Pre-Mortem

In an ordinary plan review there is, in Klein's words, "silent pressure in these meetings not to surface doubts that might disturb the team's harmony", and people keep back what they would not ordinarily mention "for fear of being impolitic"; the opening paragraph of his HBR article says "too many people are reluctant to speak up about their reservations during the all-important planning phase." The pre-mortem changes the frame: the leader tells the team the plan has failed and asks why. In Klein's words, "The pre-mortem reverses this dynamic—people show how smart they are by the quality of the issues that they raise." Writing reasons alone first, before anyone speaks, keeps one senior voice from setting the list. In a study of 178 college students that Klein reports, the pre-mortem group showed the greatest drop in confidence in a hypothetical plan compared with groups that critiqued the plan or listed pros and cons; the study measured confidence, not whether the plan would have worked. Klein's HBR article says prospective hindsight "increases the ability to correctly identify reasons for future outcomes by 30%", but the 1989 study it rests on measured how many and what kind of reasons people gave when an outcome was framed as certain, not whether the reasons were right.

Bias for Action: hunting for failure on every plan breeds caution; Klein himself notes that pre-mortems "tend to encourage risk aversion", and for a cheap, reversible step, trying it teaches more than imagining how it goes wrong.