McKinsey has a good article about trusting your gut. When is it wise to do so and when should you get some facts? Midway through the piece Gary Klein, a scientist at MacroCognition, talks about something called "the premortem," which I love. We've all heard of the postmortem, that wildly fun meeting when everyone hovers around after a project to discuss things that didn't go as planned and learnings to be applied. But why don't we do premortems? Perhaps we should start...
Klein: The premortem technique is a sneaky way to get people to do contrarian, devil’s advocate thinking without encountering resistance. If a project goes poorly, there will be a lessons-learned session that looks at what went wrong and why the project failed—like a medical postmortem. Why don’t we do that up front? Before a project starts, we should say, “We’re looking in a crystal ball, and this project has failed; it’s a fiasco. Now, everybody, take two minutes and write down all the reasons why you think the project failed.”
The logic is that instead of showing people that you are smart because you can come up with a good plan, you show you’re smart by thinking of insightful reasons why this project might go south. If you make it part of your corporate culture, then you create an interesting competition: “I want to come up with some possible problem that other people haven’t even thought of.” The whole dynamic changes from trying to avoid anything that might disrupt harmony to trying to surface potential problems.