From Farsighted (Steven Johnson, 2018) p122-3
… It’s not enough to ask someone, “Can you think of any way this plan might fail?” Premortems and red teams force you to take on a new perspective, or consider an alternate narrative, that might not easily come to mind in a few minutes of casual devil’s advocacy. In a way, the process is similar to the strategy of assigning expert roles that we explored in the mapping stage of the decision. By taking on a new identity, seeing the world through a simulated worldview, new outcomes become visible. Experimenting with different identities is more than just a way of uncovering new opportunities or pitfalls. Hard choices are often hard because they impact other people’s lives in meaningful ways, and so our ability to imagine that impact – to think through the emotional and material consequences from someone else’s perspective – turns out to be an essential talent. New research suggests that this kind of psychological projection is part of what the brain’s default network does in daydreaming. When we simulate potential futures in our wandering minds, we often shift the mental camera from one consciousness to another without even realizing it, testing different scenarios and the emotional reactions they might provoke. You’re driving to work and thinking about a new job opportunity, and your mind flashes onto the image of your boss responding to the news. It’s a fantasy, a simulation, because it’s an event that hasn’t happened yet. But the work that goes into that fantasy is truly sublime. You’re mapping out all the reasons why you might reasonably be considering leaving your current job and you’re mapping out all the reasons why your boss might be alarmed or hurt (or both) at the news, and you’re building a mental forecast of what kind of response the collision of those two maps might trigger in him. That is a very rich and complicated form of mental simulation, but we run those calculations so fast we don’t appreciate them.
Still, some of us do it better than others. And that ability to shift our imagination between different perspectives may be one of the core attributes of a farsighted mind. Part of being a smart decision-maker is being open-minded enough to realize that other people might have a different way of thinking about the decision. …
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