Your team has the perfect plan, honed over years of experienced and matched perfectly to your skills.

Nothing can go wrong.

Then you lose anyway. It happens.

Afterwards, the painful post-mortem begins.

We have all sat in the changing rooms after a defeat looking at the floor while the coach or captain - sometimes both - declare a lack of commitment, ability to stick to the plan or a million other things. Reasons are given, excuses are made.

Sometimes even blame is handed out.

It’s always horrible, even when it’s well run.

Save the pain with a pre-mortem

The problem with these post-lost reviews is they are always done at a time when the pain is fresh. It’s easy to want to block it out and move on. It’s easy to make excuses and not really improve as a result.

Managers in business suffers from the same problem when work projects fail. And they have come up with a solution that allows them to spot failures before thay happen, and make it possible to sidestep them.

It’s called a pre-mortem.

It’s the opposite of a wince-inducing post-mortem and is simple to do. So wouldn’t you like a 30% boost in your ability to spot failures too?

Here’s how you do it.

How to do a cricket pre-mortem

Before a season, match or important group of games, get together with your team. It doesn’t have to be everyone, but it should be a substantial group.

It’s the before part that is important.

Next the captain or coach leads in with the team’s tactics. You might already know the overall plan, but review it quickly so everyone is clear. Then the captain asks everyone to imagine the plan has totally failed. It was spectacular in its failure, you were not even close.

With a pen and paper independently, everyone writes down every reason they can think of for this imaginary failure. The reasons might be things in your control, like bowling poorly after a late night the day before. The reasons might be things out of your control like a highly skilled opponent playing the innings of the season.

This is powerful because everyone has the freedom to talk about failures without blaming, or seeming like you’re not a team player. You can’t blame people for things that have not happened yet!

With all the reasons recorded, you can start to discuss them.

Say, then plan is to score at four an over in the first 10 overs of a club one day game. The failure projected is the openers look to rotate the strike and get out through poor judgement of quick singles or getting bowled or LBW trying to play the ball into gaps across the line. Then the middle order feel restricted and slow the scoring rate to focus on not getting out.

You see how you are looking at problems before they occur?

So now, with these issues in mind the group can discuss solutions to this failure before it happens.

You could reduce the scoring rate to focus on only hitting the bad balls and not worrying about rotation early on. You could get your openers to play in middle practice and strike rotation until they are confident they can get up to four an over, even under pressure. You could even pick more attacking players up top.

Then get to work.

Talk about nipping things in the bud. There isn’t even a bud to nip and you are on the road to sorting the problem out.

What’s your experience?

How good are you at finding the reason for failure as a team?

How do you handle reviews? Have you had exeperience with bad reviews, good reviews or pre-mortems?

Leave a comment and let me know your process, and how effective it has been.