If This Fails, Why? A Pre-Mortem for Education Change

What if we stopped pretending every new education initiative was automatically a good idea?

That may sound harsh, but it is a question schools increasingly need to ask. Across Aotearoa New Zealand, educators are being asked to implement a steady stream of change, including curriculum refreshes, stronger emphasis on explicit teaching, attendance plans and new reporting requirements, cell phone restrictions, and a renewed focus on the basics. While each of these may have merit, taken together, they create a serious risk – including change fatigue, implementation overload, and a widening gap between policy intent and classroom reality.

In my previous post I summarised my thoughts from a webinar I’d listened to on AI and the futures we create. In it there was reference made to the idea of conducting a pre-mortem as a way of understanding and planning for future change. This idea triggered a lot of feedback, so I thought I’d explore it a little further here, and apply the thinking specifically to what we are facing in the current NZ education system.

A pre-mortem is a strategic exercise where a team imagines a project has already failed, then works backward to identify why. The point is not negativity for its own sake. It is to surface the blind spots, assumptions, and risks that too often go unspoken when people are eager to get moving. Gary Klein developed the approach to help break groupthink and overconfidence. Atlassian describes it as a way to prepare for “every twist and turn” before a project begins.

That feels especially relevant in education right now.

In schools, we are often handed change before we have had enough time to understand the problem it is meant to solve. We are told to implement, align, adjust, monitor, and report. But are we always equally clear on the “why”? Are we asking what happens when this change lands in a staffroom already stretched by workload, relievers, behaviour, attendance pressures, and competing priorities? Are we asking who carries the implementation burden, and what gets displaced when the new initiative arrives?

A pre-mortem asks exactly those questions.

Why this matters now

Consider some of the current demands schools are living with. The Ministry of Education’s 2026 updates include Attendance Management Plans, stepped responses to absence thresholds, and more formal recording and reporting expectations. At the same time, schools are navigating curriculum change, stronger expectations around explicit teaching, and ongoing pressure to lift achievement and attendance. On top of that, cell phones are now meant to be away for the day, and ERO has reported that compliance is still uneven, particularly in secondary schools.

None of these changes exists in a vacuum. Each one competes for time, energy, communication, and trust. That is why the question is not simply whether a policy sounds sensible in theory. The real question is whether it will work in the lived reality of schools. Will staff understand it? Will whānau support it? Will students comply? Will it reduce complexity or add another layer to an already crowded system?

This is where many reforms stumble. Not because people are lazy or resistant by default, but because implementation is often treated as the easy part. The hard part is what happens after the announcement: the interpretation, the local adaptation, the communication with families, the extra workload, the unintended consequences, the confusion, the compliance gaps, and the slow erosion of goodwill when staff feel they are being asked to absorb one more thing. A pre-mortem forces us to name those risks before they become reality.

What a school pre-mortem could look like

Imagine a leadership team, department, or staff meeting where the group is told:

“It is six months from now and this initiative has failed. What happened?”

That simple prompt can shift the conversation in powerful ways.

Educators might identify things like:

• The purpose was never clearly explained.
• Staff were told what to do before they were consulted on how it would work.
• The initiative added workload without removing anything else.
• The language was clear at policy level but murky in practice.
• Training was rushed or one-size-fits-all.
• Whānau were not brought on the journey.
• The change looked good in a document but collapsed in day-to-day reality.
• There was no agreed evidence of success, so no one knew whether it was working.

Those are not complaints for their own sake. They are early warning signs. And once they are visible, they can be acted on. Clarifying the purpose, simplifying the process, reducing duplication, resourcing implementation properly, and deciding what will be stopped so the new work has room to succeed are all examples of the sorts of mitigations that may emerge. That is consistent with the pre-mortem method’s emphasis on identifying risks, prioritising them, and creating mitigation actions.

Questions worth asking

If you want this to be genuinely useful for educators, here are some starting questions they could use in any school-facing change process:

• What problem is this actually meant to solve?
• What assumptions are we making about staff, students, and whānau?
• What will this require people to stop doing?
• What does success look like in practice, not just on paper?
• What unintended consequences should we expect?
• What will this add to workload?
• Where are the likely points of confusion or resistance?
• What evidence will tell us whether this is working?
• What support is missing?
• What would failure look like six months from now?

These questions are deliberately uncomfortable. That is the point. The goal is not to block change, but to improve it before it hardens into another burden on schools.

A better standard for change

The challenge for education leaders and policymakers is not to avoid change. It is to stop assuming that announcement equals progress. Schools deserve reforms that are coherent, resourced, and shaped by the realities of implementation, not just the language of intent. If a change cannot survive a serious pre-mortem, then perhaps it is not ready to be imposed on teachers, students, and communities.

A pre-mortem does not promise certainty. What it does promise is honesty. And in a system under pressure, honesty may be the most valuable reform tool we have.