"Fail to prepare, prepare to fail" is a well-known phrase used extensively to remind us all of the significance of high quality planning to ensure successful performance.

How many of us in our planning use failure or the potential of failure as a planning tool?

A pre-mortem is a managerial strategy in which a manager imagines that a project has failed, and then works backward to identify all of the possible reasons why.  Pre-mortems have proven to be useful strategies to mitigate risk.

A post-mortem in a medical setting allows health professionals to establish the cause of death. A pre-mortem is the hypothetical opposite of a post-mortem.

In a coaching context, the pre-mortem occurs during the planning phases rather than at the end of the game, season or competition. Unlike the post-game autopsy, the pre-mortem assumes the game/ tournament has been and/or the player(s) have failed--and asks what went wrong.

MORE: USA Football's Practice Smart course

The team members’ task is to work backward from the point of failure and identify what is to blame. The end goals of the pre-mortem are to:

• Identify all the reasons why the team/ athlete didn't reach the performance expectations set
• Ensure interventions are put in place to prevent them from occurring in the first place, or at least minimize the identified risks.

Team members would include head coaches, assistant coaches, support staff, administrators and players or, in a team-based context, player representatives, such as captains.

Who would be sitting at your program's pre-mortem table? Identify them by name. Also, be clear on who is leading the pre-mortem. Ideally, this would be conducted by an independent facilitator to ensure objectivity.

So how do you conduct a pre-mortem? Follow these steps:

• Gather all the team members together for a brainstorming session.
• Inform everyone about the "failure."
• Ask each individual in the room independently to write down every reason they can think of for the failure—especially the kinds of things they ordinarily wouldn’t mention as potential problems, for fear of being impolite. Spend just 5-10 minutes on this.
• Ask team members to record each reason on a separate sticky note.
• Ask each team member, starting with the head coach, to read one reason or risk from his or her list and then post this onto a flip chart. Each team member identifies a different risk until all potential risks related to the activity have been recorded. Encourage the team to engage in blue-sky thinking to consider all risks, regardless of how remote the possibility is.
• Review all of the sticky-notes on the flip chart and prioritize the likelihood of them actually occurring. Prioritize from high to low. The beauty of sticky notes is that they move and this makes the prioritization task much easier.
• For each risk, identify the solutions, interventions and preferred outcomes.
• Put in place a review process that allows you to track the progress of the plan and evaluate whether the risk has been minimized or whether it has increased. A traffic light or flagging system (red-to-green) is a useful visual approach to quickly check and chart progress.
• Adapt and modify the plan as required.

SEE ALSO: Deliberate practice: planning guidleines you can use to shape your practices

High-quality meaningful pre-mortems rely on the ability to ask hard and searching questions, active listening, honesty, transparency and solution-oriented creativity.

The pre-mortem’s positive hindsight approach, a natural precursor to reflective practice, offers benefits that other methods don’t. It sensitizes the team to consider, identify and pick up early signs of trouble. Pre-mortems can be extremely helpful tools for football coaches because they may be the best way to circumvent any need for a painful post-mortem.

Sarah McQuade is an independent coach education consultant, owner and director of e.t.c coaching consultants and co-director with The Coach Learning Group. To learn more about accessing how-to coach skills workshops click the Coaching Skills button at www.etcoachingconsultants.com.