Your broken shoulder represents a product risk in which something goes wrong that is unlikely to have a serious, long-term impact on your overall health. Your shoulder may hurt, it may keep you from typing with two hands for a while, and it may require months of excruciating physical therapy to reestablish its previously glorious contribution to your backswing. But you will return to being a high-functioning human with the proper amount of time, treatment, and effort.
When your product, project, or activity “breaks its shoulder” and is unlikely to have a serious, long-term impact on the health of your company or brand, you may have time to be more thoughtful about the response if the product risk doesn’t escalate into a brand risk. You should prioritize next for action those product risks that have this potential. Problems that will likely never elevate to this level of significance can be addressed after the more important things are handled.
If you stay true to your mission by planning wisely to reduce or forestall disaster, or managing the response to a crisis once things go wrong anyway, the reflection on your own personal brand will often take care of itself. Where we as emotionally fragile and egocentric humans fail is when we allow the threat to our personal reputation to motivate our thinking. Solving problems intelligently, in the right order, can help restore the luster to our brands. Eventually.
The truth is that it is impossible to completely crisis-proof our projects, companies, or products. But we can make them more crisis-resistant and we can apply a triage decision-making framework that will help us prioritize responses when something goes wrong anyway. Simply, we have to do everything we can to keep a crisis from happening in the first place, and if it does, we will need a plan on how to respond. First, apply a dark and fertile imagination to visualize as many potential threats to our success as possible. Then, we can spend the time, money, and energy to keep all those monsters securely UNDER the bed.
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ANYTHING THAT CAN GO WRONG
I never had the opportunity to meet Captain Edward A. Murphy, but he was my kind of guy. He was the actual Murphy behind Murphy’s Law. There are many versions of the origins of his eponymous law that “anything that can go wrong will go wrong.” Like many famous attributions, it is questionable whether he was the first to say it, or whether he ever said it at all. After learning a little bit about Captain Murphy, it appeared to me that Murphy’s Law was not based on a sense of dark, foreboding pessimism, which spawned an industry of T-shirts, posters, and websites bursting with corollaries, extensions, and addenda applicable to a wide variety of subjects and disciplines. Murphy’s Law was based on an unflagging quest for perfection. Perfection was particularly important to Captain Murphy because of his work as a U.S. Air Force engineer; he was tasked with overseeing projects that tested the limits of human endurance under particularly stressful conditions.
THE MAN BEHIND MURPHY’S LAW
In 1949, Captain Murphy was an engineer at Edwards Air Force Base, overseeing a project to determine how much sudden deceleration a human body could withstand and survive. The tests measured the effects of physical forces on the human body when a fast-moving vehicle abruptly stops moving, but the brain, internal organs, and skeleton wanted to keep going. A mistake could be awfully messy.
Murphy’s engineering team assembled a simulator, which was essentially a rocket sled on rails. A test pilot was to climb aboard, strap-in, and take a very fast but relatively short ride ending with a very sudden stop. It was part of a multiyear series of studies entitled “Effects of Deceleration Forces of High Magnitude on Man,” or Air Force Test MX981. So, if you are ever offered a friendly ride in a vehicle with that model number, I suggest you call an Uber. Understanding this test would require precision performance of the rocket sled, Murphy inspected the device and discovered that it was incorrectly wired by one of his subordinates. In his frustration, Murphy reportedly muttered: “If there is any way to do it wrong, he’ll find it.”
After Murphy’s team repaired the error, Dr. John Paul Stapp, an Air Force doctor, took a seat on the device and rode, or more appropriately, stopped into history, withstanding a bone-jarring horizontal force of 40 g. For the physics-challenged among us, a force of 40 g is 40 times the force of gravity. At the press conference held shortly after the test, Dr. Stapp credited the project’s safety record to the engineering team’s dedicated fight against “Murphy’s Law,” and before long, an entirely new treasure trove of sarcastic wisdom started oozing into the public consciousness. It is not known how many of the biting, popularly quoted observations that comprise the many variations of Murphy’s Law were ever written, spoken, or otherwise invoked by Captain Murphy himself. One account suggests that he considered the multitude of Murphy-isms “ridiculous, trivial, and erroneous.”
DEFENSIVE DESIGN
What was more important to Captain Murphy than crafting laws was the principle of defensive design—ensuring that plans, tests, and experiments are developed with contingencies that take all possibilities into account. Colonel Stapp himself is credited with Stapp’s Ironical Paradox, which observes: “The universal aptitude for ineptitude makes any human accomplishment an incredible miracle.” I’m not big on believing the worst in people, but Dr. Stapp had a point. People mess up all the time. We must be vigilant to make sure we don’t do that too often or in situations that can have profoundly serious impacts. One observation that Captain Murphy may have appreciated was put forward by Northrop’s project manager, George E. Nichols, who’s no-nonsense “Fourth Law” instructs us to: “Avoid any action with an unacceptable outcome.”
Thanks more to Captain Murphy’s vigilance than his sardonic wit, Dr. Stapp survived the test and beat his own record five years later, surviving a peak acceleration of 46.2 g. The greatest nonfatal g-force ever measured occurred more than a half-century later at the Texas Motor Speedway, after Kenny Bräck’s car made wheel-to-wheel contact with another vehicle. The contact caused him to lose control of his car and impact the fence at an estimated 214 g during the final race of the 2003 IndyCar Racing Series.
THE GREAT EQUALIZERS
I arrived anonymously in Jacksonville, Florida, a week before Super Bowl XXXIX in 2005. Every row of seats on the shuttle bus from the airport was filled with the NFL staff who needed to be on-site for the last few remaining days, rather than the three or four weeks that the event team had been in town. The buzz onboard was a lesson in how much one can learn when you keep your ears open and your mouth shut, and no one knows who you are. My real orientation on all things Super Bowl began on that ride—as opinions, perspectives, and analysis on everything, everyone, and everywhere on the bus went around and around. I recognized that I was experiencing perhaps the only unfiltered fly-on-the-wall insights I would ever get on the job.
It was my first working NFL experience in 17 years. In 1988, I was Radio City Music Hall’s associate producer for the Super Bowl XXII halftime show in San Diego, California. The Super Bowl was big in 1988, but since then, it had taken Murphy’s rocket sled to growth, and didn’t appear to be likely to stop any time soon. The Super Bowl had grown into an event that invaded a city, occupied every available hotel, gobbled up every usable venue, and consumed every available resource.
Notwithstanding my having been involved with big events for many years, I felt the g-forces of a sudden zero-to-100 mph acceleration. From my hotel window, I could see the stadium and many of the sites around downtown Jacksonville, which had been activated for the Super Bowl. As the week went on, masses of Philadelphia Eagles and New England Patriots jerseys filled every café, restaurant, and public space in between. Although I wouldn’t characterize myself as growing anxious, I was definitely mindful that I would soon be leading the team responsible for pulling off the event. “It’s just so big,” I remember saying every night when I phoned my wife, Cathy.
I walked along the St. Johns Riverwalk the next morning with my boss, NFL COO Roger Goodell (currently commissioner of the NFL), heading to a meeting with Detroit Super Bow
l XL Host Committee Chairman Roger Penske and Host Committee CEO Susan Sherer on Penske’s yacht. Super Bowl XL was going to be held the following year in the Motor City, and it was important to make a good impression on Roger Penske. My predecessor in the Special Events Department, Jim Steeg, who had overseen the Super Bowl’s remarkable expansion for more than two decades, was leaving the NFL for the San Diego Chargers, and I’m sure this was of great concern to him.
On the drizzly walk along the St. Johns riverbank, Goodell tried pumping up my confidence. “You are going to take the Super Bowl to an entirely new level,” he said. I felt the speeding rocket sled screech to a sudden halt. “What level is that, exactly?” I remember wondering. “The Super Bowl is already on its own level.”
There was no choice in the matter. The pressure was definitely on, and the expectations were stratospheric. I had to immediately start gathering the information and perspectives of league insiders, establishing the relationships, and understanding the playing field (literally and figuratively)—all the critical inputs I would need to start imagining how to ensure that Super Bowl XL would measure up to the expectations of an “entirely new level.” Oh, great. XL is not only “40” in Roman numerals. It also means “extra-large.” Any more pressure you want to put on me, guys?
Goodell and I walked up the gangway to the ship. It was not easy to push aside the thought of it being a walk off of a gangplank, even though the boat was in front of, and not behind, me. We both took off our shoes at the request of the steward before walking into the yacht’s commodious living room on the bare, stunningly perfect hardwood floor.
Up until then, there was absolutely nothing that wasn’t intimidating about my first day on the job. Until I noticed the fruit bowl on the credenza. It was a strikingly beautiful, brilliantly colored, thick-walled glass Swedish Kosta Boda bowl. It’s not that I’m an expert on Swedish bowls. It’s just that I used to buy one of these same vividly colored bowls on my way back from the annual National Hockey League (NHL) International Series preseason games in Sweden. I have four or five of them, and they cost me about $25 each from the duty-free shop. I’m pretty certain that Roger Penske didn’t personally buy his glass Kosta Boda bowl in a duty-free shop, or anywhere else, for that matter. Someone else probably bought it to decorate this magnificent boat. This one insignificant detail made me feel a whole lot less intimidated. I had the same bowl as Roger Penske!
Once I started working with this incredible, very real individual, I realized that Roger Penske would never have intended to intimidate me. Any such feeling would have been totally imagined by me, conjured up entirely by my perspective of his fame and prodigious accomplishments. He had an awesome yacht, and he earned every plank and brass fitting. It was a simple bowl, the same kind that was on my own coffee table, which connected me on some common level to the titan of industry before me. That is still probably where any similarity between Roger Penske and me ends, but I glanced at that bowl a few times during our meeting when I felt any creeping nervousness. Its familiarity equalized any anxiety.
The Merriam-Webster dictionary definition of intimidate is “to frighten into submission,” and “implies inducing fear or a sense of inferiority into another.” Roger Penske was not intimidating me, and neither was the Super Bowl. I was inducing fear and a sense of inferiority into myself by imagining that I might not be up to the task in front of me. Starting a daunting, challenging project like managing and organizing a Super Bowl and feeling intimidated by it, or by the people involved, would not have been a good foundation for sound planning or competent execution. If something went wrong along the way, I would already be halfway to panic. If I imagined being outclassed by the job, I discovered I could apply the same imagination to finding ways of equalizing the playing field. This ability would come in handy later on when I started attending meetings with NFL owners.
The Super Bowl was still “just so big,” but it didn’t own a glass Kosta Boda bowl to make me feel more its peer. Something else would present an opportunity to equalize the intimidation I imagined. The 2005 Super Bowl in Jacksonville was the only one I ever experienced from the sidelines. I picked up a walkie-talkie the morning of the game and never pressed the “talk” button. I just listened to the incessant buzz of radio traffic. What I heard helped me to understand that all of the issues faced by the staff during a Super Bowl were familiar to me. There were just a lot more issues in any given minute. Someone had the wrong credential and couldn’t get where he needed to go; a pipe burst in the locker room area; concessions were running out of food; queues were growing longer at the security checkpoints; traffic was tied up on the highway. There was nothing happening that I hadn’t heard before. I felt better knowing that problems were handled at the Super Bowl just like they were at NHL All-Star Games, or at any event for that matter. Someone identified the problem and rectified it or called someone else for help.
When you feel intimidated by a new project, task, job, or event, search for your great equalizers, things and situations that are common and familiar to you. The practice of visualizing your great equalizers will come in handy during every step of the project management process. They may not be as simple as a Kosta Boda bowl, but if you are facing something entirely new, remember that you’ve faced other things for the first time, and you handled them well. If you didn’t handle them well, you learned from when they went wrong. Imagining that something awful might happen? That’s great. That’s the time to imagine a plan to reduce or eliminate that possibility. Something went wrong anyway? Remember that things have gone wrong for you before and that you lived to tell about it. Or, if you prefer, remember some of the things that went wrong for others in this book. Feeling intimidated is a function of your own imagination. Repurpose that imagination by applying past experiences to conquer your anxiety.
A FRESH SET OF BRAIN CELLS
It was time to forget about Penske’s Kosta Boda bowl and time to get to work imagining the “next level of Super Bowl.” During the week, I made sure to: experience every major event, attend every production meeting, and visit every venue—from the media center, team practice facilities, and major hotels to party and charity event sites, fan festivals, and of course, every square inch of Alltel Stadium (now TIAA Bank Field), the host stadium. I spent every night reading the meeting notes, production schedules, and bid documents, and I devoured the Game Operations Manual, the league’s go-to resource that lays out every detail, guideline, and regulation pertaining to staging an NFL game. I still kept a low profile, but in truth, it was not to eavesdrop like I did on the shuttle bus. I knew the pressures everyone was under and did not want to be a distraction. There was a flipside to anonymity, of course. I was nearly thrown out of the stadium by security during Paul McCartney’s halftime rehearsal because almost no one knew what I looked like.
As it turned out, having lots of event experience, but little familiarity with the Super Bowl beyond what America had seen on television, was not a disadvantage, but rather the best starting point of all. It was not a blank canvas, of course. There was something already stellar and very special about the Super Bowl, built on the hard work of hundreds of people at the League Office who had stewarded the event to prominence; the on-field greatness of Bart Starr, Joe Namath, Lynn Swann, and Roger Staubach; the innovative and insightful broadcasts of Dick Enberg, Pat Summerall, Curt Gowdy, and John Madden; and the passion, viewership, and support of the NFL’s fans and partners. It gave me the opportunity to experience America’s unofficial holiday with entirely new eyes, a fresh set of brain cells, and the imagination to enhance and add value to 39 years of the event’s greatness.
Was the event big? Yes, enormous. Spectacular? Peerless. At the pinnacle of its potential? As I would discover, not then, not later, and not even now. When the game ended, I waited for the presentation of the Vince Lombardi Trophy. Television went to commercial, the crew began setting up the stage, and fans flooded the exits. By the time NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue presented the tro
phy to New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, the stadium was nearly empty. The players, team personnel, and media on the field seemed to outnumber the fans in the stands. Having come from the NHL, where fans idolize the Stanley Cup and stay in the arena to experience its presentation—even to the opposing team—I thought it was incredibly strange that so few fans remained to witness the historic moment of what the winning team worked all season to achieve. I also thought back to how often I paid attention to the trophy ceremony when I watched the game on television. Not very often, I recalled.
I felt I had found perhaps the one thing that we could start to imagine differently. Something that elevated the Vince Lombardi Trophy presentation enough to get people to watch it, in the stadium and on television. What we developed for Super Bowl XL was a red-carpet entrance for a prominent football personality—fittingly, Super Bowl I and II MVP Bart Starr—carrying the trophy to the stage to a stirring, specially composed Vince Lombardi Trophy theme. Players lining the red carpet in future years spontaneously started reaching over to touch the trophy on its way to the stage, and a new tradition worth hanging out for was established.
Firing up your imagination before planning begins generates innovation. But as you will also see, it informs your planning process, and will even help you devise solutions when something goes wrong.
What to Do When Things Go Wrong Page 4
