Suppose I wanted to kill a lot of pilots
I first heard about this in the context of software project estimation.The author (forgotten to me) made the point that nobody has permission to think about disasters when estimating project completion time.So why not explicitly ask them to? "So now we have our estimate, what would cause us to miss it?"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.It was an interesting observation, vs the "just multiply the everything goes right estimate by X" method.If everyone else is being positive, no one wants to be the lone (realistic) downer.