Pre-mortems and red teams
Teams often discover the flaws in a plan only after it fails. A pre-mortem imagines the failure in advance so the risks can be fixed while there is still time.
Key ideas
- Imagining failure makes people more willing to name risks.
- Independent critics find weaknesses the authors miss.
- Every major risk should have an owner and a response.
Step by step
- 1
Imagine it is six months later and the plan has failed.
- 2
Ask each person to write the reasons it failed, independently.
- 3
Group the reasons and rank them by likelihood and impact.
- 4
Assign an owner and a preventive action to the top risks.
Example
Before launching a new triage system, a team runs a twenty-minute pre-mortem. Staff training gaps emerge as the main risk, and an extra training week is added.
Your drill
Run a ten-minute pre-mortem on a plan you are about to start and list the top three risks with one preventive action each.
Common mistakes
- Letting the most senior voice dominate the risk list.
- Listing risks without assigning actions.
Check yourself
Why ask people to write failure reasons independently?
Show the answer
It prevents groupthink and surfaces risks that people might not raise in open discussion.
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