Claims

The pre-mortem is a structured 20-minute exercise conducted at project kickoff where the team assumes the project has failed catastrophically, spends 2 minutes individually writing reasons for failure, then shares non-redundantly around the room, and finally spends 2 minutes identifying what each person can do to reduce risk.

A decision scorecard method of evaluating employees—reviewing major decisions made over the past year, assessing which worked and which didn't, examining the quality of thinking at the time (not retrospectively), and learning from both successes and failures—is less stressful and more educational than traditional objective-based evaluations that become stale.

Project review meetings can be enriched by asking 'Has anything happened in the last 3 months that surprised you?' because surprises in complex situations indicate that mental models need updating; absence of surprises in a wicked problem is concerning rather than reassuring.

In group decision-making, having each member individually and privately write out the problem they think they're solving, then comparing, reveals significant variance in problem definition; this variance must be acknowledged before jumping to solve the problem.