The Failure Rehearsal: A Short Pre-Commissioning Discipline for UK Consultancy Projects

Most UK clients think about consultancy risk after the adviser has been appointed. By then, the brief has been drafted, the fee agreed and the delivery rhythm set. The cheapest moment to discover that a project is fragile is earlier: before the commission is confirmed, when the brief can still be changed and the contract can still be shaped.

A failure rehearsal — often called a pre-mortem — is a short, structured exercise built on a simple premise. The project has already failed. The group’s task is to explain why. It is not a prediction exercise and it does not require pessimism. It is a practical way of surfacing the organisational, contractual and human reasons that a sound-looking consultancy project might not produce a usable result.

Why rehearse failure before commissioning

A standard risk register tends to arrive with the project and grow as delivery begins. That is useful, but it is often too late to influence the two documents that matter most: the brief and the contract. A failure rehearsal held before commissioning gives the client team a chance to write safeguards into both.

It also exposes risks that are easy to overlook in a procurement process. These include unclear decision rights, an overstretched internal sponsor, poor access to operational staff, disputed data quality and an unspoken expectation that the consultant will somehow supply capability the client has not resourced. None of these is exotic. They are ordinary reasons projects disappoint.

For UK small and mid-sized businesses in particular, the exercise has a further benefit. It tests whether the project is proportionate. If the rehearsal reveals that delivery depends on three busy people who have not been consulted, the answer may be to narrow the brief rather than to appoint a larger consultancy team.

Who should attend

The session should be small enough to allow everyone to speak and broad enough to include the people who will carry the consequences. A practical group is five to eight people.

Include the internal sponsor, the operational owner who will use the output, someone with financial oversight and at least one person from the frontline team the consultant will need to meet. Procurement or legal input is helpful if the contract is complex, but it is not essential for the first pass. The consultant should not attend. The purpose is to give the client side a candid view before the commercial relationship begins.

A neutral facilitator is valuable. This can be an internal person who is not sponsoring the project, or an external adviser who is not bidding for the work. The facilitator’s role is to keep the exercise structured and to prevent the conversation from drifting into a review of past projects or individual performance.

How to run the rehearsal

Set aside sixty to ninety minutes. The exercise works best when it is treated as a working session rather than a formal committee item.

1. Set the scene. The facilitator states the premise plainly: it is a date in the future, the project has been completed, and it has failed. Avoid softening the language. The point is to make the failure concrete enough to discuss.
2. Write in silence. Each participant writes down the reasons the project failed. Five minutes is usually enough. Silent writing prevents the most senior person in the room from setting the tone too early.
3. Take contributions in turn. Go round the group and capture every reason without debate. The facilitator should record the words used, not reinterpret them.
4. Group the themes. Cluster similar reasons: scope, access, data, decision-making, capacity, contract, culture and communication. Name the clusters neutrally.
5. Vote on the most credible. Each participant gets a small number of votes. The aim is not to rank all risks but to identify the three or four that the group believes are most likely or most damaging.
6. Convert the top risks into safeguards. For each leading risk, ask two questions: what would make this less likely in the brief, and what would make it easier to detect in the contract or delivery rhythm?

The output should be short. A one-page note with the leading risks and the agreed safeguards is more useful than a long transcript.

Keeping it from becoming a blame session

The exercise fails if it turns into a post-mortem of previous disappointments or a judgement on individuals. The facilitator should keep the language focused on conditions, decisions and assumptions rather than people.

Useful prompts include: “What would have to be true for this to go wrong?” and “What would we be assuming without checking?” Less useful prompts include: “Who would be responsible for that?” The first set opens up the system. The second closes it down.

If a participant raises a past failure, acknowledge it and redirect: “What did that teach us about the conditions we need to avoid this time?” The facilitator should also watch for the opposite problem — a group that is too polite to name obvious risks. In that case, ask participants to write down the reason they would be reluctant to say aloud, then collect the notes anonymously.

Turning the findings into safeguards

The rehearsal earns its place only if it changes something. The leading risks should be translated into specific commitments before the brief is finalised.

In the brief, safeguards may include a narrower scope, named client-side decision-makers, a defined access plan for interviews or site visits, an agreed data pack and a statement of what the consultant is not expected to do. In the contract, safeguards may include staged deliverables, a early-warning checkpoint, clarity on change control, a defined escalation route and a close-out requirement for working assets.

The rehearsal also complements the risk register rather than replacing it. The register should continue to track delivery risks once the project starts. The rehearsal’s contribution is to catch the pre-commissioning risks that a register often records too late — or not at all.

A low-cost habit

A failure rehearsal is not a guarantee of success. It is a disciplined way of asking better questions while the client still has leverage. For UK organisations commissioning consultancy in 2026, it offers a modest but practical advantage: a chance to find the obvious failure before it becomes an expensive one.