Before committing to any plan, assume it has already failed…
Before committing to any plan, assume it has already failed and generate specific causal mechanisms of failure to surface risks that optimism bias suppresses from standard risk assessment.
Why This Is a Principle
This is the pre-mortem principle. It derives from Systematic Overconfidence Taxonomy (overconfidence), Belief Perseverance Against Contradictory Evidence (cognitive systems maintain existing beliefs/frameworks), and Mental Models Are Singular by Default (people construct single mental models without generating alternatives). The principle prescribes a specific technique (pre-mortem) that follows from these biases. It's clearly actionable and general.
Source Lessons
Pre-mortem as a calibration tool
Imagining failure in advance corrects for optimistic perception biases.
Externalize your failures
A failure you analyze in writing becomes data. A failure you only remember becomes shame.
Know your systematic biases
Everyone has specific recurring distortions — identify yours. Generic bias literacy is not enough. You need a personal bias profile: the particular set of systematic errors your brain commits most frequently, in the specific domains where those errors cost you the most.
The observer is not the observed
Metacognition — the ability to observe your own thinking — is what makes self-correction possible. Without it, you cannot debug your own reasoning.