Before committing, assume the plan has already failed and reason backwards to how.
Klein's 2007 technique. The mechanism is prospective hindsight, from Mitchell, Russo and Pennington's 1989 research, which found that assuming an outcome has already occurred raises the number of causes people generate by about 30% compared with asking what might go wrong.
In practice
- A team asked what might go wrong lists four things; asked to write the post-mortem for a failure that has already happened, it lists eleven.
- A launch review that opens with "it is six months from now and this failed — why?" surfaces the dependency that "any concerns?" never does.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Decision-making & Reasoning
- Essay
- Razors, rules and the tools of careful thought