Staying ahead of a problem, in the research literature on planning and decision-making, has a fairly specific technique behind it: imagining that a plan has already failed, and working backward from that imagined failure to find the reasons before they happen. The psychologist Gary Klein calls this the premortem, and in a study he ran with colleagues, it measurably outperformed several more conventional ways of stress-testing a plan.
What the original study actually tested
In a 2010 study presented at the International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management, Beth Veinott, Gary Klein, and Sterling Wiggins had 178 participants evaluate a university’s plan for responding to an H1N1 flu outbreak. Participants were split across several conditions: a standard critique of the plan, generating pros and cons, generating only cons, and the premortem technique, in which participants were told to imagine it was months later, the plan had failed completely, and to write down the specific reasons why.
The premortem group’s confidence in the plan dropped by roughly 25 points more than the baseline condition, and reliably more than the standard critique condition. Framing the exercise in the past tense, as though failure had already happened rather than might happen, appeared to bring out a specific kind of thinking that a straightforward request to critique the plan did not.
Where the idea of prospective hindsight actually comes from
Klein did not originate the underlying mechanism. The term prospective hindsight traces to a 1989 paper in the Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, by Deborah Mitchell, J. Edward Russo, and Nancy Pennington, who studied how people explain events differently depending on whether the outcome is framed as uncertain or as already settled. Explanations for outcomes described as certain, their experiments found, tended to be longer, more detailed, and more often expressed in the past tense than explanations for the same outcomes described as merely possible. Klein’s premortem technique applies that finding directly: framing a hypothetical failure as something that has already happened, rather than something that might happen, appears to draw out the same fuller, more detailed style of explanation the 1989 research found people already produce for settled, past events.
Why the grammar of the exercise seems to matter
The mechanism Klein proposes rests on something researchers call prospective hindsight: people are generally better at explaining an outcome that has already occurred than at predicting one that has not happened yet, because hindsight narrows the range of explanations down to whichever one turned out to be true, while foresight has to hold many competing possibilities open at once. The premortem exercise borrows the fluency of hindsight and applies it to an outcome that has not actually happened, asking participants to explain a failure as though it were history rather than speculation.
This is one study, with one plan, in one setting, and it measured confidence and the number of reasons generated rather than tracking whether plans that underwent a premortem actually failed less often in the real world afterward. A separate, unpublished 2017 dissertation from Michigan Technological University extended this work into field and laboratory settings and found a broadly similar pattern, but the overall body of controlled research on the premortem technique remains fairly small relative to how widely the technique itself has since been adopted in corporate and government planning.
What “staying ahead” means in this research, specifically
It is worth being precise about what the premortem technique actually improves, according to the available evidence. It does not appear to make people better at predicting the future in some general sense, and the original study did not test whether premortem groups made better final decisions than other groups, only that they generated more reasons for potential failure and reported lower, more calibrated confidence afterward. Overconfidence in a plan’s chances of success is a well-documented bias in its own right, and a technique that reliably reduces it before a decision is locked in has real practical value, independent of whether it also improves the plan’s actual odds of success, which this research was not designed to measure directly.
A different scientific account of the same everyday habit
A separate strand of psychology offers a broader account of why imagining the future, including its failures, plays such a large role in ordinary planning. In a widely discussed 2016 book, Homo Prospectus, the psychologist Martin Seligman and his co-authors Peter Railton, Roy Baumeister, and Chandra Sripada argued that mentally simulating possible futures, not simply remembering the past or reacting to the present, is a defining feature of ordinary human cognition, operating not just in deliberate planning but in mind-wandering, imagination, and shared social expectations about what is likely to happen next.
This is a theoretical synthesis drawing on a wide body of existing psychological research rather than a single new experiment, and it should be read as an argument about how to frame a large existing literature, not as a new finding on its own. But it offers a plausible reason why a structured technique like the premortem works as well as it does: it is formalizing and directing a kind of future-oriented mental simulation that, in Seligman and his co-authors’ account, human cognition is already doing constantly, just less deliberately and less systematically.
What this does not prove
The premortem technique’s evidence base rests mainly on one controlled study and a smaller, unpublished follow-up, not a large or fully independent body of replication. It has not been shown, in controlled research, to improve real-world outcomes, only to reduce overconfidence and surface more potential failure points during planning. Homo Prospectus is a synthesis and argument, not a new controlled study, and its scope is broader than any single technique for planning. Taken together, the honest version of “staying a step ahead,” on the evidence available, is narrower than a guarantee: imagining a plan has already failed, in the past tense, appears to reliably surface more of what could go wrong and temper overconfidence before a decision is made, which is a real, useful, and modest thing for a planning exercise to do, distinct from any promise that it prevents the failure itself.