Category: Practice

A devil’s advocate is unpopular anywhere. The premortem procedure gives cover to a cowardly skeptic who otherwise might not speak up.

Richard H. Thaler 2017 : WHAT SCIENTIFIC TERM OR CONCEPT OUGHT TO BE MORE WIDELY KNOWN? edge.org

We may be able to develop a narrative about or make a bet on what we hope/intend to happen in the future. But we know that things rarely work out precisely the way we had planned. Much of the end product is tied up in the process of saying, doing and making, as Holt and Cornelissen point out. Nonetheless, we crave direction and optimism if not certainty. Isn’t that what being a visionary leader is all about?

A recent online article by Richard Thaler, one of the originators of behavioural economics, suggests that some problems and failures might be averted by conducting a pre-mortem, an approach based on “prospective hindsight” and originally devised by Gary Klein.

Conducting a pre-mortem is a simple process. It is assumed that you are somewhere in the future and your project has failed spectacularly. You then ask yourself how and why that failure occurred. This is not a post-mortem or after action review, both of which are valuable of course, but tend to suffer from rose-coloured hindsight. Thaler suggests two reasons why this might work, emphasising that he knows of no systematic study that provides empirical evidence one way or the other. Firstly, he proposes that going through this exercise can overcome any tendencies toward groupthink and overconfidence. Secondly, and perhaps more subtly, starting with the assumption that the project has actually failed tends to generate a greater degree of creativity in thinking about how that has occurred, rather than thinking about how it might fail, say in a risk management exercise.

Much like the recognition of the ante-narratives that are live in an organisation as it moves into uncertain futures and the development of scenarios to articulate possible futures the conscious and transparent conduct of a pre-mortem in relation to specific projects and plans helps to sensitise organisational members to alternative possibilities. It therefore makes these possibilities easier to spot if they occur. It also supports the mindful cultivation and awareness of our “action-guiding anticipations”. It helps if we are more consciously aware of what we are anticipating in a situation or conversation because we are then much more likely to notice when we are struck by the minor deviations and differences and more likely to be aware of our own responses.

Here is what Daniel Kahneman has to say about this approach:

So conducting a pre-mortem can be a wise investment of a small amount of time and a quick way of balancing the ever-present paradox of the need for openness and vision and the need not to lose control and failure comprehensively.

Related Practice

A similar, in some ways more sophisticated approach is the Cognitive Edge method called The Future Backwards

Gary Klein has also more recently developed a similar idea which he calls the promortem.

The whole idea is this: if you really want to be innovative, you have to experiment. If you know the outcome of what you’re going to do, it’s not an experiment. It’s more like a demonstration.

Amazon’s vice president for global innovation policy and communications, Paul Misener

Introducing this kind of approach to innovation into most organisations takes a fair bit of courage, a shift in mindset about causality and the exercise of a range of somewhat different skills and capabilities.

One change in mindset might be to view any plan or prediction you make as an “ante-narrative”. A story about how you believe the future will play out that is also a “bet” (as in “upping the ante”) on what will happen. The originator of this idea, David Boje, locates ante-narrative in this way:

• Narrative – backward-looking, after-the-fact and finalised.
• Living story – in-the-moment, emergent and unfinalised.
• Ante-narrative – forward-looking, before-the-fact and both predictive and emergent.

Thinking in this way potentially allows several things to happen.

• It allows the “plan” to remain an imaginative story about how you think the future will be, rather than a precise prediction that needs to be realised.
• It combines a plan for the future with emotion and a more metaphoric form of description.
• It draws more attention to the assumptions that are being made – particularly if you ask the question, “What are we relying on in placing this bet?”
• It helps you work out which bits of the story are more or less certain and therefore direct your attention to those aspects that are essentially experiements.
• It reminds you that there are other stories that could be told.
• It makes the decision-making process for the various aspects of the chosen story more transparent, and therefore more open to being changed.

Changing your thinking about the future and how you act to change it is challenging, given the continuing emphasis in our current managerial thinking on the visionary and heroic leader (or perhaps leadership team).

Perhaps making that this change could, itself, be conducted as a series of safe-to-fail experiments.

• What is something relatively small you need to do that is sufficiently complex to be impossible to predict?
• How might you experiment with doing this in a less planned and more “experimental” way?
• What forward-looking story could you tell about it that would also be a “bet” on what is likely to happen?
• What is the next opportunity you have to try this out?

For the background (academic) on the idea of ante-narrative see here .

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