THE FMEA AND ITS sister technique, the premortem, stop people from focusing on a single, usually optimistic, guess about how the world will unfold and instead compel them to pay attention to the uncertainty surrounding the guess. The effort it takes to explore the full spectrum of possibilities and to prepare for the worst possible scenarios acts powerfully to counteract overconfidence. 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
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