The planning bias is the tendency we all have to imagine that our plans will go perfectly every time, in spite of all of the evidence to the contrary. We finish late, we go over budget, and we underestimate obstacles almost every time. But according to the psychologist Gary Klein, there is a technique we can use to fix this, and it takes about ten minutes.
Klein argues that before we do anything, we should conduct a 'pre-mortem.' This is where you say, 'let's imagine that in six months' time, this idea or this plan has failed completely. What went wrong?' For Klein, a good pre-mortem has to do three things. First, it has to assume that failure is a certainty. Things will go wrong. Second, you have to make sure that colleagues or friends write down their ideas independently of each other to prevent any kind of groupthink. And third, you must make the necessary changes now, while it is cheap to change, rather than later when it will be expensive to fix.
In some ways, Klein's pre-mortem is a reworking of an old Stoic idea known as the 'premeditatio malorum.' This is where you imagine some future catastrophe befalls you. You lose your job, you lose your home, or you lose some loved ones, and you take the necessary steps to prepare for that now. Because what both Klein and the Stoics knew is that it is better and cheaper and easier to fix a problem now than when they multiply into the future. It is better to fix your roof while the sun is still shining than when it starts to rain.