Klein: Pre-mortems fail unless facilitators assert the plan has definitively failed
Gary Klein · Gary Klein with Paul Sonkin and Paul Johnson – Conducting Pre-Mortem Analysis (Capital Allocators, EP.109) · Sep 23, 2019 · at 25:35
Gary Klein, creator of the pre-mortem analysis, explains the psychological mechanism of prospective hindsight.
0:00 / 0:33exact quote · 33.7s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“We see premortems fail when the person who's facilitating will say something like, okay, we've seen the plan, let's do a premortem, what could go wrong with the plan? That's the wrong approach. What can go wrong with the plan? That's a typical critiquing approach. You can't say what could go wrong. You say, I'm looking at a crystal ball. The plan has failed. There's no doubt. That changes the mindset that instead of just sort of musing about it, now you're seeing a disaster, and you're now in a mode of what caused that disaster.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Gary Klein
Klein: Experts rely on situational recognition, not comparing options
“And the discovery we made is that people don't Generate lots of options and use lots of standard evaluation dimensions. They use their experience to size up situations very quickly and to identify what's going on, what's likely to happen next, what can I accom…”
Klein: Pre-mortem leaders must share a serious risk first to set candor
“And the reason for that is people don't know how candid to be, and the leader is going to set an example. And if the leader picks something that's frivolous or trivial, that tells people not to take it seriously. So it's really important for the leader to come…”
Klein: Research shows using a devil's advocate produces significantly worse outcomes
“I'm only aware of one study that tried to evaluate the effect of a devil's advocate to see if it had an effect, and they got a significant result. It was significantly worse than not using a devil's advocate.”
Klein: Pre-mortems reduce overconfidence significantly more than listing pros and cons
“Listing pros and cons are just cons. Reduced confidence, but the premortem reduced confidence more than any of the other techniques we measured.”
Klein: True expertise relies on tacit knowledge, not explicit rules
“For complex tasks and ambiguous situations with lots of uncertainty, there's no set of rules that are sufficient, and an expertise is It's not about just incorporating all the rules. Expertise is about building tacit knowledge, and that's the core.”