Oliver Burkeman: Leadership Secrets of Danny Kahneman, Gary Klein, Karl Weick and Bob Rubin

One of the most important things I learned in my first two months working in the Clinton administration back in 1993 was what we called the “Bob Rubin Question”: ending a meeting with: “OK. That’s what we are going to do now. But what else should we do? What if we are wrong in our understanding of the situation? What, two years from now, will we then wish we had done today when we look back and say ‘if only…’?”

Now I find that this is SCIENCE!!:

Oliver Burkeman: This column will change your life: hindsight–it’s not just for past events: “One obvious conclusion… and I’m not saying it’s wrong…

…is that people are idiots. But a more interesting one is that hindsight… doesn’t just make things look different; it makes them look so utterly different that it’s impossible, when taking a decision in the moment, even to begin to grasp how it’ll strike you later on…. [A] technique… invented by the psychologist Gary Klein, and which Daniel Kahneman, his Nobel-winning colleague, describes as his favourite method for making better decisions… the “premortem”…. Imagine yourself in the future, after the project you’re considering has ended in spectacular failure…. You’re screwed. Everything went as badly as you could have feared. Now: why? Asking the question this way, Klein explains, has an almost magical effect…. Another advocate of “prospective hindsight”… Karl Weick, argues that it works because of a cognitive quirk: we find it easier to imagine the detailed causes of a single outcome than causes of multiple outcomes…. ‘I mentioned it at Davos’, Kahneman said a while back, and ‘the chairman of a large corporation said it was worth coming to Davos for’…. Hindsight, we’re told, is a wonderful thing. But hindsight in advance is even better…