Run a premortem before committing

Imagine the project has already failed and work backwards to find why.

Why it works

The premortem (Klein, 1989) exploits prospective hindsight: when people are told an outcome has occurred, they generate more and better causes for it than when asked to imagine possible futures. By assuming failure before starting, you bypass the motivated reasoning that suppresses uncomfortable scenarios during forward planning. The premortem surfaces specific failure modes that get averaged out by optimistic group planning, without requiring individuals to publicly dissent.

How to do it

1. After completing a plan, announce: "Imagine it is six months from now and this project failed badly. What happened?"
2. Have every team member (or your future self) write down two to three causes of that failure.
3. Gather the list, look for recurring themes, and adjust the plan or add explicit mitigation.
4. Run a separate "pre-parade" for potential successes to preserve motivation.

Evidence

Prospective hindsight research (Mitchell, Russo & Pennington, 1989) found that imagining an event as already having occurred increased the generation of correct reasons by about 30% compared to forward projection. Klein popularized the premortem as a practical application; direct RCT evidence for the premortem specifically is limited. (observational)

Most evidence is on reason generation in lab settings, not on whether premortem-adjusted plans actually complete faster.

Sources

• Mitchell, Russo & Pennington (1989), Back to the future: Temporal perspective in the explanation of events, Journal of Behavioral Decision Making

Common mistake

Treating the premortem as a brainstorm for edge cases rather than a systematic audit — the exercise requires genuine imagination of central failure, not just catastrophizing.