But What if it FAILS? Using the FMEA Tool to Analyze the Potential Effects and Impacts of Failure

You know the feeling.

You think your plan will work.
You present confidence to everyone around you.
You fire up the crowd, energize supporters, and rally the troops.
But at the same time, you're terrified you might fail.

I've spent many days hustling and nights stressing over projects that seemed just on the edge of falling apart.

Then, I went to an amazing training led by Becky Margiotta, and she introduced me to a tool that helped me focus during the day and sleep well at night.

That tool is called Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA). FMEA is a quick, systematic way of analyzing:

• which parts of your plan could fail
• which of those potential failures are most likely
• which of those potential failures would cause the most severe consequences 
• which parts of your plan you should focus on strengthening to avoid likely, severe failures 

FMEA comes from the worlds of systems engineering and the military. It's used in many industries where failures can be catastrophic (i.e. hospitals, nuclear power, aeronautics). But it can also be useful in any situation where you want to get a clearer understanding of what failure might mean and how you can avoid it. For example, we share it at OF/BY/FOR ALL bootcamps to help cultural and civic professionals identify and address fault lines in their plans to involve new communities. You can use it for anything.

Here's how you do it:

1. Make a list of all the possible ways that your plan could fail. These are your failure modes.
2. Assign each failure mode a score from 1-10 for "likelihood" and another score from 1-10 for "severity."
3. For each failure mode, multiply the "likelihood" score by the "severity" score to get the total score.
4. Sort your failure modes by score. Focus your energy on finding ways to mitigate the high scoring failure modes. Don't let yourself be distracted by the low-scoring ones--they are either so improbable or so minor in impact that they are not worth sweating.

Here's a silly example we made up at the last OF/BY/FOR ALL bootcamp. The plan in question was to create a parade of 100 giraffes down the main street of a small town. As you can see, while bootcampers came up with several ways the parade could fail, there was only one ("can't get 100 giraffes") that would be both likely and severe enough to sink the project. So we focused our mitigation energy on getting the giraffes.

Here's a more serious example that our OF/BY/FOR ALL staff team created one month before we launched the Change Network program. Here, you can see that there were two failure modes we honed in on (1B and 3). Based on this analysis, we decided to focus on ensuring that videocalls would work and that we had enough staff time to support our First Wave teams. We acknowledged--but didn't sweat--the other stuff. 

I love this tool because it lets you get all your anxiety out on the table and then empowers you to realize most of your fears are either highly unlikely or do not have severe consequences. It generates clarity and confidence - fast. You can focus on what matters and put unreasonable fears in their place.

Here's a PDF template of the FMEA tool you can download and use if helpful to you. If you try it out, let me know how it goes. And if you have other tools that help you focus and remove stressful distractions, please share them in the comments.