Concept
The premortem
A premortem, Gary Klein's tool adopted by the Heaths, imagines before you commit that it is a year later and the decision has failed, then asks everyone to write why. The past tense draws out the specific worries people were carrying and not saying.
Asking 'what could go wrong?' invites polite, general answers. Saying 'it went wrong; here is what happened' produces specific ones, and a 1989 study by Mitchell, Russo and Pennington found that imagining an event as having already occurred raised people's ability to correctly identify reasons for it by about thirty percent. The premortem is a cheap defence against overconfidence, which is not believing things will go well but imagining too narrow a range of outcomes. The Heaths pair it with bookending, writing the realistic worst and best cases and preparing for both, and with tripwires that force a review.
A real-life example
A baker runs a premortem on a second branch with her husband and head baker. The head baker says, for the first time in three months of planning, that she cannot be in two kitchens. The plan changes: the second branch sells bread baked at the first.
How to use it
- 1Say: it is a year from now and this failed. Take five minutes and write why.
- 2Do it with the people involved; the quiet ones carry the reasons.
- 3Turn the top reason into a change to the plan or a tripwire.