A Powerful Way to Find Hidden Risks Before they Escalate
By Suzie Thoraval
Make better decisions, have stronger governance and fewer surprises
“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.”
What struck me when I recently watched the Netflix documentary, 'Trainwreck: Woodstock '99', was a twenty-two-year-old assistant site manager at the music festival, Lee Rosenblatt. Before the disaster unfolded, he looked at the bands that had been booked and the crowd they were likely to draw, went to the organisers and told them he was worried that it created conditions for bad things to happen. They dismissed him.
Organisers were focused on their individual goals of profit and booking headline bands fans would want to see. The festival went ahead, and that weekend became the story people still tell about how badly something like this can go, from looting and fires to rioting, serious injuries, sexual assaults and a young man who died in the heat.
No organiser wants an outcome like this. What stays with you is that each part, on its own, might have been manageable. The danger was in how they came together. The bands were high energy. The heat was survivable. The site, the water supply, the behaviour of the crowd, each of those elements by themselves could possibly have been managed with enough safeguards in place. The problem was that all of these issues occurred together, and it seems no one had sat down to look at what might happen when combined.
We tend to look at risks one at a time
On a risk register, every threat gets its own line, its own owner, its own rating, its own set of controls. That is a sensible way to keep track of things, but if we are not careful, it has a blind spot built into it. We get very good at weighing each risk on its own, but we rarely stop to ask what happens if a few of them were to happen at once.
Most of the time no one is being careless. It is just that no one has looked at how the risks might interact.
Where a premortem helps
One tool I often recommend for this is the premortem. It has been around for years and it is genuinely simple. Before you commit to a decision, you ask the team to imagine that it is some months later and the whole thing you are planning has gone badly wrong, and then you ask them to explain why.
Asking the question that way changes what people tell you. When you ask a group "what could go wrong?", people tend to offer the safe, obvious risks, the ones they are comfortable to say in front of colleagues and the boss. They might hold back the bigger worry, the one that questions the whole plan because they don't want to sound alarmist or disloyal.
Ask them to explain a disaster that has, in their minds, already happened, and they are more likely to name the things they were genuinely worried about. The premortem takes out the social cost. Once you tell them to imagine it has already failed, naming a real worry no longer sounds pessimistic, it is just describing what happened.
Premortems can also bring out the failures that come from several things going wrong together, which is the part a line-by-line risk register may miss.
Lee Rosenblatt had voiced exactly that kind of worry, and was overruled. A premortem would have made his concern part of the decision rather than an objection to dismiss.
How to try it
Before your next significant decision, get the people closest to the work into a room and ask them a few questions:
It is six months from now and this has gone badly. What happened?
Did any of these risks make each other worse?
What were we all assuming that turned out not to be true?
What you are after is a clearer view of how these risks might combine, while there is still time to do something about it.
For me, using foresight in this way helps with adaptive stability. It is the habit of looking at the whole situation, not just the parts, so that fewer things catch you off guard.
What might you notice if you looked at your risks as a whole, rather than one at a time?
