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Pre-Mortem Worksheets — How to Avoid Project Catastrophe

TomFeatured, LeadershipMay 14, 2019August 21, 20211 Comment

A Pre-Mortem is a strategic planning activity that imagines a project has failed. This type of thinking helps to identify and mitigate risks early on in the planning phase.

Exploring the worst-case scenario is traced to great Stoic philosophers, like Seneca, who called it the premeditation of evils, “premeditatio malorum”.

What is quite unlooked for is more crushing in its effect, and unexpectedness adds to the weight of a disaster. This is a reason for ensuring that nothing ever takes us by surprise. We should project our thoughts ahead of us at every turn and have in mind every possible eventuality instead of only the usual course of events.
~ Seneca

Adding the Pre-Mortem technique to your planning toolkit will help you project your thoughts ahead, comprehensively assess the challenges to a project and adapt your plans.

I have developed a set of Pre-Mortem worksheets for you to take away. It outlines all of the steps you need to follow and provides a clear structure. Before you finish make sure you subscribe and grab a copy.

👉 Jump to the download link for the worksheets.

Improve Your Planning

One of the biggest challenges to a successful project is the quality of planning. A plan is weaker when it overemphasises a positive outcome. A Pre-Mortem activity helps to balance this outlook by allowing time and space to explore failure scenarios.

If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail!
Benjamin Franklin

However, it is not negativity for its own sake. We are not simply amplifying the negative voices in a group or the whinges.

The structured Pre-Mortem process steps through how to explore each scenario, identify the causes and outlines methods that respond to each potential risk.

Prospective Hindsight

Instead of being reactive to problems, in this activity, you will use the thought experiment: Prospective Hindsight. You might even be able actually to say you are going “back to the future”.

Prospective Hindsight is casting our mind forward into a future time and then imagining what we might have wished we had learned by looking back.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing
William Blake

Prospecting is a powerful imaginative disposition when working with any strategic planning and is something I use frequently.

“I can imagine a time when we …”
“It is clear that in the future we might be…”
“When this is in place the benefits are likely to be…”

Strategic planning is all about prospecting, to imagine a future scenario – what Prospective Hindsight does is explore and recognise the risks and issues that might occur.

When and Who

To gain the most benefit, use the Pre-Mortem exercise with your core team at an early stage of the project planning. Potential risks and issues that you uncover may need time and resources to address.

The Pre-Mortem is a planning activity, and so unsurprisingly, it needs to occur during planning. The outcomes of the task feed into your project planning.

Instead of a post-mortem, when we look back on what went wrong, we establish this reflective practice even before the project has started.

Gather a core team who have a clear understanding of the proposed project plans so far. The outcome should be relatively straightforward and agreed upon; time should be spent exploring the risks, not what the project is about.

Disposition and Mindset

Establishing the right mindset is essential to the success of the Pre-Mortem: open to sharing risks and identifying responses to those risks.

Explicitly discussing the potential failure scenarios is a challenging type of talk. Our positive bias, especially for a project we have invested in, means we don’t like to be deliberately negative.

This deliberate and strategic negativity is a strategic muscle we are not often activating.

The Pre-Mortem also requires us to grapple with increasing uncertainty and ambiguity. This is a delicate balance and might need strong facilitation. Our tolerance for uncertainty is an indicator of our creativity.

Pre-Mortem Worksheets

Works Well With

Below I have outlined a range of other methodologies and mental models that the Pre-Mortem complements.

Playing the Devil’s Advocate

This activity works well with other mental models and planning exercises. Playing the Devil’s Advocate is something many of us have experienced.

It is a subjective version of the Pre-Mortem. An individual takes it upon themselves to imagine that something might go wrong.

The problem with that interjection is that the approach and disposition are often not mirrored by others in the group. A genuine insight might be discarded because others do not want to think negatively or are not ready for more uncertainty.

A Pre-Mortem brings the whole group into that thinking at the same time – that is its strength.

The Tenth Person Rule

The Tenth Person Rule is the deliberate opposition to a decision when everyone else agrees. If everyone else is saying “Yes”, the tenth person (or the last) is ethically bound to say “No”.

This opposition, regardless of personal belief, instigates further debate and challenge. The outcome is more coherent due to that conjecture, even if it remains the same.

The task of the Tenth Man is to explore alternative assumptions and worst-case scenarios…to challenge conventional and received wisdom. The aim is to look at things creatively, independently, and from a fresh perspective, to engage actively with and to reconsider the status quo.
How Israeli intelligence failures led to a ‘devil’s advocate’ role

The Tenth Person Rule was popularised by the film World War Z and had some real connections to approaches within Israeli Military Intelligence.

The Reversal Method

The Pre-Mortem activity works well with this creative thinking method as they both help create a new perspective.

The Reversal Method is a lateral thinking tool that encourages us to change how we think about a problem. In Lateral Thinking, Edward De Bono explains it might be used for the following reasons:

To escape from the absolute necessity to look at the situation in the standard way.
By disrupting the original way of looking at the situation one frees information that can come together in a new way.
The main purpose is provocation. By making the reversal one moves to a new position. Then one sees what happens.

SWOT Analysis

A SWOT Analysis is a standard managerial and leadership model used during planning and review. SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Obstacles and Threats.

The Pre-Mortem focuses its lens on Threats in a much more systematic way than the SWOT Analysis. These two methods would complement each other well.

Running a Pre-Mortem activity could be done to create the outcomes linked and included in a comprehensive SWOT for a project.

De Bono’s 6 Thinking Hats

These parallel thinking processes fit into six key areas. The Black Hat type of thinking is most relevant to the Pre-Mortem exercise. We want Pre-Mortem participants to do Black Hat thinking:

The Black Hat is judgment – the devil’s advocate or why something may not work. Spot the difficulties and dangers; things might go wrong — probably the most powerful and valuable of the Hats but a problem if overused.

What balances the planning process is the use of Green Hat thinking once potential risks are identified. A team would explore new ideas to address the problems identified during the Pre-Mortem.

The Green Hat focuses on creativity, possibilities, alternatives, and new ideas. It’s an opportunity to express new concepts and new perceptions.

Learning Alignment Model

TomLearningApril 26, 2019April 26, 20192 Comments

In this post, I want to introduce you to a Learning Alignment Model that I have developed with some of my partner schools over the last few years.

It is not a step by step process to design learning, but more of a high-level thinking model to engage with that uncovers some interesting potential tensions in our classroom work.

As you will see the model also helps explain a little about the line of sight from whole school strategy through to the actual process of learning.

Starting Points

There have been a few sources of inspiration for this Learning Alignment Model.

First would be the work of Dylan Wiliam and his simple, yet a powerful, statement that “children do not learn what we teach.” In explaining this Wiliam refers to the work of Denvir and Brown (1986) who explored the developmental path of learning number concepts with 7-9-year-olds.

Wiliam explains that despite targeted instruction children do not learn what we teach. You can access a webinar here in which Dylan Wiliam explains this in more detail, have a look from the 01:48 mark.

This discrepancy and unpredictability remain a powerful provocation. It is something that I experienced throughout my teaching, but I never stopped to question or reflect why. This model helps to surface that provocation.

The second instigation is the various definitions of curriculum. When you explore the work of curriculum development, various sub-sets of the curriculum emerge. For example these eight ideas:

The recommended curriculum derives from experts in the field. Almost every discipline-based professional group has promulgated curriculum standards for its field.

The written curriculum is found in the documents produced by the state, the school system, the school, and the classroom teacher, specifying what is to be taught.

The supported curriculum is the one for which there are complimentary instructional materials available, such as textbooks, software, and multimedia resources.

The tested curriculum is the one embodied in tests developed by the state, school system, and teachers. The term “test” is used broadly here to include standardized tests, competency tests, and performance assessments.

The taught curriculum is the one that teachers actually deliver. Researchers have pointed out that there is enormous variation in the nature of what is actually taught, despite the superficial appearance of uniformity (Gehrke, Knapp, & Sirotnik, 1992).

The learned curriculum is the bottom-line curriculum—what students learn. Clearly, it is the most important of all.

In addition, there is often reference to the hidden curriculum (a term coined by Jackson, 1968) is the unintended curriculum-what students learn from the school’s culture and climate. And the excluded curriculum is what has been left out, either intentionally or unintentionally.

These definitions are taken from Planning And Organizing For Curriculum Renewal by Allan A. Glatthorn, Judy F. Carr and Douglas E. Harris.

This model of curriculum design and development is at the core of my own model.

A final core provocation for me was the concept of Constructive Alignment from John Biggs the author of the SOLO taxonomy. He explains:

In constructive alignment, we start with the outcomes we intend students to learn and align teaching and assessment to those outcomes.

The idea of alignment provides an accelerant for how these parts work together. I wanted to create something that combined the three concepts and focused more on the learning experience than just the curriculum.

I share it as an ongoing work in progress and I would be grateful for your comments and critique.

When you review the model I want you to take into account a few ideas about how it might be used and thought about.

Supporting Notes and Explanations

It deliberately emphasises learning over assessment or curriculum.
Instead of saying planning I have used “Designed Learning” as I think this is richer articulation of what needs to occur. Start with the learner.
I felt I needed to add the word “Experience” in to the upper levels to distinguish from the core level of “Learning” at the base.
There is a connection between a broader whole school vision statement (Conceptual) and the designed learning. How each classrooms aligns itself to those core values and how that flows down to the learning that occurs.
As you move down the model there is less control. We can write visions statements down and collaborate on learning design, but as soon as those ideas are enacted there are more variables.
There can be a big difference between what we design, what we teach and what the actual student experience ends up being. This was highlighted to me recently when a young teacher reviewed some video of her lesson introduction and realised how much she was talking. Her perception of that was very different than the actual experience students had.
The base level Learning was added later as the model developed as I wanted to include the cognitive process we do not see. How do we know that learning has happened? In order to be able to better understand this we need better proxies for learning. This leads to discussions about assessment design which is a bridge between instruction and learning.
Write these out on cards and consider how they pair together and influence each other. Explore how they are sometimes aligned and sometimes very much disconnected.
There is a major assumption inherent in the model that better alignment = better learning. I am not sure this is always true. Sometimes great learning happens when we least expect it and often when we do not plan or design for it. Does all learning have to be designed?
This alignment could be different for every child. When we move the model from curriculum and design to learning, we have to consider the actual experience and change in long term memory will be different for every student.

Here is the model in plain text format.

Conceptual Learning Experience	Vision statement / teaching and learning principles or frameworks
Designed Learning Experience	Planning and programming / Curriculum documentation
Enacted Learning Experience	Teaching and facilitation
Actual Learning Experience	The student’s direct experience of teaching and learning
Learning	Changes in long term memory

To finish, I want to share some summary questions that you can use when exploring the model and that act as further provocations for thinking about the design of learning.

Accompanying Questions and Provocations

How do you know that learning has occurred?
What can you do to better understand the student experience?
What is the difference between planning and designing?
What proxies for learning do we use?
How does the student experience of learning align with what our community values the most?
How is every learning experience an expression of what we are striving to achieve as a whole school?
How can we make the best use of unexpected teachable moments with the same rigour as those that we design?
How might we use formative assessment to bridge between teaching and learning?
How can we improve our skills in assessment design?

I still have plenty of areas I want to explore with this model and I would be delighted to hear your reaction and response.

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The Spaces You Need to Innovate

TomInnovationSeptember 1, 2018October 6, 20197 Comments

Innovation is a process with a range of other ideas nested within it. When you peer inside you see creativity, curiosity, feedback and taking action. All interdependent and collectively they might be called innovation.

When you think of the “space to innovate” what immediately springs to mind? The physical environment around you? Space where you might develop ideas? Alternatively perhaps something about the time you have available?

During my work with architects and learning environment projects over the last eight years, I have started to identify a richer, more complex, set of spaces and dependencies. Beyond just the physical space we design.

Each space contributes to the culture and in particular (for this blog post at least) the conditions for innovation. Some spaces are more prominent and noticeable than others, whereas some have a more significant influence than others but cannot be seen.

For each concept, I have shared some initial thoughts, links and quotes. Each section concludes with some small steps, Protocols and Practices you might take to encourage thinking about it’s relationship to your innovation efforts. You will see these in the green blocks like this one.

To conclude the article I have shared a mental model to explore the relationship between the different spaces. I am interested in what happens when one of these spaces is missing or poorly resourced. What impact might this have on the overall Space for Innovation.?

As a bonus you can subscribe to my newsletter and download a FREE innovation follow up activity.

Physical Space

One of the first times I consciously experienced the impact of the physical environment on my thinking was when organising some of the first Teachmeets in my region back in England.

I was able to secure a modern, purpose-built professional learning space for an inaugural TeachMeet in the Midlands and it was a considerable departure from the Victorian school buildings I was accustomed.

The physical environment signalled collaboration and connection as well as high expectations. It was an inspiring place to plan and develop the event.

Of course, the impact of the physical space on our ability to innovate can be unconsciously negative. We normalise our surroundings pretty quickly and so get used to a lack of collaboration, visibility or space to externalise our ideas.

Physical spaces for innovation have become a little cliche. Whiteboards and open spaces, you don’t have to go far to find image galleries of all sorts of workspaces squarely designed for innovation and creativity.

On a much more personal level, the physical space for innovation may look very different for each of us. Fresh air and exercise is an excellent primer for new thinking. Or perhaps you prefer the utility of the whiteboard and the proximity to abundant post-it note supplies.

Of the spaces I am exploring in this post, the Physical Space for Innovation is the most observable. Take a look around you now dear reader; you can quickly judge your surroundings for yourself in how much they are the right conditions for curiosity and ideas.

Protocols and Practices
> Triage your space for what is not needed or used infrequently.
> Create visible spaces for externalising and storing your ideas.
> Change things up – get outside, get out of the room.

Temporal Space

A further space that often conceals the opportunity for innovation is Time. It is one of the most critical aspects of creating the right conditions for change and new ideas to flourish.

It is not just about the amount of time we have but the way we use that time. Too much haste is an emotional block to creativity and will likely push people away from exploring original ideas.

Think carefully about how the pace of thinking and work is being used to suit the needs of different people. Vary the pace to allow everyone the opportunity to share ideas and develop original concepts.

Just as “one size does not fit all” – when it comes to the Temporal Space for Innovation one pace does not fit all.

Image result for you never have enough time to do all the nothing you want

There’s never enough time to do all the nothing you want.

Bill Watterson

The structure of Time can be lightly resting on us, or it can create pressure. A pressure to perform, create or submit ideas by a deadline. This false-haste can have a negative impact. We need time to play.

John Cleese explains it well:

The open mode is a relaxed, expansive, and less purposeful mode in which we’re probably more contemplative, more inclined to humour (which always accompanies a wider perspective), and, consequently, more playful. It’s a mood in which curiosity for its own sake can operate because we’re not under pressure to get a specific thing done quickly. We can play, and that is what allows our natural creativity to surface.

John Cleese

In schools, we organise time into a table. That enduring structure can dictate the experience way beyond the original remit. Blocks of time signal the start and end of thinking or work. Often days are punctuated by a rhythm a long way from what might be considered ideal for play, deep thinking and innovation.

We might have beautiful, creative physical spaces but time structures that do not match. We have to pay attention to them both.

Protocols and Practices
> Explore different times of day for development work.
> Protect longer blocks of time you have set aside for deeper work.
> Look at the medium to long-term provision of quality project time.

Cognitive Space

The further we are from the Physical the more difficult it is to observe these concepts. The Cognitive Space for Innovation refers to the capacity we have for thinking in a playful, creative and exploratory way.

When our thoughts are swamped or overwhelmed with too many projects, deadlines and tasks it is very difficult to be able to commit to the challenge of innovative work.

You will always be able to pick those moments when your Cognitive Space is crowded, or when your colleagues say, “I don’t have time for that now.” We need to ensure we clear some room for the wide-ranging thinking that innovation requires.

One of my favourite mental models is the analogy of the mind used by Sherlock Holmes. He describes the (Cognitive Space) as an attic. You may have heard of Attic Theory. This passage from a Study in Scarlet explains it some more:

“You see,” he explained, “I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skilful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these, he has a large assortment and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.”

A Study in Scarlet – Arthur Conan Doyle

Attic Theory is an excellent example of applying a physical space analogy to the Cognitive Space between our ears.

The Cognitive Space for Innovation is something that can be hidden to us. Teachers, facilitators and leaders need to carefully uncover the signals of an overcrowded cognitive space.

My favourite method is to ask “What is on your mind?” to a group. Give it a try and then adapt what you are about to do in response.

Protocols and Practices
> Identify ways to relieve the pressure so others can focus.
> Pay attention to the number of active projects and programmes.
> Ask “What is on your mind?” to allow the pressures to be shared.

Emotional Space

“Head, heart and hands” right? The Emotional Space for Innovation is a close ally to the Cognitive Space. The Emotional Space for Innovation for me refers to the commitment, passion and purpose each person has.

This space is about how much we care about the ideas and challenges we are exploring. Perhaps it is linked to whether the people in your team have self-selected (see Agentic) to be there or they have been told.

In teaching, we often talk about how our relationships are at the centre of what we do and how to engage students on an emotional level. Deep down this is true for creating the right conditions for innovation and creativity.

It is literally neurobiologically impossible to think deeply about things that you don’t care about.

Dr. Immordino-Yang

So our neurobiology dictates terms when it comes to purposeful work. Regardless of the Physical, Temporal or Cognitive Space, unless we care, we will always be working against a neurobiological tide.

Protocols and Practices
> Take your time to connect to the wider purpose of your work.
> Use empathy activities (like shadowing) to connect with others.
> Regularly re-establish the emotional connection to the task.

Agentic Space

Many of us have experienced this particular space, mainly due to the lack of agency we have. The Agentic Space for Innovation is the room we have to define our own experience.

Put a different way it is how much license we have to implement new ideas. This type of space impacts the pointy end of any innovation process, the implementation and application of ideas.

Without agency, innovation can falter. I sit here writing this thinking I have complete agency over my work. I have control over my calendar and who I work with. As a small business owner, if there is a new idea I want to implement, I don’t need to seek permission or beg for forgiveness.

To better understand this space let’s look at the various versions of agency we might encounter:

Proxy agency – rely on others to act.

Collective agency – coordinate with others to secure what cannot be accomplished in isolation.

Personal agency – act with intention, forethought, self-reactiveness, self-reflectiveness to secure a desired outcome.

Which do you most commonly experience during Innovation processes? I would hazard a guess that Collective Agency is the most frequent experience. This is due to the collaborative nature of innovation.

If we are relying on other people, we have very little ability to act with intention and purpose.

The Agentic Space for Innovation may well be a circuit breaker. With all others in play, we may still be waiting for the permission from others. Consider how you might de-couple teams and colleagues enough to have a more open Agentic Space for innovation.

Protocols and Practices
> Establish how much agency a team has from the beginning.
> Reinforce the permissive culture within the project.
> B authentic about follow through and implementing ideas.

What happens to innovation when one of these spaces is missing?

The relationship between these spaces is perhaps the most interesting aspect of this work. They each depend on each other in varying forms. Let’s explore some of the potential ripple effects if we have a space that is not functioning well.

Untitled presentation 8 — What do you think?

When you don’t have the Physical space for innovation, the process takes longer. This might be true because there is less visibility of ideas and progress, fewer opportunities for working collaboratively and poorer communication between teams.

If our Cognitive space is crowded and overwhelming us, we will likely only engage at the surface level. The commitment to the work will probably wain over time as other competing agendas and projects take their toll. Mental energy is limited.

Time is a crucial ingredient for any creative or innovation work. Without enough quality time, ideas might become less ambitious and revert to safe bets.

Without the Emotional commitment to the work, we get projects that fizzle out. We don’t see the connection to the broader purpose and start to reduce our energy and effort as the drive is not there. Fighting our neurobiology is futile.

If we are trying to innovate without Agency in a culture that historically moderates heavily from the top-down, it creates apathy. Why bother getting invested in innovation when nothing changes? Why should we care when the decision is out of our hands?

Other Spaces

This article is not an exhaustive list so let me know what different types of spaces for innovation you might add.

While I have been working on the post, I have been wondering about the Digital space for innovation as remote teams across the world build software products together.

Alternatively the Collaborative space for innovation which directly refers to the overlapping physical and digital spaces we use for creating ideas together.

From an education perspective, the concept of a Pedagogical Space for Innovation is interesting. The room provided in the approach to teaching and learning for change and renewal.

This article is an exploration of some emerging ideas, and I would be pleased to hear from you in the comments about each of the different concepts.

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The PDF resource includes

Question and Dialogue Prompt Cards
Explores the common emotional blocks to creativity
Extends the ideas through various levels of an organisation
Builds on known innovation models

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6 Protocols To Help You Run Better Meetings

TomLeadershipFebruary 16, 2018July 25, 2022Leave a Comment

One of the most effective strategies to run better meetings and development sessions is to establish a set of protocols at the start. These working norms should be discussed and shared before you begin and even used to help you debrief.

We have all probably experienced these in some form or another – no technology, come with an open mind, somebody to take minutes – the usual stuff we encounter. In this post, I present a range of alternative protocols I know work from years of application.

Collective Responsibility

Use this protocol to encourage everyone to step up

Although one person may have convened a session or be running the meeting it is always beneficial to discuss how every participant can contribute.

I often couple this with a Step Up Step Back protocol – which emphasises the need for everyone to contribute. Participants are not attending to simply warm the seats.

Sessions are more effective when there is a shared and collective responsibility to work successfully together and not just be on the shoulders of one person.

Approve or Improve

Use this protocol to improve giving feedback

Develop the expectation that feedback is done under the protocol of approving an idea or helping to improve and develop it further.

Feedback should not be so the giver has air time. Critique should help move an idea forward.

Hold your Ideas Lightly

Use this protocol to improve receiving feedback

How we receive feedback is probably more important than how we give it.

To help you when inviting feedback think about Holding Your Ideas Lightly so that others can offer critique.

Avoid clutching your idea so tightly that others can’t help. Effective feedback needs an open disposition

W.A.I.T – Why Am I Talking?

Use this protocol to develop meta-cognition

Before you contribute take some moments to pause and reflect on why you are contributing. Get into the habit of asking some simple questions:

What is my intention behind what I am about to say?

Is there a question I could ask that would help me better understand what the other person is saying and perceiving?

How might I simply listen and let go of my urge to talk in this moment?

Write stuff down and create artefacts

Use this protocol to make your thinking visible

Such a simple protocol and something that is often overlooked as everyone starts up their laptops as they settle into the session.

Make room for materials in the middle of the table and describe how making your thinking more visible and tangible will aid development.

Use index cards or post-it notes to scribe ideas and jot down themes from discussions. Get into the habit as a team of writing stuff down.

Talk about the Talking

Use this protocol to better transition into the meeting

All too often we jump headlong into the agenda. With no intentional transition we are often left reeling with our minds still caught up with the work you just left or from the meeting you have just walked out of.

By making time to deliberately Talk About the Talking you address the change and shift in pace and allow participants time to settle in.

As a team gets into the habit of exploring what the work will require of us, will it be creative or analytical thinking? Will we be unpacking something or exploring new concepts?

Taking a few moments to prime everyone and transition well invariably leads to a better meeting.

Protocols are expectations that you make explicit and that shape and guide the experience you have with others. Over time and with consistency these expectations become common practice and a normal part of your successful meetings.

These five ideas are an extension of the core protocols that I have been using for years – let me know what protocols and structures work for you.

Photo by Mark Duffel on Unsplash

Will this cause harm?

TomMental ModelsFebruary 8, 20181 Comment

I have been reading Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s brilliantly tangential book Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder.

A concept and mental model he shares is iatrogenics. This is a medical term that refers to “harmful unintended side effects”.

In Antifragile, he writes:

In the case of tonsillectomies, the harm to the children undergoing unnecessary treatment is coupled with the trumpeted gain for some others. The name for such net loss, the (usually bitten or delayed) damage from treatment in excess of the benefits, is iatrogenics.

Iatro– means “a physician; medicine; healing,” from Greek iatros “healer, physician”. –genic means “producing, pertaining to generation.” So harm caused by a healer.

While some have advocated using ‘iatrogenesis’ to refer to all ‘events caused by the health care delivery team’, whether ‘positive or negative’, consensus limits use of ‘iatrogenesis’ to adverse effects, possibly including, broadly, all adverse unforeseen outcomes resulting from medication or other medical treatment or intervention.

(Iatrogenesis)

Taleb extends this concept beyond medicine and it has helped me think about the total impact of any intervention.

When we intervene without a full appreciation of the potential positive and negative effects, Taleb describes this practice as “naive interventionism”.

What does this look like in other fields like education?

In schools these interventions might be a simple timetable change from one year to the next. You may be experiencing that now – as the the new academic year in Australia has just started. Perhaps you are only just realising the negative impact of that extended first session or the longer lunchtime.

Perhaps something more significant like streaming in primary maths classes causes obvious missed opportunities for building relationships – perhaps the negative impact outweighs the positive. We are causing more harm than good – this is iatrogenics.

I experienced many primary schools in the UK with complex intervention programmes for students I taught in my classes. I don’t remember ever fully evaluating the negative side effects of those interventions and how they were delivered.

Taleb suggests any intervention will have iatrogenics – the question for leaders is whether we are even aware of them?

It is easy to begin to use the mental model of iatrogenics in your development planning – all we have to do is ask ourselves a few questions:

“Will this cause harm?”
“How might we understand the negative impact of this idea?”
“What can we do to minimise the negative impact?”
“How will we know if the negative impact of this outweighs the positive?”
“What would happen if we did nothing?”

#28daysofwriting

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

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