This column will change your life: hindsight – it's not just for past events
H uman history, as you're doubtless aware, is one long cavalcade of failure and catastrophe. But amid all those fiascos, there's one uniquely humiliating subcategory: the kind where it's impossible to imagine how anyone could have thought it a good idea in the first place. The foolishness involved can be relatively minor (such as "restoring" a painting of Jesus in your local church, so that he resembles a hairy monkey) or huge (such as launching a new healthcare system for a country of 310 million people with a website that crashes when a few thousand use it). But, with hindsight, the question is the same: what were they thinking?
One obvious conclusion to draw from this – and I'm not saying it's wrong – is that people are idiots. But a more interesting one is that hindsight is even more transformative than you think. It doesn't just make things look different; it makes them look so utterly different that it's impossible, when taking a decision in the moment, even to begin to grasp how it'll strike you later on.
Well, perhaps not impossible. Maybe actually quite easy – if we employed a technique that almost nobody uses, invented by the psychologist Gary Klein, and which Daniel Kahneman, his Nobel-winning colleague, describes as his favourite method for making better decisions. Klein calls it the "premortem", and it's embarrassingly simple: you imagine yourself in the future, after the project you're considering has ended in spectacular failure. "Unlike a typical critiquing session, in which project team members are asked what might go wrong, the premortem operates on the assumption that the 'patient' has died," Klein writes. In the fantasy world of the premortem, it's already over. You're screwed. Everything went as badly as you could have feared. Now: why?
