Why pre-mortems create better thinkers
This article is part of our series on how to help students use critical and creative thinking to break down problems, devise & evaluate solutions, and inform their interactions with others. To learn more about how we teach critical & creative thinking, see here.
You might have heard of a post-mortem before – it is a medical examination that occurs after someone has died to establish the cause of death.
That same idea has been introduced to businesses worldwide. Try something – a new project, an initiative, a marketing campaign – and, if it doesn’t work, run a post-mortem on it. Sit down, dissect what happened, and work out what went wrong and why. This process treats the failure as more of a learning exercise so that you can improve your approach the next time around.
In her article, Thea Van Os of St Joseph’s College Hunters Hill emphasised the importance of continually iterating your approach to implementing hands-on, real-world learning. She reflected on how their curriculum has been refined over time by incorporating learnings from each attempt. This has produced a series of successful forays into more innovative teaching & learning.
Thea’s reflection is a great example of the power of post-mortems. They help us capture our learnings and harness them to create something better. They also re-frame what might have been called a ‘failure’ into a vital learning experience. Running post-mortems therefore help students understand that failure is actually a crucial step on the road to success. This builds their resilience.
But whilst a post-mortem helps us improve for next time, it doesn’t change the fact of the failed attempt. So wouldn’t it be better if we’d identified the reasons why something might not work before we’d implemented it? Wouldn’t this help us either (a) discard the idea, or (b) make it stronger?
Introducing the pre-mortem
That’s exactly what a pre-mortem is. It is a process of evaluating an idea, a decision, or a plan before it is implemented to test how strong it is. The aim of this process is to make that idea or plan stronger, and to identify and avert any potential weak points or negative consequences of your actions.
This sounds like such an obvious idea. Of course we should think about why something might not work before we try it! Who wouldn’t do something like that!? Well… all of us. The vast majority of the time, we wouldn’t ever work through anything like a pre-mortem in our minds when thinking about what action to take or which decision to make. We generally go straight from idea to execution without fully working through the possibilities and consequences that might eventuate.
This is mainly due to our cognitive biases, especially confirmation and optimism bias. Confirmation bias is our tendency to notice, focus on, and attach greater weight or importance to information which aligns with our existing beliefs. It means we often reject evidence or information that contradicts our current thinking. In an ideation context, students will think of all the reasons why their idea or plan will work and dismiss the reasons why it won’t. This feeds into optimism bias, which is our tendency to overestimate our likelihood of experiencing positive events and underestimate our likelihood of experiencing negative events. The net result of these biases is that we assume our intended approach will work and we don’t adequately turn our minds to why it might not.
We’re also sometimes reluctant to challenge an idea or plan because we don’t want to shoot down our team’s ideas or possibly hurt someone’s feelings. But a pre-mortem makes it safe for the whole team to look for reasons why it won’t work.
So, if we are training students to become critical thinkers, a pre-mortem is an indispensable tool. It represents the final part of our double diamond approach to problem solving. The ‘converging’ stage of the second diamond is about choosing the single best idea or approach from all our available options; a pre-mortem helps us do that. So whenever students are working through an ideation process or choosing an idea to turn into a solution, they shouldn’t make that choice without working through a pre-mortem first.
Of course, pre-mortems aren’t just valuable for students working through hands-on, real-world projects. They can (and should!) be used by every team in every type of organisation, or by every person when making key personal decisions. They’re as close as you can get to a magic bullet that turns everyone into a better decision-maker.
Pre-mortems and red-teaming
Pre-mortems encourage dissent and critical thought. We can also use red teaming to make this process more effective.
In the army, a red team is given a plan or strategy with their sole job of looking through it and finding as many flaws and weaknesses as they can. The more they find, the more the plan or strategy can be changed, and the better it becomes. Only once all weak points have been identified and fixed will the plan or strategy be implemented. This doesn’t mean the plan will be perfect, but it does significantly increase the likelihood of it succeeding.
Students should adopt this same ‘red team’ mindset when refining their solution ideas. When they work through a pre-mortem, their goal is to find weaknesses and problems in their ideas before they go too far down the path of trying to make them work. Students should be excited by finding problems they hadn’t previously thought of. They’ve unearthed a problem they would otherwise have missed, which gives them a bonus opportunity to improve their idea.
To make this strategy even more effective, a red team can be a different group of students. Student teams can swap their ideas and let another team go through the red-teaming process. As the red team won’t have expended time and energy developing this idea, they’ll be coming to it with fresh eyes and will have less emotional investment in it. They are therefore better placed to spot holes and weaknesses that the originating team might have overlooked.
Running a pre-mortem
Running a pre-mortem isn’t something that can be done in five minutes. It requires careful and deep thought from students to unpack their ideas and search for weaknesses that might prove fatal.
An in-depth post-mortem has five components. Each serve a very specific purpose.
Theory of change
This brings students back to the problem they are trying to solve. We can often get so swept in thinking of ideas that what we end up with doesn’t actually solve the same problem we set out to tackle. The theory of change forces students to articulate their logic for why this idea will work. If they can’t do that, it’s a good sign their idea isn’t suitable.
Key questions to ask are:
What problem are you trying to be solve?
What impact do you think your idea will have?
How will you implement your idea?
Once implemented, how will your idea have the impact that you are predicting?
Using probabilistic thinking, explain your confidence level that your idea will work
Bias assessment
Everyone’s thinking is influenced by cognitive biases. All we can do is become more aware of them and, in so doing, check them.
Key questions to ask are:
Are any cognitive biases impacting your decision-making? Consider:
Is there any confirmation bias influencing your evaluation of your idea’s impact and ease of implementation?
Is there any optimism bias influencing your evaluation of your idea’s impact and ease of implementation?
Logic fallacies
Asking students to reflect on their logic is an effective way of getting them to unpack their idea. By asking them think about whether they have made assumptions – and how accurate these might be – students must confront whether their idea sounds better in theory than in practice.
Key questions to ask are:
Are you making any assumptions about how the world works that are necessary for your idea to work as you hope?
What are these assumptions? Do you have evidence to support them? What information do you need to justify them?
Scenario analysis
This is the heart of red-teaming process. Students must actively look for reasons why an idea will not work. What would need to happen or go wrong? By considering how possible each of these failure points is, students can take steps to mitigate them from happening – or build safety nets into their solution so that, if one of these reasons does eventuate, it isn’t fatal to their idea.
Key questions to ask are:
In what circumstances might your solution not work? How likely are those circumstances to occur?
What are the second and third order consequences of your idea?
How might you strengthen your idea or prevent negative second and third order consequences?
Revised assessment
Students must update their confidence level for their idea using Bayesian thinking.
The key question to ask is:
Using probabilistic thinking, what is your revised confidence level that your idea will work?
Summing up
This process might seem granular, but that’s the point. It forces students to deconstruct their idea and think about all the real-world implications of implementing it.
By the end, they should have a renewed confidence in their plan because they’ve worked out how they need to improve it. Or, they should have realised that their idea isn’t likely to succeed and that they need to go back to the drawing board. In both cases, students are more likely to end up implementing an idea or solution that will work.
You’ll find the pre-mortem amongst Cura’s Critical & Creative Thinking Toolkit, along with other tasks that help students develop more innovative and rigorous solutions to real-world problems
If you are passionate about enhancing students’ critical thinking or want to learn more about pre-mortems, get in touch with us at hello@curaeducation.com.