious in Retrospect
How "I knew it all along" corrupts judgment — and the practices that correct it