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skills/forecast-premortem/resources/premortem-principles.md

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+# Premortem Principles
+
+## The Psychology of Overconfidence
+
+### Why We're Systematically Overconfident
+
+**The Planning Fallacy:**
+- We focus on best-case scenarios
+- We ignore historical delays and failures
+- We assume "our case is different"
+- We underestimate Murphy's Law
+
+**Research:**
+- 90% of projects run over budget
+- 70% of projects run late
+- Yet 80% of project managers predict on-time completion
+
+**The fix:** Premortem forces you to imagine failure has already happened.
+
+---
+
+## Hindsight Bias
+
+### The "I Knew It All Along" Effect
+
+**What it is:**
+After an outcome occurs, we believe we "always knew" it would happen.
+
+**Example:**
+- Before 2008 crash: "Housing is safe"
+- After 2008 crash: "The signs were obvious"
+
+**Problem for forecasting:**
+If we think outcomes were predictable in hindsight, we'll be overconfident going forward.
+
+**The premortem fix:**
+By forcing yourself into "hindsight mode" BEFORE the outcome, you:
+1. Generate the warning signs you would have seen
+2. Realize how many ways things could go wrong
+3. Reduce overconfidence
+
+---
+
+## The Power of Inversion
+
+### Solving Problems Backward
+
+**Charlie Munger:**
+> "Invert, always invert. Many hard problems are best solved backward."
+
+**In forecasting:**
+- Hard: "Will this succeed?" (requires imagining all paths to success)
+- Easier: "It failed - why?" (failure modes are more concrete)
+
+**Why this works:**
+- Failure modes are finite and enumerable
+- Success paths are infinite and vague
+- Humans are better at imagining concrete negatives than abstract positives
+
+---
+
+## Research on Premortem Effectiveness
+
+### Gary Klein's Studies
+
+**Original research:**
+- Teams that did premortems identified 30% more risks
+- Risks identified were more specific and actionable
+- Teams adjusted plans proactively
+
+**Key finding:**
+> "Prospective hindsight" (imagining an event has happened) improves recall by 30%
+
+---
+
+### Kahneman's Endorsement
+
+**Daniel Kahneman:**
+> "The premortem is the single best debiasing technique I know."
+
+**Why it works:**
+1. **Legitimizes doubt** - In group settings, dissent is hard. Premortem makes it safe.
+2. **Concrete > Abstract** - "Identify risks" is vague. "Explain the failure" is concrete.
+3. **Defeats groupthink** - Forces even optimists to imagine failure.
+
+---
+
+## Outcome Bias
+
+### Judging Decisions by Results, Not Process
+
+**What it is:**
+We judge the quality of a decision based on its outcome, not the process.
+
+**Example:**
+- Drunk driver gets home safely → "It was fine"
+- Sober driver has accident → "Bad decision to drive"
+
+**Reality:**
+Quality of decision ≠ Quality of outcome (because of randomness)
+
+**For forecasting:**
+A 90% prediction that fails doesn't mean the forecast was bad (10% events happen 10% of the time).
+
+**The premortem fix:**
+By imagining failure BEFORE it happens, you evaluate the decision process independent of outcome.
+
+---
+
+## When Premortems Work Best
+
+### High-Confidence Predictions
+
+**Use when:**
+- Your probability is >80% or <20%
+- You feel very certain
+- Confidence intervals are narrow
+
+**Why:**
+These are the predictions most likely to be overconfident.
+
+---
+
+### Team Forecasting
+
+**Use when:**
+- Multiple people are making predictions
+- Groupthink is a risk
+- Dissent is being suppressed
+
+**Why:**
+Premortems legitimize expressing doubts without seeming disloyal.
+
+---
+
+### Important Decisions
+
+**Use when:**
+- Stakes are high
+- Irreversible commitments
+- Significant resource allocation
+
+**Why:**
+Worth the time investment to reduce overconfidence.
+
+---
+
+## When Premortems Don't Help
+
+### Already Uncertain
+
+**Skip if:**
+- Your probability is ~50%
+- Confidence intervals are already wide
+- You're confused, not confident
+
+**Why:**
+You don't need a premortem to tell you you're uncertain.
+
+---
+
+### Trivial Predictions
+
+**Skip if:**
+- Low stakes
+- Easily reversible
+- Not worth the time
+
+**Why:**
+Premortems take effort; save them for important forecasts.
+
+---
+
+## The Premortem vs Other Techniques
+
+### Premortem vs Red Teaming
+
+**Red Teaming:**
+- Adversarial: Find flaws in the plan
+- Focus: Attack the strategy
+- Mindset: "How do we defeat this?"
+
+**Premortem:**
+- Temporal: Failure has occurred
+- Focus: Understand what happened
+- Mindset: "What led to this outcome?"
+
+**Use both:** Red team attacks the plan, premortem explains the failure.
+
+---
+
+### Premortem vs Scenario Planning
+
+**Scenario Planning:**
+- Multiple futures: Good, bad, likely
+- Branching paths
+- Strategies for each scenario
+
+**Premortem:**
+- Single future: Failure has occurred
+- Backward path
+- Identify risks to avoid
+
+**Use both:** Scenario planning explores, premortem stress-tests.
+
+---
+
+### Premortem vs Risk Register
+
+**Risk Register:**
+- List of identified risks
+- Probability and impact scores
+- Mitigation strategies
+
+**Premortem:**
+- Narrative of failure
+- Causal chains
+- Discover unknown unknowns
+
+**Use both:** Premortem feeds into risk register.
+
+---
+
+## Cognitive Mechanisms
+
+### Why Premortems Defeat Overconfidence
+
+**1. Prospective Hindsight**
+Imagining an event has occurred improves memory access by 30%.
+
+**2. Permission to Doubt**
+Social license to express skepticism without seeming negative.
+
+**3. Concrete Failure Modes**
+Abstract "risks" become specific "this happened, then this, then this."
+
+**4. Temporal Distancing**
+Viewing from the future reduces emotional attachment to current plan.
+
+**5. Narrative Construction**
+Building a story forces causal reasoning, revealing gaps.
+
+---
+
+## Common Objections
+
+### "This is too negative!"
+
+**Response:**
+Pessimism during planning prevents failure during execution.
+
+**Reframe:**
+Not negative - realistic. You're not hoping for failure, you're preparing for it.
+
+---
+
+### "We don't have time for this."
+
+**Response:**
+- Premortem: 30 minutes
+- Recovering from preventable failure: Months/years
+
+**Math:**
+If premortem prevents 10% of failures, ROI is massive.
+
+---
+
+### "Our case really is different!"
+
+**Response:**
+Maybe. But the premortem will reveal HOW it's different, not just assert it.
+
+**Test:**
+If the premortem reveals nothing new, you were right. If it reveals risks, you weren't.
+
+---
+
+## Practical Takeaways
+
+1. **Use for high-confidence predictions** - When you feel certain
+2. **Legitimate skepticism** - Makes doubt socially acceptable
+3. **Concrete failure modes** - Forces specific risks, not vague worries
+4. **Widen confidence intervals** - Adjust based on plausibility of failure narrative
+5. **Set kill criteria** - Know what would change your mind
+6. **Monitor signposts** - Track early warning signals
+
+**The Rule:**
+> If you can easily write a plausible failure narrative, your confidence is too high.
+
+---
+
+**Return to:** [Main Skill](../SKILL.md#interactive-menu)