The Pre-Mortem! Predicting problems in order to prevent them

This is an excellent (and scientifically-proven!) way to help students successfully identify and evaluate the reasons for future outcomes. It works when analysing a business case study, or deciding what to focus on before the upcoming exams.

The premise, is surprisingly simple; the Optimism Bias, a theory by a cognitive neuroscientist, states that 80% of people over-estimate the amount of good that will happen to them and under-estimate the amount of bad things that will happen to them.

A possible cause of this is that two out of three small businesses fail, and when they do, post mortems are sad, overdue and ultimately futile. However, they usually show the cause (or causes) of failure. What if these causes could be determined before the failure even happened?

This is the thinking behind famous behavioural economist Gary Klein’s Pre-mortem, for which he claims “imaging that an event has already happened increases the ability to correctly identify reasons for future outcomes by 30%”.