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by
Annie Duke
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March 14 - April 14, 2020
The key to a successful premortem is that everyone feels free to look for those reasons, and they are motivated to scour everything—personal experience, company experience, historical precedent, episodes of The Hills, sports analogies, etc.—to come up with ways a decision or plan can go bad, so the team can anticipate and account for them.
Incorporating this type of imagining of the negative space into a truthseeking group reinforces a new habit routine of visualizing and anticipating future obstacles. As always, when a group we are part of reinforces this kind of thinking, we are more likely in our own thinking to consider the downside of our decisions.
In a way, backcasting without premortems is a form of temporal discounting: if we imagine a positive future, we feel better now, but we’ll more than compensate for giving up that immediate gratification through the benefits of seeing the world more accurately, making better initial decisions, and being nimbler about what the world throws our way.
Once we make a decision and one of those possible futures actually happens, we can’t discard all that work, even—or especially—if it included work on futures that did not occur. Forgetting about an unrealized future can be dangerous to good decision-making.
One of the goals of mental time travel is keeping events in perspective. To understand an overriding risk to that perspective, think about time as a tree.
Even the smallest of twigs, the most improbable of futures—like the 2%–3% chance Russell Wilson would throw that interception—expands when it becomes part of the mighty trunk. That 2%–3%, in hindsight, becomes 100%, and all the other branches, no matter how thick they were, disappear from view.
Maybe you’re the problem, do you think?”: You can see for yourself David Letterman’s uncomfortable interview of Lauren Conrad from the Late Show with David Letterman on October 27, 2008, on YouTube. The web response to the interview came from the following sources: Ryan Tate, “David Letterman to Lauren Conrad: ‘Maybe You’re the Problem,’” Gawker.com, October 28, 2008, http://gawker.com/5069699/david-letterman-to-lauren-conrad-maybe-youre-the-problem; Ayman,
The group ideally exposes us to a diversity of viewpoints: The Dissent Channel is codified in the Department of State’s Foreign Affairs Manual, 2 FAM 071-075.1, https://fam.state.gov/fam/02fam/02fam0070.html. Its history and origins were described in several news stories about uses of the Dissent Channel in the Obama and Trump administrations.
Wanna bet (on science)?: Several studies about corporate prediction markets mention the companies studied or those known to be testing prediction markets. See Cowgill, Wolfers, and Zitzewitz, “Using Prediction Markets to Track Information Flows.” Some studies also refer to some of the companies anonymously. For an example of a study doing both, see Cowgill and Zitzewitz, “Corporate Prediction Markets, Evidence from Google, Ford, and Firm X.” Both citations appear in the Selected Bibliography and Recommendations for Further Reading.
I wish I had the space or the excuse to share more details from Robert K. Merton’s remarkable
Mertonian communism: more is more: For an account of John Madden’s attendance at Vince Lombardi’s eight-hour seminar on one play, see Dan Oswald’s HR Hero blog post, “Learn Important Lessons from Lombardi’s Eight-Hour Session,” March 10, 2014. The documentary Lombardi was produced by NFL Films and HBO and initially appeared for broadcast on HBO on December 11, 2010.
Reconnaissance: mapping the future: There are innumerable descriptions of the planning and execution of the D-Day invasion at Normandy, so you can look practically anywhere to see this monumental example of scenario planning in practice. One such introduction to the subject is an interview that appeared in the Daily Beast with naval historian Craig Symonds, in connection with the release of his 2014 book on the subject. See Marc Wortman, “D-Day Historian Craig Symonds Talks about History’s Most Amazing Invasion,” TheDailyBeast.com, June 5, 2014, and, of course, Symonds’s book, Neptune: Allied
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Allan, David. “Backcasting to the Future.” CNN.com, December 16, 2015. http://www.cnn.com/2015/10/22/health/backcasting-to-the-future.
Ariely, Dan. Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions. Rev. exp. ed. New York: Harper Collins, 2009.
There is an entire field of study on mental time travel and its benefits to decision-making. Neuroscientist Endel Tulving, a psychology professor at the University of Toronto, pioneered analysis and research into chronesthesia, the term for mental time travel through the ability to be aware of our past or future. For further material on the neuroscience of time travel and its decision-making benefits, see the Selected Bibliography and Recommendations for Further Reading.
Tilt doesn’t just result from bad outcomes, although that is the more likely impetus. Poker players also talk about winner’s tilt, where a series of good outcomes distorts decision-making, particularly in causing a player to play as if their win rate is not a momentary fluctuation from the mean but will continue at that rate in the future. In the euphoric, in-the-moment feeling of a big uptick, winners can make irrational in-game decisions or overestimate their level of skill and accomplishment and commit themselves to play for higher stakes.
