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When you want to prevent avoidable disasters
The Titanic sank about 100 years ago.
Imagine you’d been working for the shipping company White Star Line then, and were making your final preparations for the maiden voyage. All that excitement, pride and focus.
Sadly, in all the excitement about the positives, they didn’t prioritize the negatives. After all, if the voyage had been a success, nobody would have celebrated there being lots of lifeboats.
Communication can be like this. When working on projects, strategies and initiatives, in all the excitement, people often forget to ask Lifeboat Questions, such as:
When companies ask me to create communications to help initiatives succeed, my first questions always establish their desired outcome – What do you want to achieve? How will you know you’ve done so? And so on. People are usually pretty clear on their answers to these.
But my second questions always seek to establish what might go wrong – the Lifeboat Questions. This time, in response they usually say, “Good question. I haven’t thought about that”.
But it’s critical. For instance, my asking these questions unearthed such information as:
Once you’ve identified potential problems, proactively eliminate them.
The weird thing with this is that, when things subsequently run smoothly, nobody celebrates the fact you averted disaster. It never even became an issue.
But, on balance, I’ve found that most people prefer to have enough Lifeboats.