Introduction to research: Premortems and avoiding the avoidable

What's the idea? When implementing a new idea or approach, on many occasions this may end in failure. Indeed, when you come back to look at these failures, you may often say “How could I have missed that problem?” Indeed, many of the problems you encounter may be entirely predictable and could have been easily addressed, if you had been able to consider them from the outset. One way to try and achieve the benefit of hindsight without making the actual mistakes, is to use Daniel Kahneman’s favourite approach to decision-making: premortems. What does it mean? Devised by Gary Klein (2007a), a premortem is defined as “the hypothetical opposite of a postmortem. A postmortem in a medical setting allows health professionals and the family to learn what caused a patient’s death. Everyone benefits except, of course, the patient. A premortem in a business setting comes at the beginning of a project rather than the end, so the project can be improved rather than autopsied. Unlike a t