Thinking of decisions as products raises the issue of quality control.
How do you make sure that decisions measure up?
One way is to leverage the talent and knowledge of all the people surrounding the decision-maker. The problem is that there’s an enormous amount of hostility toward the idea of improving the decision-making process because it threatens people in positions of leadership. They don’t want to be questioned.
Enter research psychologist Gary Klein, who advises organisations to conduct what he calls a pre-mortem, the converse of an autopsy. It legitimises dissent, makes it possible for people to point out flaws without seeming to be disloyal, and creates a space for decision-making that is not biased.
How the pre-mortem technique works
The pre-mortem need not take more than an hour to do.
- Imagine that a decision or plan has been implemented, say a year ago, and it has failed miserably. What could have caused such a fiasco?
- Request each team member to suggest 10 reasons for failure, particularly those they would never raise for fear of being impolite. Because they are not in the position of having to defend the plan, they can search for faults and explanations for failure.
- After the session is over, gather and prioritise the list of reasons that grew out of collective knowledge.
- Look for ways to strengthen the plan by avoiding essential drivers of failure, beginning with the two or three items of greatest concern.
The pre-mortem attempts to identify threats at the outset. It helps challenge key assumptions, generate multiple hypotheses, discover unknown unknowns and anticipate the unanticipated.
