The psychologist Gary Klein, inspired by this research, devised a method for testing decisions that he calls the “premortem.” 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?
