The Most Important Question I Ask Before Every Show

Two words that can help your next project.

It was a local football game in Costa Rica. 2013.

The truck went dark and silent mid-show. The generator failed. The signal dropped. It took us three minutes to bring it back.

Three of the longest minutes of my life.

We got the game back. Then we sat down for the post-mortem.

The post-mortem found what post-mortems usually find. The backup power had never actually worked. There was no UPS in the truck. We had been one bad night away from this for a long time.

That is when I went looking. There had to be a better way to find these things than waiting for them to break us.

What I found

I came across a line attributed to the famous American investor Charlie Munger that he liked to repeat. “All I want to know is where I’m going to die so I’ll never go there.”

He used it to teach inversion. Solve the problem backwards. Find what kills you. Then do not go there.

That hit. I kept reading. And that is how I found the pre-mortem.

The pre-mortem was popularized by psychologist Gary Klein in a 2007 Harvard Business Review article called Performing a Project Premortem. The technique is simple. Before the project starts, you assume it has already failed. Then you ask the team to write down every reason they think it failed.

You are not predicting the future. You are giving everybody on the team permission to say what they already secretly suspect, while there is still time to do something about it.

The post-mortem is what we have always done. The pre-mortem is what we should have been doing.

The two-word version

In a control room we don’t have time for a Klein workshop. But we can run the simpler version.

What if?

What if the generator dies. What if the talent does not show. What if comms drop on the side that runs the rundown. What if the iso operator on the goalkeeper cannot lock for the full ninety. What if the playback machine times out at the worst minute.

A club competition final, 2017. We asked “what if?” twice. First about the uplink truck. Then about the fiber feeding it. The uplink failed on air. The audience never saw it. A second fiber was already running on a separate path.

The discipline is the same as Klein’s. The format is two words. Asked early enough, in front of the right people, those two words have saved more shows than I can count.

Not because we kept bad things from happening. Because we already had answers in our heads when they did.

The pushback I got

The first time I ran a pre-mortem with a team I heard all of the lines.

“Don’t be so negative.”

“If we talk about it, it will happen.”

“No need to waste time on things that aren’t going to happen.”

I have a lot of sympathy for those lines. They come from people who care about the show. Nobody who is calm about the work asks “what if?” about a generator.

But over time I noticed something. The teams that were willing to sit with the question for ten minutes became the teams I trusted with the bigger shows. The ones who refused stayed where they were.

Planning for what we don’t want is how we get ready for what we don’t see coming. That is not negativity. That is the job.

The NBCU Academy line

I spent last week’s newsletter recommending the NBCU Academy video on the Super Bowl pre-game show. There is a moment in that video where the director says, “we have to try not to create curve balls for ourselves.”

He is right. The curve balls life throws at you are bad enough. The ones you create for yourself are inexcusable. That is what “what if?” is for. It promises you will not be the one who walked the show into a known hole.

It gives you the version of yourself that already thought about the worst case and already decided who would handle it.

That version is calmer at minute thirty when the thing actually happens.

The version of “what if?” for everyone else

If you do not run shows, the question still works.

What if the funding round closes a quarter late. What if the senior person on the project takes another job. What if the test that everybody assumes works actually does not. What if the demo on Monday breaks the way it broke last quarter and nobody fixed it.

You do not need a workshop. You need ten minutes, the right two or three people, and the question.

The post-mortem teaches you what already broke. The pre-mortem teaches you where you would die so you can not go there.

“Talking about what we don’t want is how we get ready for what we don’t see coming.”

Thirteen years since Costa Rica. The two words have not gotten old yet.

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One ask

Forward this to a producer or a production manager who runs morning meetings.

If you teach live production, give your students ten minutes next week to imagine a show has already failed and write down every reason. Then watch them argue about who fixes what. The argument is the lesson.

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Bulletin board

You read about the pre-mortem and thought, “I want to be in the rooms where this question gets asked before the biggest shows in the world.”

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