Kaoru Ishikawa -one of the fathers of modern Total Quality concept as well as process performance improvement- was very interested in learning from failure, particularly to prevent it.
Ishikawa's Fishbone diagram and tool is one of the most used and still effective in the performance improvement toolbox
My experience working on cities' transformation projects and what Robert K. Merton called "unanticipated consequence of purposeful social action" (1936) led to develop a complementary, yet opposite model.
In keepinmg with the analogy with Ishikawa's fishbone, I called it "Cat Whiskers".
This diagram -like the cat's whiskers- works to prevent and anticipate possible consequences, impacts and reactions to social action. In the example below, we apply the Cat Whiskers Diagram (CWD) to Public Housing.
Think of a public housing program and ask yourself "what can go wrong?" or "what would it look like in 10 years?". Then, stick your answers to the cat whiskers below and think about it.
Which in turn, took me to develop a second complementary model, which I called the "Tug-Of-War diagram" (TOW) shown below.
My article Be the Cat Whiskers was published by Performance Improvement Journal in 2018.
Most of the cases I used these models I found positive and negative impacts didn't balance out against each other. More than establishing a "pro vs. con" balance, the tool helped visualize all the factors involved, weight them and figure out how to manage them in advance instead of reacting to them.
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