The psychologist Daniel Kahneman advocates the use of ‘premortems’, where decision-makers are asked to imagine they are one year down the line from introducing a new policy or project and it has gone spectacularly and horribly wrong. They then detail all the things that contributed to the project’s failure. Kahneman says, “in general, doing a premortem on a plan that is about to be adopted won’t cause it to be abandoned. But it will probably be tweaked in ways that everybody will recognize as beneficial.”
