Problem / need / context
Rarely do learners consider what could go wrong when initiating a project, since the framing is negative and seems to carry effort to the opposite direction. The lack of this approach, however, leads to avoidable mistakes, missed deadlines, equipment misuse, safety incidents, and projects that stall halfway because a risk no one named has materialised.
Learners are reluctant to voice doubts at the start of a project because it feels like negativity or lack of confidence. Once the project is underway, the same doubts resurface as complaints or excuses. The cost of this delay is paid in failed assessments, damaged equipment, and lost client confidence during work placements.
Since there is this gap in proactive thinking, learners can analyse what went wrong after a failure but lack a structured way to anticipate failures before they start.
The case study addresses three of the 10 transversal skills: critical thinking, problem-solving, and communication and teamwork.
Intervention
A 90-minute pre-mortem workshop run at the start of every group project, based on Gary Klein’s pre-mortem method (Klein, 2007, Harvard Business Review). The technique uses prospective hindsight — imagining a future failure to identify risks that standard planning misses.
Key actors. Trainers facilitate the workshop and capture risks on a board or shared document. The project lead (a learner role) presents the project plan at the start of the session. All team members generate risks individually and contribute to the consolidation.
1. Frame the project (10 min). The project lead presents the plan, scope, deadline, and success criteria. Questions are limited to clarification.
2. Imagine the failure (5 min). The trainer says: “It is six months from now. This project has failed completely. The work was not delivered, or what was delivered was unusable. Picture it clearly.”
3. Individual generation (15 min). Each learner writes down every plausible reason for the failure on a personal list. No discussion.
4. Round-robin sharing (25 min). Each learner reads out one item at a time. The trainer captures items on the board. The cycle continues until all lists are exhausted. No critique, no debate at this stage.
5. Cluster and prioritise (15 min). The group bundles similar risks and ranks them by likelihood and impact. The top three to five are selected.
6. Mitigation planning (15 min). For each priority risk, the group agrees a specific action: who will do what, by when, to prevent the risk or reduce its impact.
7. Close (5 min). Risks and mitigations are saved as the project risk register and reviewed at each milestone.
Outcomes
After running pre-mortem workshops at the start of group projects across two semesters, three findings emerged.
More risks surfaced earlier. Project teams identified 12–18 risks per session, against a baseline of two to three risks named in standard kick-off meetings. Trainers reported that several risks identified in the workshop were ones they had expected to see materialise.
Better mitigation in the plan. Project plans now included specific actions to address top risks, with named owners and deadlines. Mid-project crisis interventions dropped because problems were caught early or prevented entirely.
Easier team conversations. Learners reported that the imagined-failure frame made it easier to voice concerns. The structure removed the social cost of being the person who raises objections, because everyone was required to do so. This effect persisted in later project meetings; teams that had run a pre-mortem were more comfortable flagging issues throughout the project.
Critical thinking: learners practised challenging the optimistic frame of a plan and looking for weaknesses systematically.
Problem-solving: learners moved from reactive (fixing problems after they happen) to proactive (preventing them).
Communication and teamwork: the structured format gave every learner a voice and made disagreement productive rather than personal.
Note: pre-mortems run without the imagined-failure framing — for example, asking “what could go wrong” — produced the same thin lists as standard meetings. The future-failure premise is doing the work. This is now emphasised in the trainer briefing.