Correction: The Premortem: Imagining Failure Before It Happens
Corrected by Emir Baycan · Full-Stack Developer, Mobile App Builder and Web Platform Founder with expertise in SEO, automation, SaaS, AI visibility, DevOps and scalable digital products
Emir Baycan found something wrong, outdated, or unsupported on this page and proposed a fix. The publisher accepted the correction.
- Role
- Correction
- Publisher
- When Notes Fly
- Topic
- Decision Making
- Status
- Accepted
- Date
- 19 July 2026
The exact change
"Prospective hindsight - imagining that an event has already occurred - increases the ability to correctly identify reasons for future outcomes by 30%." - Deborah J. Mitchell, J. Edward Russo, and Nancy Pennington, Back to the future: Temporal perspective in the explanation of events (1989)
Participants asked to imagine a future outcome had already happened and to generate explanations for it produced significantly more reasons for that outcome than participants who were only asked to imagine the outcome might happen - the 1989 Mitchell, Russo, and Pennington study measured the number of reasons generated, not the accuracy of those reasons.
Why this is better
The blockquote misstated the actual Mitchell/Russo/Pennington (1989) finding: prospective hindsight was shown to increase the NUMBER of reasons people generated for a future outcome, not the ACCURACY of those reasons. Converted the blockquote to prose and corrected the claim in both the body and the FAQ.
How this record is verified
- The contribution is tied to a real, identified contributor, not an anonymous byline.
- It counts only because the publisher, When Notes Fly, accepted it. Self-claimed work earns nothing.
- It is recorded against a specific page and cannot be bought or edited after the fact.