{"id":791,"date":"2014-06-18T16:07:59","date_gmt":"2014-06-18T15:07:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/socialscienceresearchfunding.co.uk\/?p=791"},"modified":"2014-06-18T16:07:59","modified_gmt":"2014-06-18T15:07:59","slug":"pre-mortems-tell-me-why-your-current-grant-application-or-research-project-will-fail","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/socialscienceresearchfunding.co.uk\/?p=791","title":{"rendered":"Pre-mortems: Tell me why your current grant application or research project will fail"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"I came across a really interesting idea the other day<\/del> week via the Freakonomics podcast<\/a> – the idea of a project “pre-mortem” or “prospective hindsight”\u00a0 They interviewed Gary Klein<\/a> who described it as follows:<\/p>\n

KLEIN:\u00a0 I need you to be in a relaxed state of mind.\u00a0 So lean back in your chair. Get yourself calm and just a little bit dreamy. I don\u2019t want any daydreaming but I just want you to be ready to be thinking about things. And I\u2019m looking in a crystal ball. And uh, oh, gosh\u2026the image in the crystal ball is a really ugly image. And this is a six-month effort. We are now three months into the effort and it\u2019s clear that this project has failed. There\u2019s no doubt about it. There\u2019s no way that it\u2019s going to succeed. Oh, and I\u2019m looking at another scene a few months later, the project is over and we don\u2019t even want to talk about it. And when we pass each other in the hall, we don\u2019t even make eye contact. It\u2019s that painful. OK. So this project has failed, no doubt about it [….] I want each of you to write down all the reasons why this project has failed. We know it failed. No doubts. Write down why it failed.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The thinking here is that such an approach to projects reduces overconfidence, and elsewhere the podcast discusses the problems of overconfidence, “go fever”, the Challenger shuttle disaster, and how cultural\/organisational issues can make it difficult to bring up potential problems and obstacles.\u00a0 The pre-mortem exercise might free people from that, and encourages people (as a team) to find reasons for failure and then respond to them.\u00a0 I don’t do full justice to the arguments here, but you can listen to it for yourself (or read the transcript) at the link above.\u00a0 It reminds me of some of the material covered in a MOOC<\/a> I took which showed how very small changes in the way that questions are posed and framed can make surprisingly large differences to the decisions that people make, so perhaps this very subtle shift in mindset might be useful.<\/p>\n

How might we use the idea of a pre-mortem in research development?\u00a0 My first thought was about grant applications.\u00a0 Would it help to get the applicants to undertake the pre-mortem exercise?\u00a0 I’m not sure that overconfidence is often a huge problem among research teams (a kind of grumpy, passive-aggressive form of entitled pessimism is probably more common), so perhaps the kind of groupthink overconfidence\/excessive positivity is less of an issue than in larger project teams where nobody wants to be the one to be negative.\u00a0 But perhaps there’s value in asking the question anyway, and re-focusing applicants on the fact that they’re writing an application for reviewers and for a funding body, not for themselves.\u00a0 A reminder that the views, priorities, and (mis)interpretations of others are crucial to their chances of success or failure.<\/p>\n

Would it help to say to internal reviewers “assume this project wasn’t funded – tell me why”?\u00a0 Possibly.\u00a0 It might flush out issues that reviewers may be too polite or insufficiently assertive to raise otherwise, and again, focuses minds on the nature of the process as a competition.\u00a0 It could also help reviewers identify where the biggest danger for the application lies.<\/p>\n

Another way it could usefully be used is in helping applicants risk assess their own project.\u00a0 Saying to them “you got funded, but didn’t achieve the objectives you set for yourself.\u00a0 Why not?” might be a good way of identifying project risks to minimise in the management plan, or risks to alleviate through better advanced planning.\u00a0 It might prompt researchers to think more cautiously about the project timescale, especially around issues that are largely out of their control.<\/p>\n

So… has anyone used anything like this before in research development?\u00a0 Might it be a useful way of thinking?\u00a0 Why will your current application fail?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I came across a really interesting idea the other day week via the Freakonomics podcast – the idea of a project “pre-mortem” or “prospective hindsight”\u00a0 They interviewed Gary Klein who described it as follows: KLEIN:\u00a0 I need you to be in a relaxed state of mind.\u00a0 So lean back in your chair. Get yourself calm … Continue reading “Pre-mortems: Tell me why your current grant application or research project will fail”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[16,6,13,19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-791","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-application-advice","category-funding","category-funding-policy","category-university-culture"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1OLY1-cL","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/socialscienceresearchfunding.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/791","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/socialscienceresearchfunding.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/socialscienceresearchfunding.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/socialscienceresearchfunding.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/socialscienceresearchfunding.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=791"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/socialscienceresearchfunding.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/791\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":797,"href":"https:\/\/socialscienceresearchfunding.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/791\/revisions\/797"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/socialscienceresearchfunding.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=791"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/socialscienceresearchfunding.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=791"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/socialscienceresearchfunding.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=791"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}