Gary Klein

speaker

51 appearances 5 recordings 2 series first heard Mar 2025 last heard May 2025

Gary Klein’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Freakonomics Radio · How to Succeed at Failing, Part 4: Extreme Resiliency (Update) · 21 May 2025 podcast

The premortem is designed to help you do better rather than to shut off innovation.

A wicked problem is one where there's not a clear right answer that people would generally agree upon.

Most of the major social problems we wrestle with are wicked problems. We have multiple stakeholders and there's no way to please all of them. And so there's all of this potential conflict and resource situations change or pandemics arise, wars arise, things that are unexpected that are going to upset what you're doing.

The premortem is designed to help people surface realistic possibilities and threats so that you can improve the plan, improve the product, and increase your chance of success.

You know, many of our projects succeeded, but not all of them. And we would occasionally have an after-action review. Those weren't exciting things to do because we were pretty disgruntled. At one point I said, why don't we do this at the very beginning? Why don't we imagine that it fails?

Often in organizations, if you have like a kickoff meeting, there'll be a part where they say, all right, now, does anybody have any concerns? Are there any critiques? Does anybody see any problems? And nobody says anything, either because they don't want to disrupt the harmony of the team or because they're not thinking that anything could go wrong because they're excited to get started.

So to break through that mindset, I developed this technique of a premortem, and at the end of a kickoff meeting, we say, all right, imagine that I'm looking at a crystal ball. I'm dialing forward six months, maybe a year, whatever the right time frame is, and oh, no. This project has failed. It's failed in a big way. We know that. There is no doubt. This crystal ball is infallible.

Now, everybody in the room, you've got two minutes. Write down all the reasons why this project failed. And it's amazing the types of issues that people surface that ordinarily they wouldn't say in public or even think about.

Well, after I developed the technique, I read about some research on prospective hindsight. And so I think a big part of it is the certainty that it's failed. And so now that changes my mindset. So I'm not resisting. If I say, here's the plan, are there any problems? There's all kinds of pressure not to think about problems.

But by being certain that the plan has failed, by entering into that exercise, it just changes the whole valence, the whole experience.

OK, so let me get we never thought about this as a tool outside our company. This was just something we did. But then we had a big project we were doing for the Air Force. It was a software tool for identifying ways of using precision-guided munitions. And I told my prime sponsor, I want to do a premortem. And he said, what's that? And I explained it to him, and he said, absolutely no way.

We want everybody to be positive. This is such a depressing exercise. I don't want to do it. And I said... This is an important project. We want it to succeed. This is a way to make it succeed. And reluctantly, he agreed to do it. We were doing this premortem, and there was this young captain. He hadn't said a word. The meeting had gone on for about two days. He hadn't said a word.

And it was time for him to come up with what he had on his list. We'd go around one at a time around the room, and we'd do one or two or three sweeps. And he looked a little nervous, and he said, this tool that we're building, it's for people in the field, and they have these low-powered laptops. The tool we're building runs on a supercomputer that takes 48 hours.

I don't see how that's going to work. And there was silence in the room because everybody realized he was right. And then somebody said, now, I've got a back of the envelope technique that I use that could be a shortcut. And all of a sudden, we were back in business. But if we hadn't done that, we would have failed. And he never would have said that if we didn't give him that space.

I have a couple of ideas, but one of them is the premortem, because the premortem creates a culture of candor. People learn that they can voice unpopular ideas and not be punished for it. It also creates an environment where...

I'm surprised at the ideas that you come up with or this young captain comes up with because a premortem really harvests the different experience and ability of the people in the room. I don't know what's in your head, so how can I appreciate your perspective? But in a premortem, I realize, wow, I never thought of it that way.

So there's a chance for the people in the room to start to gain more respect for their colleagues.

Anonymity could be useful in environments that are usually very punitive, but in terms of creating a culture of candor, it works better if we're all face-to-face.

I have never seen that happen, surprisingly enough, no. No, because everybody knows that this is a made-up failure. So it's not life or death, although it could be. And everybody knows that the intent is to improve the plan.

I've wrestled with that issue for a while because most organizations say that they want insights, but they don't because insights are going to mean that we have to change. And if I'm a mid-level manager, now I've got to change my supply lines, I've got to change my staffing. Can we just continue what we're doing and try to do it better?

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