Thinking about Failing to Succeed
Strategy #4
Preemptive Risk Management: Engaging sponsors in risk discussions early on aligns expectations and prepares for swift decision-making when issues arise.
Preemptive Risk Management: Engaging sponsors in risk discussions early on aligns expectations and prepares for swift decision-making when issues arise.
Engaged and active sponsors are the most important element driving success of any project. Accordingly, providing sponsors with all the support they need to be successful as change leaders is crucial. A key question to establish the optimal mindset for dealing with risk is to ask sponsors, “How do you want to deal with problems and challenges when they occur?”.
Asking the question from the point of view that things will go wrong - not that things could go wrong. This is to create the right mindset to plan for contingencies.
The purpose of doing this early in the process is to ensure:
That setbacks and problems are to be expected in all projects. Mitigation strategies for known and expected risks is a first step, but even more important is discussing how to deal with the unexpected and unknown risks. In other words, acknowledging that there are risks and issues that either can’t be predicted or foreseen. The proverbial “unknown unknowns”. But, we know that we need to be ready for these challenges!
Surfacing the “go to” strategy to address unanticipated problems with a project. This agreement to handle anything that arises in a specific manner eases the burden of delay when a problem comes up that was not planned for in the first place. When there’s a plan with responsibilities and action steps it will shorten the time that could delay the project.
What is a good way to have this discussion? Setting the environment for a productive discussion when trying to plan for missteps could be challenging. However, there’s a great technique that can help!
One of the Liberating Structures (a set of lightweight, but very effective ways to facilitate discussions) is called TRIZ. The word is an acronym for a Russian term that in translation means “The Theory of Productive Problem Solving”. The TRIZ Liberating Structure takes a creative interpretation of the original method. Using a variation of this structure (a “riff”) can help set the basis for a great conversation about how to prepare for eventual issues.
In this riff of TRIZ, you would ask a question to elicit the types of failure that would derail your project. Something along the lines of “How could we ensure that our project is a complete failure - it fails to meet even the most basic objectives we’ve established?” Then, capture all the ways we could guarantee such a total failure. Keep the conversation light and creative - allow your sponsors to use their imagination to devine all the possibilities that they would most be concerned could happen.
Finally, using the list of ways the project could fail, you can then direct the conversation to the following:
How many of these ways of failure are present now?
What can we do to resolve these problems now?
What process will we use to address any of these problems when they do arise?
Finally, capture a mitigation plan to update as the project progresses. This is your opportunity to avoid detours by thinking through the inevitability of problems that will delay your launch.
