Encouraging leaders to use critical foresight by imagining what could go wrong and taking proactive action to prevent it.

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To increase the likelihood of success by planning as if the initiative had already failed and learning from that scenario in advance.

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Action Steps	Key Questions	Practice
Frame the exercise clearly.	If this initiative failed in six months, what would have caused it?	Ask the leader to run a 10-minute premortem with their team and capture all possible failure causes.
Identify patterns and preventions.	What themes appear across potential risks?	Practise grouping risks into categories (communication, clarity, capacity) and discussing mitigations.
Assign ownership for prevention.	Who will take responsibility for reducing each risk?	Practise a team-planning discussion in which leaders assign accountability for each mitigation.
Review and adjust midway.	How will you revisit assumptions once implementation starts?	Ask the leader to schedule a mid-point review meeting to test whether predicted risks are materialising.

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