Decisive: How to make better choices in life and work

by Chip Heath

The psychologist Gary Klein, inspired by this research, devised a method for testing decisions that he calls the “premortem107.” A postmortem analysis begins after a death and asks, “What caused it?” A premortem, by contrast, imagines the future “death” of a project and asks, “What killed it?” A team running a premortem analysis starts by assuming a bleak future: Okay, it’s 12 months from now, and our project was a total fiasco. It blew up in our faces. Why did it fail?

“failure mode and effect analysis” (FMEA),

In an FMEA, team members identify what could go wrong at every step of their plans, and for each potential failure they ask two questions: “How likely is it?” and “How severe would the consequences be?” After assigning a score from 1 to 10 for each variable, they multiply the two numbers to get a total. The highest totals—the most severe potential failures—get the

Our judgment can be wrong in multiple ways. We might err by failing to consider the problems we could encounter, and that’s why we need premortems. However, we might also err by failing to prepare for unexpectedly good outcomes. When we bookend the future, it’s important to consider the upside as well as the downside. That’s why, in addition to running a premortem, we need to run a “preparade.” A preparade asks us to consider success: Let’s say it’s a year from now and our decision has been a wild success. It’s so great that there’s going to be a parade in our honor. Given that future, how do we ensure that we’re ready for it?

Realistic job previews have been proven, by a large research literature, to reduce turnover. Simkoff shared one of Evolv’s own case studies concerning a call center that had been hiring roughly 5,400 people per year. After implementing realistic job previews114, new hires dropped by more than 10% over the next 12 months: 572 fewer hires, with a cumulative savings of about $1.6 million.

Pilots, for example, are taught to pay careful attention to what are called “leemers”: the vague feeling that something isn’t right, even if it’s not clear why. Having a label for those feelings legitimizes them and makes pilots less likely to dismiss them. The flash of recognition—Oh, this is a leemer— causes a quick shift from autopilot to manual control, from unconscious to conscious behavior.

Researchers call this sense of fairness “procedural justice”—i.e., the procedures used to make a decision were just—as distinct from “distributive justice,” which is concerned with whether the spoils of a decision were divvied up fairly. An extensive body of research confirms that procedural justice126 is critical in explaining how people feel about a decision. It’s not just the outcome that matters; it’s the process.

No. Hitz has it right. A manager’s self-criticism is comforting, rather than anxiety producing, because it signals that she is making a reality-based decision. The manager is saying, in essence, “We’re making an informed bet that this decision will work, but we’ll be monitoring it closely.” (We’ve reality-tested, and we have set tripwires.) On the other hand, if the manager, confronted with criticism, becomes a press secretary for the decision and immediately retreats to her talking points, it’s unsettling, because it makes her team worry that even if the decision is a fiasco, she won’t change direction.