By Niamh Sweeney, Head of Union Support, Unions 21 | 3 min
We are in unpredictable times. War, economic shocks, pandemics, changes to a more hostile government or the calling of snap elections. Unions are navigating pressures and in some circumstances reaching for risk registers as the answer.
But it is not just these large-scale shocks that we can plan for. The everyday challenges unions experience matter too.
During one of our Future Leaders modules, a participant from the CSP told us their union was exploring pre-mortems. These are exercises first put forward by Gary Klein, built around a simple question:
Instead of asking what's going wrong, what if an organisation said, "Imagine it's 12 months from now and this has failed badly - why?"
Pre-mortems are designed to require realistic pessimism, ensure collective responsibility and surface tacit knowledge of where risk really lies. It is an active simulation, not a briefing to read.
Why a simulation?
Structured "what if" conversations with the right people in the room are more effective for genuine preparedness than any amount of planning documentation. The point of a simulation isn't to produce a better document. It's to find out where your assumptions are wrong before something forces you to find out the hard way.
Here's one scenario: what happens if 5% of your members leave at the same time? Do you know the financial impact? Do you have an operational response plan for the next six months?
We suspect the honest answer for most unions is: we know the number, but not the response.
The typical answer when membership falls is to look at mergers. Simulations force a different question: not what's the long-term structural response, but what do we do in the next six months? As Simon Baugh puts it, it surfaces issues at a point where you still have time to fix them, not when it's already too late.
Where a union can start
The simulations that work best are the ones with a specific, tangible focus. A scenario built around something people recognise creates the situational awareness that general planning rarely does.
Strike simulations. Does your union have a clear operational plan for funding and running industrial action? Do the right people know their roles? Has anyone ever tested it?
Financial shocks. What happens if inflation spikes and members freeze or reduce their subs? What's your trigger for action, and who pulls it?
Governance failures. Could you reconstruct the paper trail for a major spending decision made two years ago? If an auditor asked, what would you find?
Employer structure changes. If a major employer in your sector restructures, contracts out, privatises, merges, what's the effect on your membership base? Has anyone modeled it?
Strategy is supposed to be long-term. But long-term strategy only holds if you've also thought through what could break it.
Unions that run simulations aren't being pessimistic. They're being honest about the gap between having a plan and knowing whether it works.
