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Imagine it failed, then ask why
Why we are overconfident
One reason people are overconfident in general is that they tend to look for reasons supporting their ideas. When a decision is important, the remedy is to stop and ask why they might be wrong.
The pre-mortem
In planning, a group can do this as a pre-mortem. Everyone projects into the future and imagines the initiative failed spectacularly. What happened to make it fail? Then the group asks what it can do to prevent those stories from happening.
How doctors do it
Doctors build this habit into their work. They don't diagnose, they do a differential diagnosis. A doctor may have an idea, such as Lyme disease, but then has to ask what else the symptoms are consistent with, and tests are run to rule out everything that can be ruled out. Thinking of alternatives, and thinking how you could be wrong, is core to medicine.
Why does imagining failure improve planning?
In a 1989 study, Deborah Mitchell, J. Edward Russo, and Nancy Pennington found that people who imagined an event had already happened came up with more reasons for it than people who imagined it might happen. The researchers called this prospective hindsight. Psychologist Gary Klein later turned the idea into the pre-mortem and described it in a 2007 Harvard Business Review article. The original experiments found that prospective hindsight increased the ability to correctly identify reasons for future outcomes by about 30 percent.
What mistakes does a differential diagnosis prevent?
Diagnostic errors often start with settling on one explanation too early. In a 2005 review of diagnostic errors in internal medicine published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, Mark Graber and colleagues found that cognitive factors played a part in about three quarters of the cases. Among the most frequent faults was premature closure, in which a clinician stops considering other possibilities once one seems to fit.
Why do people look only for supporting evidence?
In 1960, psychologist Peter Wason gave people the number sequence 2, 4, 6 and asked them to discover the rule behind it by proposing new sequences. Most people tested sequences that fit their first guess, such as numbers rising by two, and rarely tried ones that would break it. The actual rule was any ascending sequence, so their tests kept confirming a rule that was too narrow. Wason coined the term confirmation bias for this tendency.
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