# Sources — inversion

> *Primary and authoritative sources for the [inversion](../SKILL.md) skill.*

- Klein, Gary. **"Performing a Project Premortem."** *Harvard Business Review*, September 2007. https://hbr.org/2007/09/performing-a-project-premortem — the canonical primary-source description of the pre-mortem as a structured inversion practice for teams, including the verbatim instruction quoted in the Overview above.
- Munger, Charles T. **"A Lesson on Elementary, Worldly Wisdom As It Relates to Investment Management and Business."** Address at the USC Business School, 1994. Republished in Peter Kaufman, ed., *Poor Charlie's Almanack* (PCA Publication, 2005). The "where I'm going to die" formulation appears in this address; "invert, always invert" is Munger's own carrying-forward of the Jacobi maxim.
- Apollo 204 Review Board, **Final Report** (April 5, 1967), NASA Historical Reference Collection. https://history.nasa.gov/Apollo204/ — primary source for the post-Apollo-1 FMEA mandate cited in Method in Action.
- Klein, Gary. **Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions** (MIT Press, 1998). Background on pre-mortem's place in the broader naturalistic-decision-making literature.
- The maxim **"man muss immer umkehren"** is attributed to Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi (1804–1851) through a chain of mathematicians' recollections (most prominently carried into modern decision-making by Munger). The phrase is not pinpoint-traceable to a single Jacobi publication; it is reported in correspondence and student notes of his Königsberg period. We cite the *principle* and the *language*, with the attribution caveat — by this skill's own rule, an attributed maxim is not bedrock; the reasoning is.