In his new book, The Power of Regret, Daniel Pink argues that regret is not a negative emotion we should seek to avoid, but rather a positive one. It is regret that allows us to examine our mistakes and learn from them, so we don’t repeat them over and over. But what if you could take it one step further and learn from your mistakes before you even make them? At Truss, we have been working to learn from potential mistakes before we make them through a process called pre-mortem.

Pioneered by Gary Klein in 2007, the pre-mortem was designed to reduce the frequency of failure and is based on a psychological principle called a counterfactual, which asks how you can imagine something that has not yet happened and, further, how you can draw use from that imagined future. In contrast to the post-mortem, which examines the outcome of an initiative once it is over, the pre-mortem also focuses on a specific initiative, but ideally before it begins or in its early stages. Here is what it looks like.