Negative prescience
What a foreboding title… But a title that combines one of Tim Ferris’ most famous creations, MIT professor Gary Klein’s “Brain-child” and a key tenet of an over 2000 year old philosophy that the likes of Steve Jobs relied heavily upon.
The aim of this “hack” is to envision what failure would look like.
In Gary Klein’s own words: “A premortem is the hypothetical opposite of a postmortem.”
A 1989 study by the Wharton School; Jay Russo, of Cornell; the University of Colorado, found that prospective hindsight — imagining that an event has already occurred — increases the ability to correctly identify reasons for future outcomes by 30%.
A postmortem in a medical setting allows health professionals and the family to learn what caused a patient’s death. A premortem in a business setting comes at the beginning of a project rather than the end, so that the project can be improved rather than autopsied.
Unlike a typical critiquing session, in which project team members are asked what might go wrong, the premortem operates on the assumption that the “patient” has died, and so asks what did go wrong. The team members’ task is to generate plausible reasons for the project’s failure.
By imagining failure we concede that despite our excellence, many things go wrong in most projects, to ignore this would upset Daniel Kahnemann if you’ve read his book.
By brining to life such a possibility, in the worst case we make it easier to deal with, and in the best case identify areas to tread carefully and plan accordingly. Ultimately decreasing your emotional reactivity in ever Stoic fashion.
Finally, I’d recommend searching for Tim Ferris’ famous Ted Talk on “Fear setting” and to check out his creation below if you’re interested in using this hack in a more personal sense.
