How to Conduct a Premortem: Identify Project Risks
Use a 90-minute premortem to surface potential project risks that your team might overlook in regular meetings.
What was corrected
The article quoted George Bernard Shaw with a two-sentence statement about communication and planning illusions. Independent research into this quote's history found the Shaw attribution itself is not confirmed by any evidence he said it, and the second sentence about planning could not be verified against the quote's documented lineage. The article also described an unnamed, specific 'documented case' where a Gary Klein premortem surfaced a critical dependency risk at a technology company, a case that does not match any of Klein's actual published examples. It described Amy Edmondson's landmark study as observing teams in a medical setting (the real study was in manufacturing) and cited two additional Edmondson publications and statistics that could not be verified anywhere. It also cited specific figures for the Veinott, Klein, and Wiggins premortem study, the Kahneman, Lovallo, and Sibony research on investment decisions, and the Gawande-led surgical checklist study that did not match those studies' real reported findings.
The article no longer attributes any quote to George Bernard Shaw. The case study now accurately describes Gary Klein's real, published 2007 example. Edmondson's study is now correctly described as observing manufacturing teams, and the two unverifiable citations have been replaced with an accurate description of her broader, real body of work. The Veinott, Klein, and Wiggins study is now described in terms of its real finding, a reduction in overconfidence, rather than an unverified accuracy figure, and the Kahneman, Lovallo, Sibony, and Gawande-led studies are now described using figures that match their real, published findings.
Why this is better
Web searches for the Shaw quote traced its actual history and found no evidence Shaw ever said either sentence attributed to him. A search for the specific 'documented case' attributed to Gary Klein found no matching example in his real published work, only a different real example with different details. Several specific statistics attached to real, correctly named researchers and studies did not match what those studies actually found when checked directly. Given the number and severity of these issues, the entire section was rewritten to ensure every remaining claim is accurate and traceable to a real source.
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