The Pre-Mortem

There is great value in holding pre-mortems where you pretend that a proposed plan has failed and then try to determine the likely cause. You do this, of course, before putting the plan into action and yet it is surprising how often the vulnerabilities are readily identified,

I suspect this is because behind the enthusiasm for a particular course of action, there may be silent prayers that some item won't be a disappointment or some weakness won't be fatal.

This recently surfaced while examining the strategy of a community group. Its approach to a crisis was to call in the team, fire up the members, and resolve the matter. What it missed was the first job of crisis management is to prevent the crisis from occurring at all. Rather than an incident response, it needed a long-term program to build alliances. By the time the crisis arose, that approach was not viable and a harsh lesson was learned:  Not every crisis can be resolved without serious cost or pain. You can pay dearly for delays.