Ask a founder whether their plan is good, and you are handing their most biased judge the case. They are financially invested, emotionally invested, and publicly invested in a "yes". The question itself all but guarantees a reassuring answer.
Change one word in that question, and something genuinely strange happens to the answer.
The Brain Behaves Differently When Failure Is a Fact
Researchers Mitchell, Russo and Pennington documented this back in 1989: when people are asked to imagine that an event has definitely already happened, and then explain why, they generate significantly more, and significantly more specific, causes than when they are simply asked to forecast whether it might happen. Psychologists call this prospective hindsight.
Cognitive psychologist Gary Klein built directly on this finding in his well-known 2007 Harvard Business Review article on the "project premortem", turning an individual psychological effect into a team exercise. Instead of asking whether a plan might fail, you stipulate that it already has, and go looking for why.
Advocate Brain vs. Analyst Brain
Once you have committed to a plan publicly, financially, and emotionally, your brain shifts into what amounts to advocate mode. This is the well-documented planning fallacy at work: underestimating costs, timelines, and risk while overestimating the upside, specifically for plans you already favour.
"Is this a good plan?" asks your advocate brain to grade its own homework. "Assume this plan died, why?" routes around the advocate entirely and hands the question to the analyst instead, the part of you capable of noticing what the advocate would rather not see.
Failure is stipulated as an established fact, not a hypothetical, so identifying why it happened isn't pessimism — it's forensics.Pre-Mortem for Founders
Learn more and read the full book Pre-Mortem for Founders.
