Concepts

The Premortem: Imagining Failure Before It Happens

Published by When Notes Fly

https://whennotesfly.com/concepts/decision-making/the-premortem-technique-imagine-failure-first

When Notes Fly knowledge-library article flagged by an internal fact-check audit for a remaining factual inaccuracy.

Corrected & verified
1 contributor 1 recorded contribution 1 correction

Who created and checked this page

Correction

Emir BaycanExpert Contributor

Correction history

Every accepted correction to this page is recorded with the exact change, so readers can see how the page improved over time.

  1. 19 July 2026 · corrected by Emir Baycan

    Corrected a misstated research finding on When Notes Fly's premortem-technique explainer: a blockquote claimed the Mitchell/Russo/Pennington 1989 study found prospective hindsight improved the ACCURACY of identifying reasons for an outcome by 30%, when the actual finding was that it increased the NUMBER of reasons people generated, not their accuracy.

    Before

    "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)

    After

    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: 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.

    View the full record →

Full contribution timeline

  1. Correction 19 July 2026

    Emir Baycan: Corrected a misstated research finding on When Notes Fly's premortem-technique explainer: a blockquote claimed the Mitchell/Russo/Pennington 1989 study found prospective hindsight improved the ACCURACY of identifying reasons for an outcome by 30%, when the actual finding was that it increased the NUMBER of reasons people generated, not their accuracy.

    Proof record →