Scenarios, Contingencies and Pre-Mortems

Preparing to perform

I have been called a pessimist by some of my teammates, players and coaches over the past two decades. Why? Most of the time I pose a lot of “What if…” questions and scenarios. Many people see this as pessimistic, but I think this is one of the key ways to be able to perform in the moment. This first came up when I was a player and my coach, Big Kev, was a sergeant in the Australian Army.

See Big Kev leveraged his experience in the army and rugby league to create a different culture at the club than I was used to. It was the first time that I was part of a leadership team and it was a huge learning process for me. See at different parts of the year we were going to lose different players — some of them to representative sides (2-4 players for 5 weeks), some to military maneuvers (8-12 players for for 4 weeks) and some unfortunately injuries. At the start of the season, we started talking about how to shift different players through the first and second side to make sure that at different points of the season we were capable of performing our best even when we had players unavailable for selection.

First, we would plan for different scenarios. It started with who would be missing and then we started to look at how we had to change the way we played. When you take out some starters, the rest of the team could pick up the slack but we had to emphasize the replacements strengths. This really helped the player leadership and the coaches stay on the same page as we had to vary our tactics and strategy at different points in the season. When our rep side players were out, we lost a lot of our dynamic forwards and the game plan became tighter. When the military boys were away, we lost a lot of our linking players who played off the cuff and we had to become more directive with the play calls.

Second, we would contingency plan. As our depth was challenged at different points in the season, we would start to prepare players to be thrown in the deep end when we had our full squad. This meant that many players were expected to play different positions at training and sometimes didn’t get to train their primary position. See Big Kev was really good at keeping his eye on the development of the team over the course of the season. It meant that if a player went down during a practice or a game, we had experience stepping into different roles and executing with different people around us. We became familiar with adapting to the unfamiliar, which allowed us to make a very deep run in the playoffs as we always had the confidence to play rugby — regardless of the make-up of the team.

Finally, we would do a pre-mortem. I didn’t realize that this was a common military practice, but it was very useful for the player leadership. It meant that we did someof problem solving before the game and it gave us more time to figure out how to respond in the middle of the game. Before each game, we would think of two or three things that would really de-rail us. This might be an injury to a key player, other times it would be the ref we were assigned and other times it could be being behind on the scoreboard. By thinking about how to solve problems before the game, it allowed us to respond collectively in the heat of the game when faced with adversity.

As a coach, I have used this experience of setting scenarios, developing contingencies and adapting through a pre-mortem. I have found that it allows my coaching staff and player leadership to do their thinking under less pressure, which allows them to act efficiently and effectively should the need arise. It has helped my players think more broadly about the game including the potential impact their skill execution in a high pressure moment. Finally, it has helped the team look differently at a failure — it stops being a block to performing and becomes a light post to take action.