If you've ever done a premortem, then you've done what we're going to be talking about in today's episode. If you're not familiar with the premortem, the basic idea is to look at a project that you're involved in, something that may take a significant amount of time. So try to make it at some kind of like initiative level, an org level, or a team project at the very least. And imagine fast forwarding into the future by some number of months and imagine that the project has been a miserable failure. What exactly has gone wrong? And this is called a premortem, the idea of a pre, before. Or mortem, some kind of death. The project has died in some way. And the way that this works in our minds is that we tend to have a positivity bias. And so when we're thinking about something like a project, we imagine the ways that it could go well. Our vision is kind of totally taken up by ways that it could go well. Now we can kind of defeat this using the premortem. We use the premortem to... Intentionally think about negative things, things that have not gone well. Something that killed the project. This is a type of inversion. Inversion thinking or inverted thinking. The idea of inversion is to look at something from the opposite angle. Instead of focusing on one aspect, you focus on exactly the opposite aspect. Another example of this would be imagine... Instead of imagining how you... You could stay focused today or how you can get the most important things done today. Imagine that you are trying to keep yourself from getting the most important things done today. You're trying to make yourself less focused. You're trying to ruin your day. What would you do? What kinds of things, what kinds of roadblocks, what kinds of distractions would you put in the way to ensure that this day is going to go poorly? It's very likely... It's very likely that the list that you have for how can I focus better today will be much better informed if you use the information from the inverted question. In other words, how can I focus better today? Well, I know what I need to avoid if I look at the inverted list. The inverted list of ways that I would ruin my focus if I was trying to. If you're trying to find... An inverted exercise might be to identify who your least ideal customer profile might be. Maybe you're trying to identify your values or your career purpose. You're trying to find clarity. Perhaps you look at the things that you explicitly do not consider your values. These kinds of defining inversions can help clarify the opposite side. And this is kind of based on a mental model of displacement. If you imagine a ball or any object really, and you're trying to understand the shape of that object. In fact, if you wanted to measure the volume of that object, you could submerge it in liquid and measure how much displacement has occurred as a result of that immersion. This is... Part of the assertions of the Archimedes principle. But the basic idea here is that the opposite or the displacement is directly related to the original object. In other words, if you wanted to understand something about the original object, you could measure what it moves out of its way. You could measure the inversion of that. You can measure the displacement. In this way... Inversion or inverted thinking allows you to kind of carve away and reveal a truth rather than trying to build a truth. This is a little bit of a different perspective on the same subject. This works especially well if there is some kind of cognitive bias at play. For example, the premortem works to defeat the positivity bias. For example, let's say that you are part of a group of people. You're part of a group of people. You're part of a hiring team. And you're trying to determine whether a candidate is qualified for a given role. Well, this candidate may, let's say, have an impressive background and something relatively unrelated to the job that you have at hand. So one thing you could do, an inverted kind of thinking, might be to imagine jobs that this person is not qualified for. Recognize that... Recognize that the halo effect is at play whenever we have someone who has something impressive or something that we like about them. The halo effect can cause us to believe that they are good. If they're good at that one thing, then they are also good at other things. But if we do some kind of inverted thinking rather than saying we believe that this person is going to be good for this job, we try to force ourselves into imagining what kinds of jobs would this person not be good at. This will help us recognize, okay, where are the areas that perhaps we are giving them credit where the credit is not necessarily due. It's part of that halo effect. There are many other ways that you can use inverted thinking to your advantage. I'd love to hear how you're thinking about it, how you're using this kind of mental model in your day-to-day work. You can join us on the DeveloperTea Discord community by heading over to developertea.com slash discord. It's totally free. It will always be free for listeners of the show. That's developertea.com slash discord. Thanks so much for listening. And until next time, enjoy your tea.