Daniel Kahneman

And he said, suppose it's two years from now, and we made the decision that we're contemplating, and it turned out to be a disaster.

Now, you have a page in front of you, write the history of that disaster in bullet points.

That's the pre-mortar.

And it's beautiful as an idea.

It's beautiful because when people are coming close to a decision, it becomes...

difficult to raise doubts or to raise questions.

People who are slowing the group down when the group is nearing a decision are perceived as really, you know, annoying.

You know, you want to get rid of them.

And the premortem legitimizes that sort of dissent and that sort of doubt.

Not only legitimizes it, you know, it rewards it.

And so that's a very good idea.

I don't think that it's going to prevent people from making mistakes, big mistakes, but it could certainly, it will alert people to possible loopholes, to things that they ought to do to make a safer decision.

So that's a good procedure.

And there are many others.

What comes to mind is to make intelligence, I mean the collection of information, independent of the decision-maker's wishes.

And you really want to protect the independence of the people collecting the evidence.

And I would add to a procedure that really people don't like, but if it were possible to implement it, I think would be good.

And that's that when you're going to be discussing a topic and it's known in advance and people have been sent some material to think about the topic, that you may want them to write down the decision they are in favor of before the discussion starts.

That has many advantages.

It's going to give you a broader diversity of points of view because people tend to converge very quickly in a group discussion.