This will help you not fail: A Meditation on Premortems instead of Postmortems
Dear Magicians,
In March 2014, I watched the live stream as cosmologists at Harvard declared history being made. The BICEP2 team, which I had been a member of, was announcing the detection of primordial gravitational waves — a discovery worthy of a Nobel Prize. I had been kicked out of the leadership of BICEP2 but that didn’t mean I wasn’t caught up in the intoxicating possibility that we had glimpsed the universe’s first moments. What we were actually witnessing was a masterclass in how even the most rigorous scientific minds can fall prey to confirmation bias.
The story of BICEP2 isn’t unique. It joins OPERA’s faster-than-light neutrinos and DAMA’s dark matter claims in a peculiar pantheon of scientific near-misses — discoveries that weren’t. Each represents a moment where some of the finest minds in physics, armed with cutting-edge technology and rigorous methods, fell into a trap that a proper premortem might have revealed.
Let’s talk about why premortems aren’t just another corporate planning tool, but a fundamental safeguard against the cognitive biases that can lead even Nobel laureate physicists astray…
Let me begin by stating what should be obvious, but tragically isn’t: Most project planning is built on a foundation of cognitive optimism sometimes bordering on delusion. This isn’t a controversial claim — it’s a fact supported by decades of behavioral economics and cognitive psychology research.
Consider what happens in the mind when we plan a project. We envision success, map out the steps, and calculate timelines. And in doing so, we fall prey to what [Kahneman and Tversky] identified as the planning fallacy — a systematic bias that causes us to underestimate the time, costs, and risks associated with future actions. I don’t think U have ever seen a project come in under budget and on time in the $300m worth of scientific experiments I have led or been involved with.
The premortem technique offers a powerful antidote to this cognitive distortion. But to understand why it works, we need to examine the nature of planning itself. When we plan conventionally, we engage in a form of motivated reasoning — we see what we want to see. The premortem technique, by contrast, forces us to engage in what I would call “constructive pessimism.”
Let’s be precise about what this means. In a premortem, we’re not merely listing potential problems — we’re engaging in a thought experiment where failure has already occurred. This shift in temporal perspective fundamentally alters our cognitive architecture. We move from the realm of possibility (where our biases reign supreme) to the realm of retrospective analysis (where we can think more clearly).
The evidence for this approach is compelling. shows that teams using this technique identify 30% more critical issues than traditional planning methods. This isn’t magical thinking — it’s the result of deliberately short-circuiting our natural cognitive biases.
But there’s a deeper point here that often goes unnoticed: The premortem technique isn’t just about avoiding failure — it’s about understanding the nature of causality in complex systems. When we imagine a future failure and work backward, we’re forced to confront the interconnected nature of success and failure in a way that forward-looking planning simply cannot achieve.
Consider the case of SpaceX’s early failures. Each failed launch provided data that was, in many ways, more valuable than a success would have been. The premortem technique institutionalizes this insight: failure, adequately analyzed, is the royal road to success.
We must ask ourselves this: Are we willing to confront the reality of potential failure with the same rigor we apply to our hopes for success? The evidence suggests that those who do consistently outperform those who don’t.
Looking back at BICEP2, I can’t help but feel a deep sense of personal regret. Not just for the years of work that evaporated, but for the hubris that prevented me from seeing what should have been obvious failure modes. The hardest truth I’ve had to accept is that my own intellectual excitement — my desperate want to believe we’d done it — clouded my typically rigorous judgment. So I’ll leave you with this: The next time you feel absolutely certain about a project’s success, pause. That feeling of certainty might be exactly what’s preventing you from seeing the fatal flaw that’s hiding in plain sight. After all, if a room full of PhDs can miss cosmic dust for gravitational waves, what might you be missing in your next big launch?
So I put it to you: What potential failure are you currently refusing to see?
Until next time, have a M.A.G.I.C. Week,
Brian
Appearance
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Thanks Anna and Yves!
You can watch my first episode of the Jordan Peterson Podcast here while you wait for the next one to drop.
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Upcoming Episode
- Harry Cliff will again be on The INTO THE IMPOSSIBLE Podcast soon, his second time on! As an experimental physicist at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider and the University of Cambridge, Cliff is at the forefront of exploring the universe’s most perplexing mysteries. In his new book “Space Oddities,” he takes readers on a riveting journey across continents, investigating inexplicable phenomena that challenge our understanding of physics and cosmology, from particles with unbelievable energies bursting from Antarctic ice to unknown forces tugging at the basic building blocks of matter. What questions do you have for Harry Cliff about the mysterious anomalies challenging our understanding of the universe?
