Risk

August 2026

• Aug 31, 2026ConceptsInversion: Solving Problems by Thinking BackwardGary Klein's premortem has a team assume a project has already failed and write down why. He cites 1989 research by Mitchell, Russo and Pennington finding that prospective hindsight, imagining an event has already happened, raises the ability to correctly identify reasons for future outcomes by 30 percent. The grammatical shift from might fail to did fail is what unlocks it, and it also makes pessimism the assigned task, so doubts stop feeling disloyal.14 MIN339

July 2026

• Jul 15, 2026ConceptsThe Premortem: Imagining Failure Before It HappensMitchell, Russo and Pennington reported in 1989 that people told an outcome had already happened generated roughly 30 percent more possible reasons for it than people asked what might happen. The study measured the quantity and richness of reasons, not their accuracy. Gary Klein built the meeting around that effect, and its second engine is social: once failure is assumed, the sharpest critic wins the exercise instead of looking disloyal.15 MIN1.9k
• Jul 12, 2026ConceptsThe Availability Heuristic: Why Vivid Beats LikelyAsked whether K appears more often as the first or third letter of English words, most people in Tversky and Kahneman's 1973 study said first; in typical English text it is roughly twice as common in third position. Recall ease, not frequency, drove the answer. Schwarz and colleagues sharpened the point in 1991: people asked for six examples of their own assertiveness rated themselves as more assertive than people asked for twelve.15 MIN2.5k

November 2022

• Nov 18, 2022ConceptsThinking About Risk: A Practical Framework ExplainedRisk and uncertainty are not the same thing, a distinction Frank Knight drew in 1921. Under risk the probabilities can be estimated from data or theory; under uncertainty they cannot, and you may not even know the full range of possible outcomes, so standard tools become unreliable. Volatility is not risk either: a cash deposit with zero nominal volatility can carry enormous purchasing power risk during high inflation.20 MIN4.8k