Suppose I wanted to kill a lot of pilots
I first heard about this in the context of software project estimation.<p>The author (forgotten to me) made the point that nobody has <i>permission</i> to think about disasters when estimating project completion time.<p>So why not explicitly ask them to? &quot;So now we have our estimate, what would cause us to miss it?&quot;<p>And in the course of giant monster attacks, you give people permission to talk about specific scenarios that are actually very likely to derail the schedule.<p>It was an interesting observation, vs the &quot;just multiply the everything goes right estimate by X&quot; method.<p>If everyone else is being positive, no one wants to be the lone (realistic) downer.