What to Do When Things Go Wrong

by Frank Supovitz

  FILLING BIG SHOES

  The real takeaway from my week in Jacksonville observing the Super Bowl was that there were thousands of details that needed to be developed from planning to management to execution. Because I was new to the organization, I was reliant on the team that was in place to help guide me through the process. What concerned me most was that Jim Steeg had been in his job for more than 20 years. Much of the growth of the Super Bowl into an American cultural experience happened under his watch. With that much experience and that long a tenure, Jim instinctively knew everything that needed to get done and how to go about doing it. He was far more familiar than I was with the intricacies of the game, the people, and the politics of the league, as well as the problems we should anticipate.

  I knew a lot about managing major sports events, but little of those things. Nevertheless, I had to assume leadership over the NFL’s most important events and earn the confidence of the owners, the Commissioner, and the executive staff. I had to lead a team that was understandably loyal to Jim, had no experience working with me, and in some cases might have been annoyed that I was hired from another league. I was disappointed, but probably should have expected it when several team members resigned within days of my arrival; some of them resigned before I found the coffee machine, the men’s room, and my office on Park Avenue in New York.

  As a result, I would not only have to immediately pick up the planning for Super Bowl XL in Detroit, but I would also have to hire and integrate new team members into what remained of the department. In fact, the first in a series of major planning meetings was only a few weeks away and we were already short on the institutional knowledge that the experienced staff took away with them. In the interim, our team would also have to manage the logistical details for the NFL Combine in Indianapolis, Indiana, and the NFL Annual Owner’s Meeting in Maui, Hawaii. Most pressing, I discovered, was the need to quickly find a home for the 2005 NFL Draft to be held in April, just two months away. Time was a scarce commodity, to say the least.

  I knew that Jim Steeg had details in his head on what to do to make things go right, and how to respond when things did not, more than anything in the memos, schedules, or manuals I had read. Whether during planning or during the event, if people expected something to happen just because it always did, I needed to disabuse them of those notions, or something would slip between the cracks for sure.

  ASSUME NOTHING, DOUBLE-CHECK EVERYTHING

  I started the first Super Bowl production meeting with a slide that said: “Assume Nothing, Double Check Everything” and told them why. I wasn’t Jim. It was critical to our planning that everyone working on the Super Bowl, no matter how long they’d been working on it, imagined that none of the things that “just happened” and none of the things that were “just there” would happen or be there. This way, if something went wrong, it wasn’t because we failed to provide the resources or physical assets they assumed would be there. It wasn’t pushing potential blame for something that could go wrong from me to them. It was asking them to help ensure that when something did go wrong, it wasn’t for that reason; that is, the assumption that I was handling all the details that Jim managed for decades.

  I reinforced the concept by repeating the phrase at all remaining quarterly Super Bowl production meetings and the daily staff meetings leading up to game day. “Assume Nothing, Double Check Everything” would become the first of a series of annual “mantras” with which we opened every meeting. Each mantra was designed to serve as a rallying cry for the year, one that in a few words would set expectations for, and of, everyone working on the event.

  Looking back, this “mantra” could have been inspired by Captain Edward Murphy. In inspecting the rocket sled, he did not assume everything was wired correctly. I could be entirely wrong, but I’d like to think that he didn’t really know ahead of time that the technician who wired it had done it wrong. Rather, that he was systematically and scientifically double checking and not assuming that the vehicle Dr. Stapp was about to ride into history was not going to make him history. Captain Murphy imagined the worst or imagined that the worst was not impossible. He was all about taking action before things went wrong, and he didn’t think that Murphy’s Law was a joke. According to his son, he was annoyed that people didn’t take it more seriously. Murphy, Stapp, Nichols, and others were perfectionists. They had to be. People (including Stapp himself) could die if they weren’t. They had to imagine the worst outcomes in order to be a little shy pressing the “LAUNCH” button without checking on things just one more time.

  I imagine the worst when doing my job, and so should you. Not because we are pessimists, but because, like Captain Murphy, we are committed to having things go right. If we imagine all the ways things can go awry, we start to understand where we, our brands, or our products might be exposed to risk. Often, we imagine these things and how we could have, or should have, dealt with them after they have already happened. Although that’s second best, it does sharpen our senses to be on guard for similar failures the next time around.

  When the 1996 NHL All-Star Game was held in Boston, we could have hired the Boston Bruins’ eager and enthusiastic anthem singer, Rene Rancourt, to perform The Star-Spangled Banner and O Canada. We instead booked a nationally renowned, operatically talented television personality to deliver the traditional opening. One of our production team members had deep connections to the hard-to-reach celebrity community through his network of personal assistants. Rather than slog through the slow and labyrinthine bureaucracy of agencies and management companies, we connected with the actor’s personal assistant, and appealing to his sports-loving nature, secured his agreement to join us in Boston. So, we had only ourselves to blame.

  We arranged for a first-class ticket for the actor on a flight from Miami that would arrive at Logan International Airport with plenty of time to get him to the arena for a sound check and rehearsal before the doors opened to fans. A production assistant waiting to meet the flight called us 45 minutes after the scheduled landing to let us know that there was no sign of our celebrity. He was on the manifest as a ticketed passenger, but he had not boarded in Miami. We thought that perhaps he missed the plane and there was another flight scheduled to take off soon, which would still give us room to get him to the arena in time for the performance, but not for a rehearsal. Rehearsing is always a good thing when a performer is going to step onto a thin rubber-backed carpet on a freshly minted sheet of ice.

  Once the cabin door was closed, the airline could tell us whether he was on the flight or not. He wasn’t. At the risk of being humiliated, we asked the Bruins to call Rene Rancourt. Having the night off, Rene had planned to host a dinner party at his home. He could have been a jerk and enjoyed making us squirm, but, as I would come to appreciate, that wasn’t Rene. He grabbed his tuxedo, sped to the arena, belted out two goosebumps-worthy national anthems, finished them off with his iconic and enthusiastic fist pump, and then returned to his guests. He saved our lives just like he saved the life of another event organizer when Kate Smith canceled her anthem performance just before Game 6 of the 1975 World Series. What really happened to our celebrity friend? We actually worried that something awful had happened to him, but when we read nothing about it in the media, we stopped worrying.

  After that night, I could vividly imagine an anthem singer not showing up. Or, having the flu. Or, being abducted by aliens hiding in his luggage. Okay, maybe not that, but I could imagine a lot of things. So, although our team kept booking celebrity anthem singers for the NHL All-Star Game, we also invited the host team’s favorite performer to be our guest at every game thereafter, with the understanding that he or she might be asked to leap into action at the last possible moment. Captain Murphy would have certified this plan as “defensive design,” the notion that contingencies are built into the system. I call it sleeping better the night before the game.

  Having a plan that covers only what to do when things run smoothly does not constitute adeq
uate planning. It is creating a road map, and that might be fine 80 percent, 90 percent, or even 99 percent of the time. But it’s that nasty issue that happens 20 percent, 10 percent, or 1 percent of the time that can sink your business, derail your project, or make an event memorable for all the wrong reasons. So, whatever you are planning, sit in a quiet space with your ears plugged and your eyes closed—if that’s what works for you—and imagine the worst. Sales dry up. The warehouse floods. The lobby of your office building is suddenly a taped-off crime scene. Your freight elevator stops working. How do people get to work? How will your customers and clients be served?

  You can’t make up every solution on the spot and be successful. Using your dark imaginings to tease out contingencies should inform your overall planning strategy so that you can then incorporate potential solutions into your defensive design. Otherwise, you may not be able to overcome challenges that expose weaknesses in your plan or project as quickly.

  If your imagination is vivid enough, you’ll uncover a great number of things that can potentially go wrong, from the annoying to the simply inconvenient and cataclysmically catastrophic. The good news is there is no limit to your imagination. There is only a limit to your time, your team’s expertise, and your money. You won’t think of absolutely every potential issue. But, if you identify, prioritize, and account for the right contingencies in your planning, you are well on your way to deferring Murphy’s Law to another day.

  You will naturally prioritize based on the least improbable things that could go wrong and those that could do the most damage to your project, brand, or company. Why did I purposely use a double negative? Because if it is probable that something is going to go wrong, you should reassess the project, product, or event. I’m betting you’ve already gotten your project to the point where the odds of something going wrong is already reduced to the relatively improbable. But things that are the least improbable are, alas, still possible.

  Applying our imaginations to building multiple contingency plans that reduce the risk of failure is truly a pain in the neck. Extra planning you may never put into action can take a lot of time and threaten deadlines. Resist your natural impulse to mentally, but not actually, diminish the probability of things going wrong because they would be expensive, time-consuming, complicated, or otherwise inconvenient to the planning process. It is also very easy to imagine your boss, best client, or some other exceedingly important stakeholder introducing a new variable that you hadn’t planned on—for example, a new product feature, a different launch strategy, or an accelerated set of deadlines. That seems to happen all the time, so be sure to leave yourself enough time to calculate the impact and redraft your plans.

  4

  IT’S A MATTER OF TIME

  Mick Jagger was 100 percent wrong. Time is not on my side. No, it’s not, and it’s not on your side either. Whether you have a big budget or a small one, years of experience or just launching your career, work for a stately iconic brand or a brash entrepreneurial start-up, the amount of time that fits into an hour is 60 minutes. While what you do with that hour can move the ball toward your goal line, time will always be every project’s most limiting factor. Welcome to the club.

  I learned this important and most enduring lesson in Dr. Benny Barak’s Consumer Behavior class at Bernard M. Baruch College of the City University of New York. For our term project, our study group had three weeks to create a mythical product for an existing company and develop a comprehensive business plan to launch our innovation to a selected target demographic. The four of us met one night at a Manhattan bar to start planning our campaign, but somehow, we could never get everyone back together to keep the momentum going. We all had full-time jobs, night classes, significant others, and a surprisingly more limited beer budget than we had anticipated. We struggled to do the research, share intelligence, and gather meaningful contributions from each member of the team. Somehow we produced a final product that was submitted on time; it had to be because it wouldn’t have mattered how good it was if it was turned in late. It would have earned us a failing grade irrespective of our farsighted brilliance.

  After handing in the paper, Dr. Barak asked the class for feedback about the assignment. I offered that I didn’t feel we had enough time to do as good a job as we wanted. Consumer Behavior wasn’t our only night class, after all, and everyone had different schedules. We had demanding jobs that often took priority over our academic pursuits, and three weeks was simply not enough time to perfect our plans.

  Dr. Barak stroked his professorial salt-and-pepper beard. “Maybe so,” he mused thoughtfully, “but as you advance in your careers, you will never have enough time. You will be forced to get things done in the time you have.” He turned out to be as right as Mick was wrong.

  Most of us don’t get to pick our deadlines. The product will launch, the project will be presented, or the game will kick off when the company says it must, and whatever time we get is the time we have. Like my classmates, the colleagues we will count on will have different schedules, different priorities, and different commitments, both professional and personal. As project managers, we are stuck having to deal with all of those competing agendas, and the recognition that not everyone with whom we are working will place the same level of importance on the things that are of the highest priorities to us.

  THE TIME YOU GET IS ALL THE TIME YOU HAVE

  So whatever time you think you have to complete the mission, you should start by imagining that you have less time. You’ll be glad you did when the unforeseen happens, for example, when you must throw away old plans and start over because new variables are introduced, new contingencies need to be developed, and colleagues are slow to respond.

  Think of time as an airtight container, and your project as a gas. One of the properties of a gas is that it fills the container it occupies. Somehow, the work you have to do always fills the time you have to do it in, even if you started out earlier than you originally thought would be necessary. Increase the work to be done with the new details to be resolved and it is like pumping more gas into the container. The pressure increases. Now think about shrinking the container and the amount of time remaining to complete the project, instead. The pressure will rise again. Increase the work and shrink the time at the same time, and the pressure doubles. You may be headed for a blowout.

  I don’t like that kind of pressure in my life, so I always try to make my container bigger than is typically necessary. That is, when possible, I allot more time than might be required for just about any task so I can handle the pressure when the time gets shorter, or the workload gets heavier than I expected. I used to think that made me “time’s bitch” because I always felt the pressure of time. I leave for the airport at least two hours before my flight boards even though a problem-free commute takes less than an hour. I imagine there may be even more New York traffic than normal, an accident on the route, a problem parking in the closest garage, or an extra-long line at the security checkpoint.

  I’d rather grab a cup of coffee and work in the airline club than worry about catching my flight when a thunderstorm floods the Long Island Expressway and traffic slows to a crawl. So maybe, just maybe, I’m not “time’s bitch” after all. Maybe I’m “time’s boss” because imagining that I always need more time to get to the airport helps me stay more in control, more nimble, and less pressured when something goes wrong on my drive over. I’ve never missed a flight yet. Take that, time!

  I’m not expecting or asking you to be as mindful of time as I am in everything you do. In fact, I recognize and accept that most people are not. Many of us default to getting to the airport at the latest possible moment or to the movies just as the lion starts to roar. Different strokes. But, sometimes our worlds collide . . .

  SAVING HOURS ONE MINUTE AT A TIME

  A lonely dawn had broken in Detroit as the Super Bowl XL event team straggled into the conference room at the Detroit Marriott at the Renaissance Center. Every day during the three
weeks leading up to the game, we scheduled morning briefing meetings at our headquarters hotel before everyone dispersed to the stadium or to other meetings and event sites around town. The events team and at least one senior representative from each functional area participated, including: stadium operations, construction, security, media relations, broadcasting, transportation, accommodations, hospitality, team and medical services, and host city operations. Respecting the early hour and everyone’s time, we usually set out a selection of breakfast pastries, fresh fruit, and several gallons of overpriced hotel coffee.

  In Jacksonville, the year prior, two meetings were held daily, one first thing in the morning and one around 12 or 13 hours later. Neither started remotely on time, but the evening session was always the most delayed as staff in the field were often wrapped up in important work that delayed their arrival. Because the time between the end of the evening meeting and the follow-up meeting the next morning was rather uneventful, I decided to restructure the daily meetings. Our new plan was to host one meeting at the beginning of the day, which would start with updates on the status of any problems discussed the previous day and would be followed by a round-robin of reports from each area that surfaced new issues and announced changes to the plan.

  On the first day of these newly structured meetings, I was in place at 7:00 a.m. with a small handful of our team at the folding tables arranged in the form of an elongated rectangle. Most of our team was either chatting collegially outside the room, just leaving their hotel rooms, or still detailing their hair into the perfectly coiffed uncoiffed coiffure. Apparently, the first subject of the first meeting, when it finally began at 7:10 a.m., was going to be the necessity of starting our meetings on time.