When asked by the editor of the online science and technology magazine Edge.org to share onebrilliant but overlooked concept or idea that he believes everyone should know, the Nobel laureate Richard H. Thaler, father of behavioural economics, former president of the American Economic Association and an intellectual giant of our time, did not hesitate. “The Pre-mortem!”, he said.

The idea of the pre-mortem is deceptively simple: before a major decision is made or a large project or initiative is undertaken, those involved in the effort get together to engage in what might seem like an oddly counterintuitive activity: imagining that they’re at some time in the future where the decision/project/initiative has been implemented and the results were a catastrophic failure, then writing a brief history of that failure - we failed, what could possibly be the reason?

Originally developed by applied psychologist Gary Klein and popularized by Nobel Laureate and best-selling author Daniel Kahneman, the concept of pre-mortem is based on research conducted by Deborah J. Mitchell, of the Wharton School; Jay Russo, of Cornell; and Nancy Pennington, of the University of Colorado, which found that prospective hindsight — imagining that an event has already occurred — increases the ability to correctly identify reasons for future outcomes by 30%. The purpose of the pre-mortem then is to leverage the unique mindset the team is in when engaged in prospective hindsight to identify risks at the outset of a major project or initiative.

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