by Annie Duke
Notice that the option of the extra play doesn’t reveal itself without this kind of scouting of the future. Even after the fact, with lots of time to analyze the decision, very few commentators saw this advantage.
The important thing is that we do better when we scout all these futures and make decisions based on the probabilities and desirability of the different futures. ASAS couldn’t guarantee it would get awarded every grant it applied for, but it could, through good process, make better decisions about which grants to prioritize and how much revenue to expect from the basket of grant proposals they submitted. Despite the outcry, I’d like to think that Pete Carroll didn’t lose much sleep over his decision to call for Wilson to pass.
Reconnaissance of the future dramatically improves decision quality and reduces reactivity to outcomes. So far, we have talked about thinking ahead to what the future might look like. But it turns out that better decision trees, more effective scenario planning, results from working backward rather than forward.
Backcasting: working backward from a positive future
All methods of imagining the future are not created equal. You know that Chinese proverb, “A journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step”? Turns out, if we were contemplating a thousand-mile walk, we’d be better off imagining ourselves looking back from the destination and figuring how we got there. When it comes to advance thinking, standing at the end and looking backward is much more effective than looking forward from the beginning.
The distorted view we get when we look into the future from the present is similar to the stereotypical view of the world by Manhattan residents, poked fun at by the famous New Yorker cover. The cover was a drawing of a map from the perspective of a person from New York. In that view, half the map covers a few blocks of the city. While you can see all the buildings on Ninth Avenue and even vehicles and people, the Hudson River and New Jersey are just horizontal strips. The entire United States occupies the same amount of space as the distances between Ninth and Tenth avenues. Beyond a strip of the Pacific Ocean are three tiny lumps, labeled “China,” “Japan,” and “Russia.”
When we forecast the future, we run the risk of a similar distortion. From where we stand, the present and the immediate future loom large. Anything beyond that loses focus.
Imagining the future recruits the same brain pathways as remembering the past. And it turns out that remembering the future is a better way to plan for it. From the vantage point of the present, it’s hard to see past the next step. We end up over-planning for addressing problems we have right now. Implicit in that approach is the assumption that conditions will remain the same, facts won’t change, and the paradigm will remain stable. The world changes too fast to assume that approach is generally valid. Samuel Arbesman’s The Half-Life of Facts makes a book-length case for the hazards of assuming the future is going to be like the present.
Just as great poker players and chess players (and experts in any field) excel by planning further into the future than others, our decision-making improves when we can more vividly imagine the future, free of the distortions of the present. By working backward from the goal, we plan our decision tree in more depth, because we start at the end.
When we identify the goal and work backward from there to “remember” how we got there, the research shows that we do better. In a Harvard Business Review article, decision scientist Gary Klein summarized the results of a 1989 experiment by Deborah Mitchell, J. Edward Russo, and Nancy Pennington. They “found that prospective hindsight—imagining that an event has already occurred—increases the ability to correctly identify reasons for future outcomes by 30%.”
A huge urban planning project requires enormous amounts of money, materials, commitment—and the vision to work backward from a distant future goal. When Frederick Law Olmsted designed Central Park, for example, he recognized that a lot of the charm of the park, and a lot of enjoyment that people would get from it, would take decades, as the landscape changed and matured. People walking through Central Park when it opened to the public in 1858 would have seen a lot of barren land. Even in 1873, when construction was substantially completed, there was a lot of undergrown foliage. The trees, shrubs, and plants were clearly recent transplants. None of those visitors would recognize Central Park today. But Olmstead would because he was starting from what it would develop into.
The most common form of working backward from our goal to map out the future is known as backcasting. In backcasting, we imagine we’ve already achieved a positive outcome, holding up a newspaper with the headline “We Achieved Our Goal!” Then we think about how we got there.
Let’s say an enterprise wants to develop a three-year strategic plan to double market share, from 5% to 10%. Each person engaged in the planning imagines holding up a newspaper whose headline reads “Company X Has Doubled Its Market Share over the Past Three Years.” The team leader now asks them to identify the reasons they got there, what events occurred, what decisions were made, what went their way to get the enterprise to capture that market share. This enables the company to better identify strategies, tactics, and actions that need to be implemented to get to the goal. It also allows it to identify when the goal needs to be tweaked. Backcasting makes it possible to identify when there are low-probability events that must occur to reach the goal. That could lead to developing strategies to increase the chances those events occur or to recognizing the goal is too ambitious. The company can also make precommitments to a plan developed through backcasting, including responses to developments that can interfere with reaching the goal and identifying inflection points for re-evaluating the plan as the future unfolds.
In planning a trial strategy after taking a new case, a trial lawyer can imagine the headline of winning at trial. What favorable rulings did the lawyer get along the way? How did the most favorable testimony play out? What kind of evidence did the judge allow or throw out? What points did the jury respond to?
If our goal is to lose twenty pounds in six months, we can plan how to achieve that by imagining it’s six months from now and we’ve lost the weight. What are the things we did to lose the weight? How did we avoid junk food? How did we increase the amount of exercise we were doing? How did we stick to the regimen?
Imagining a successful future and backcasting from there is a useful time-travel exercise for identifying necessary steps for reaching our goals. Working backward helps even more when we give ourselves the freedom to imagine an unfavorable future.
Premortems: working backward from a negative future
If you know medical terms or watch forensic-crime dramas on TV, you are familiar with a postmortem: that’s where a medical examiner determines the cause of death. A premortem is an investigation into something awful, but before it happens. We all like to bask in an optimistic view of the future. We generally are biased to overestimate the probability of good things happening. Looking at the world through rose-colored glasses is natural and feels good, but a little naysaying goes a long way. A premortem is where we check our positive attitude at the door and imagine not achieving our goals.
Backcasting and premortems complement each other. Backcasting imagines a positive future; a premortem imagines a negative future. We can’t create a complete picture without representing both the positive space and the negative space. Backcasting reveals the positive space. Premortems reveal the negative space. Backcasting is the cheerleader; a premortem is the heckler in the audience.
Imagining a headline that reads “We Failed to Reach Our Goal” challenges us to think about ways in which things could go wrong that we otherwise wouldn’t if left to our own (optimistic, team-player) devices. For the company with the three-year plan to double market share, the premortem headline is “Company Fails to Reach Market Share Goal; Growth Again Stalls.” Members of the planning team now imagine delays in new products, loss of key executives or sales or marketing or technical personnel, new product
s by competitors, adverse economic developments, paradigm shifts that could lead customers to do without the product or rely on alternatives not on the market or in use, etc.
A lawyer trying a case now considers favorable evidence being disallowed, undiscovered evidence undermining the case, drawing an unsympathetic judge, and the jury disliking or distrusting the main witnesses.
When we set a weight-loss goal and put a plan to reach that goal in place, a premortem will reveal how we felt obligated to eat cake when it was somebody’s birthday, how hard it was to resist the bagels and cookies in the conference room, and how hard it was to find time for the gym or how easy it was to find excuses to procrastinate going. There has been a massive amount written about visualizing success as a way to achieve our goals. Because that’s such a common element in self-help strategies, conducting a premortem (with its negative visualization) may seem like a counterproductive way to succeed.
Despite the popular wisdom that we achieve success through positive visualization, it turns out that incorporating negative visualization makes us more likely to achieve our goals. Gabriele Oettingen, professor of psychology at NYU and author of Rethinking Positive Thinking: Inside the New Science of Motivation, has conducted over twenty years of research, consistently finding that people who imagine obstacles in the way of reaching their goals are more likely to achieve success, a process she has called “mental contrasting.” Her first study, of women enrolled in a weight-loss program, found that subjects “who had strong positive fantasies about slimming down . . . lost twenty-four pounds less than those who pictured themselves more negatively. Dreaming about achieving a goal apparently didn’t help that goal come to fruition. It impeded it from happening. The starry-eyed dreamers in the study were less energized to behave in ways that helped them lose weight.”
She repeated these results in different contexts. She recruited college students who claimed to have an unrequited crush. She then prompted one group to imagine positive scenarios of initiating a relationship, and another group to imagine negative scenarios of how that would play out. The results were similar to those in the weight-loss study: five months later, the subjects indulging in the positive scenario planning were less likely to initiate the relationship. She found the same results when studying job seekers, students before a midterm exam, and patients undergoing hip replacement surgery.
Oettingen recognized that we need to have positive goals, but we are more likely to execute on those goals if we think about the negative futures. We start a premortem by imagining why we failed to reach our goal: our company hasn’t increased its market share; we didn’t lose weight; the jury verdict came back for the other side; we didn’t hit our sales target. Then we imagine why. All those reasons why we didn’t achieve our goal help us anticipate potential obstacles and improve our likelihood of succeeding.
A premortem is an implementation of the Mertonian norm of organized skepticism, changing the rules of the game to give permission for dissent. Being a team player in a premortem isn’t about being the most enthusiastic cheerleader; it’s about being the most productive heckler. “Winning” isn’t about the group feeling good because everyone confirms their (and the organization’s) narrative that things are going to turn out great. The premortem starts with working backward from an unfavorable future, or failure to achieve a goal, so competing for favor, or feeling good about contributing to the process, is about coming up with the most creative, relevant, and actionable reasons for why things didn’t work out.
The key to a successful premortem is that everyone feels free to look for those reasons, and they are motivated to scour everything—personal experience, company experience, historical precedent, episodes of The Hills, sports analogies, etc.—to come up with ways a decision or plan can go bad, so the team can anticipate and account for them.
Conducting a premortem creates a path to act as our own red team. Once we frame the exercise as “Okay, we failed. Why did we fail?” that frees everyone to identify potential points of failure they otherwise might not see or might not bring up for fear of being viewed as a naysayer. People can express their reservations without it sounding like they’re saying the planned course of action is wrong. Because of that, a planning process that includes a premortem creates a much healthier organization because it means that the people who do have dissenting opinions are represented in the planning. They don’t feel like they’re shut out or not being heard. Everyone’s voice now has more value. The organization is less likely to discourage dissent and thereby lose the value of diverse opinions. Those who have reservations are less likely to have resentment or regret build if things don’t work out; their voices were represented in the strategic plan.
Incorporating this type of imagining of the negative space into a truthseeking group reinforces a new habit routine of visualizing and anticipating future obstacles. As always, when a group we are part of reinforces this kind of thinking, we are more likely in our own thinking to consider the downside of our decisions.
Imagining both positive and negative futures helps us build a more realistic vision of the future, allowing us to plan and prepare for a wider variety of challenges, than backcasting alone. Once we recognize the things that can go wrong, we can protect against the bad outcomes, prepare plans of action, enable nimble responses to a wider range of future developments, and assimilate a negative reaction in advance so we aren’t so surprised by it or reactive to it. In doing so, we are more likely to achieve our goals.
Of course, when we backcast and imagine the things that went right, we reveal the problems if those things didn’t go right. Backcasting doesn’t, therefore, ignore the negative space so much as it overrepresents the positive space. It’s in our optimistic nature (and natural in backcasting) to imagine a successful future. Without a premortem, we don’t see as many paths to the future in which we don’t reach our goals. A premortem forces us to build out that side of the tree where things don’t work out. In the process, we are likely to realize that’s a pretty robust part of the tree.
Remember, the likelihood of positive and negative futures must add up to 100%. The positive space of backcasting and the negative space of a premortem still have to fit in a finite amount of space. When we see how much negative space there really is, we shrink down the positive space to a size that more accurately reflects reality and less reflects our naturally optimistic nature.
We make better decisions, and we feel better about those decisions, once we get our past-, present-, and future-selves to hang out together. This not only allows us to adjust how optimistic we are, it allows us to adjust our goals accordingly and to actively put plans in place to reduce the likelihood of bad outcomes and increase the likelihood of good ones. We are less likely to be surprised by a bad outcome and can better prepare contingency plans.
It may not feel so good during the planning process to include this focus on the negative space. Over the long run, however, seeing the world more objectively and making better decisions will feel better than turning a blind eye to negative scenarios. In a way, backcasting without premortems is a form of temporal discounting: if we imagine a positive future, we feel better now, but we’ll more than compensate for giving up that immediate gratification through the benefits of seeing the world more accurately, making better initial decisions, and being nimbler about what the world throws our way.
Once we make a decision and one of those possible futures actually happens, we can’t discard all that work, even—or especially—if it included work on futures that did not occur. Forgetting about an unrealized future can be dangerous to good decision-making.
Dendrology and hindsight bias (or, Give the chainsaw a rest)
One of the goals of mental time travel is keeping events in perspective. To understand an overriding risk to that perspective, think about time as a tree. The tree has a trunk, branches at the top, and the place where the trunk meets the branches. The trunk is the past.
A tree has only one, growing trunk, just as we have only one, accumulating past. The branches are the potential futures. Thicker branches are the equivalent of more probable futures, thinner branches are less probable ones. The place where the top of the trunk meets the branches is the present. There are many futures, many branches of the tree, but only one past, one trunk.
As the future becomes the past, what happens to all those branches? The ever-advancing present acts like a chainsaw. When one of those many branches happens to be the way things turn out, when that branch transitions into the past, present-us cuts off all those other branches that didn’t materialize and obliterates them. When we look into the past and see only the thing that happened, it seems to have been inevitable. Why wouldn’t it seem inevitable from that vantage point? Even the smallest of twigs, the most improbable of futures—like the 2%–3% chance Russell Wilson would throw that interception—expands when it becomes part of the mighty trunk. That 2%–3%, in hindsight, becomes 100%, and all the other branches, no matter how thick they were, disappear from view.
That’s hindsight bias, an enemy of probabilistic thinking.
Judge Frank Easterbrook, a leading jurist and member of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, warned about the danger in the legal system of assessing probabilities after one of the potential futures has occurred. Jentz v. ConAgra Foods involved a “hot” grain bin owned by ConAgra and the company it hired (named West Side) to investigate and deal with the cause of the burning smell, smoke, and raised temperatures from the bin. After failing to solve the problem, West Side’s foreman told ConAgra to call the fire department. He then told some of his employees to remove tools from a tunnel to the bin that could impair firefighters’ access.