It often goes that way. Something goes wrong and it changes how well you can imagine something similar happening again. Charlotte now requires a minimum standard for tented structures and a greater amount of ballasting for tents to keep them securely fastened to the ground. “The Taste of Charlotte” incident also teaches us the importance of having a place for senior officials to go to discuss important issues away from the limelight, and certainly away from the public and the media. So while you are imagining what can possibly go wrong, also imagine where you will rally the important stakeholders when you have to make difficult decisions and how you will gather them.
MAY THE ODDS BE EVER IN YOUR FAVOR
Whether it’s rain or any other factor that could derail your project, a 20 percent chance of some single thing going wrong is actually a pretty high probability. It may sound that this means you have an 80 percent likelihood of success, but unless you truly believe that’s the ONLY thing that can go wrong, think again. It simply means that you have an 80 percent chance of that one specific thing going right. There are still a lot of other things that can go wrong that can eat away at that 80 percent escape from disaster.
The more complex the project, the more likely something is going to go wrong somewhere, sometime, or somehow. Every time you imagine the possibility of something going wrong, you should add the probabilities together to determine how likely your project will be afflicted with just one of these failure factors (see Figure 5.1).
FIGURE 5.1. Calculating Partial Failure
Let’s say that in addition to the one thing that has a 20 percent probability of failure, you imagine something else that might have only a 5 percent likelihood of going wrong. That means if you escape the first problem, which by your own reckoning you will do 80 percent of the time, your likelihood of complete success goes down by another 5 percent. Now, the chance that you’ll be free and clear of one of these two sources of anxiety is down to just 75 percent of the time. Add another factor that has a 5 percent probability of failure and the likelihood of enjoying a success—unencumbered by any one of those three issues—is now down to only 70 percent. Keep adding factors that can go wrong, and you can see that your likelihood of total, unequivocal success drops with every single one. The more complicated the process or project, the more details, the more factors in the equation, the more probability that at least something is not going to go well. Consider a project as complex as the Super Bowl, and you can imagine that plenty is going to go wrong on Super Bowl Sunday. Every time. The trick, of course, is to make sure that the things that don’t go right are the least important, the least damaging, and the least visible. That, of course, was not always the case.
I wouldn’t waste much of your precious planning time calculating your likelihood of complete escape from something going wrong. A total escape is near impossible. This is just an illustration of why it’s important to imagine and eliminate from the system as many things likely to go wrong as possible, or to try to make them less likely. Few risk factors will be as high as that 20 percent likelihood of scattered showers. If you have many risk factors, your project already has real problems.
Your contingency planning framework will look a lot like a classical decision tree: “If this happens, we do that. If that happens, we do this.” It will unquestionably save your project valuable time and resources, and result in better and more informed decision making if you are acting on a contingency plan rather than trying to figure out your response from scratch when the heat is on. You will have more time to gather more intelligence and opinions while also reasoning through all of the ramifications and potential consequences of any course of action if you imagine them ahead of time.
A few hours after the conclusion of Super Bowl XLVIII between the Seattle Seahawks and Denver Broncos, the temperature plummeted and by morning, eight inches of fresh snow had blanketed the New York metropolitan area, stranding many out-of-town fans and guests at area airports. If that snow had fallen just 12 hours earlier, the game would have been very different. It was an unusually brutal winter. Deep “polar-vortex” cold often dropped temperatures into the single digits. Heavy snows ahead of the game delayed construction and preparations at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey. Snowfall in January and February in the northeast was, of course, predictable. What wasn’t predictable was exactly when it would snow and how much. So, contingencies had to be built into the plan in case it snowed a lot and at the worst possible time.
The intrigue of canceling, postponing, or moving a Super Bowl made for irresistibly good news copy. New York Daily News journalist Bill Price sounded the alarm more than a year ahead of the game: “According to the new Farmer’s Almanac, which will be printed soon, the weather on Feb. 2, 2014—the same day Super Bowl XLVIII is scheduled to be played at MetLife Stadium—will feature ‘an intense storm, heavy rain, snow, and strong winds.’ ” He continued, “Not good news for organizers of the event, which will be played outdoors in a cold-weather city for the first time in history.” He went on to explain that Pete Geiger, editor of the Farmer’s Almanac, had told the Associated Press “This is going to be one for the ages.”
I was repeatedly asked about the Farmer’s Almanac forecast and whether it made me nervous. “We’ve been in cold-weather cities before,” I told Bob Glauber, football columnist for Newsday. “We’ve been in situations where snow has fallen ahead of the Super Bowl. There are rescheduling scenarios for 256 regular-season games each year. Same thing for Super Bowls since the beginning of Super Bowls,” I assured his readers. Of course, I was nervous. Not because of the Farmer’s Almanac forecast, or any forecast made 13 months ahead of time. Besides, how much news would they have made if they predicted a beautiful Super Bowl Sunday? I was nervous because a major snowfall at a miserably unfortunate time was a very real possibility.
In the same article, Glauber went further in trying to reassure his readers: “One thing the league has going for it when it comes to being reasonably certain the game will go off as scheduled: Since the construction of Giants Stadium at the Meadowlands in 1976, no Jets or Giants game has ever been postponed because of weather.” (Thanks for trying to make me feel better, Bob, but a happy weather history doesn’t have any bearing on the likelihood of a future outcome.)
Throughout the processes of planning, execution, response, and evaluation, applying your imagination should never cease. But now that you’ve imagined enough challenges, let’s get down to planning those contingencies!
STEP TWO
PREPARE
6
THE “BCD’S” OF CONTINGENCY PLANNING
Wouldn’t you know it. The Farmer’s Almanac was right about Super Bowl XLVIII, which was held at Met-Life Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey (as we just discussed in Chapter 5). The northeast winter of 2013–2014 would turn out to be among the coldest, snowiest, and most challenging in memory. Nearly five feet of snow blanketed the New York City area that year, 260 percent above the normal seasonal total of 19 inches. Little did NFL owners know when they met in 2010 to award the first-ever outdoor Super Bowl to a cold-winter city that the term “polar vortex” would be introduced that year to the region’s common lexicon. For 28 days, daily high temperatures remained below freezing, seven of them were bitter cold days that never climbed above 10 degrees F. We expected tough weather conditions, and we rationalized that if surviving a deep-winter Green Bay Packers game at Lambeau Field is regarded as a bucket-list fan experience, so too could the first-ever Super Bowl played in extreme cold. Moreover, we postulated, New Yorkers consider themselves to be a rather tough bunch who could withstand just about anything.
Super Bowl Boulevard opened on Wednesday night in Manhattan, transforming 14 blocks of Broadway from Herald Square to Times Square into a free, three-quarter-mile-long football fan festival. The nighttime temperature dipped to 12 degrees as the Rockettes, the cast of Jersey Boys, and government dignitaries took to the stage—each taking their shivering, teeth-chattering turn for th
e official opening ceremony. We wondered if all those tough New Yorkers and resolute fans from Denver and Seattle would really brave the freezing temperatures as our event team huddled in the hollow shelter beneath the stage. We needn’t have worried. A little cold didn’t hold back the 1.5 million fans who jammed onto Super Bowl Boulevard as tightly as rush-hour subways for four days.
While warming ourselves beneath the stage, we were also monitoring the game-day forecast, which looked anything but good. Another snowstorm was heading our way and it could hit sometime on Sunday. That was really unwelcome news, but we were ready to roll out one or more of our contingency plans if it did.
PLANS B, C, AND D
Contingency planning is not about constructing our core project plan, or Plan A. No matter what we set out to achieve, it’s crucial that we articulate our goals and objectives, identify the strategy that defines how we will achieve them, and develop the tactics we will employ to bring the strategy to life. Regardless of your business, industry, or profession, any project you undertake should start with those three activities and in that order. This is what you do every day, and you may very well be an expert on how to pilot a project in your field from conception to completion.
Let’s assume you have forged a complete, robust, informed, and realistic Plan A for your business or project. Now reflect on all those potential challenges you imagined that could dull or destroy the effectiveness of your tactics, send your strategy off the guardrails, or push your goals even further away. Some might pose minor threats, some more major threats. Any number or combination are possible, so resist thinking that the planning process is over once you have your neat, new, and fully developed plan. It’s hard, I know. Contingency planning is a disquieting undertaking because it messes with all our exacting, expertly developed, detail-laden Plan A’s.
We all crave closure, the feeling that everything is ready and buttoned up, and as watertight as possible against threats. We want a perfectly crafted, infallible plan, but NFL coaching legend Vince Lombardi was speaking to us as leaders when he said: “Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection we can catch excellence.” Lombardi didn’t use one play or one plan to win football games. He and his coaching staff developed a playbook chock-full of plans and contingencies for whatever the opposing team, injuries to his roster, or Mother Nature might throw at the Green Bay Packers. He won championships thanks to his foresight on all the things that could go wrong at the line of scrimmage, in the backfield, or deep in enemy territory.
Developing contingency plans is joining Lombardi’s chase for perfection. When we consider all possibilities, we reduce the chances of failure, and as a consequence, we catch excellence more often. Our contingency plans may suggest undoing some of the great things we did when we made Plan A, and spending time, money, and energy developing Plans B, C, and D to deal with possibilities that will probably not go wrong the majority of the time.
Investing your finite resources in contingency planning is very much like buying insurance (which you should have too). When we spend money on insurance premiums, we hope we never have to file a claim, but if we suffer loss or damage, we are happy we had that safety net in place. Effective project leaders invest time and talent developing contingency plans that they truly hope, like an insurance policy, will turn out to be a colossal waste of time. But, having those plans can prove invaluable if something goes wrong and you need to work quickly to activate one or more of the plans.
HOW MUCH IS ENOUGH?
Effective contingency planning is rooted in believing the possibilities of your dark imaginings and the pragmatism of your problem-solving capabilities. Understanding how many, for which, and what kinds of imagined adversities we should plan for always starts with the things that have the greatest potential to go wrong, and those with the greatest safety, financial, and reputational implications. Plans B, C, and D may address different issues and varying levels of severity. You may need a Plan B to deal with a two-week delay in a product’s launch date, a Plan C to address a three-month delay, a Plan D to identify expenses targeted for reduction when revenues are forecasted to fall short of expectations, and a Plan E to quickly reconfigure a marketing campaign threatened by the misbehavior of a hired spokesperson.
How many contingency plans should you develop? As many as you can afford to create, especially for circumstances that can significantly affect the success of your outcome. My advice, after you’ve considered every possibility, is to treat yourself to a beer or glass of wine. Then, get back to it, because you’ve only considered every possibility that you have imagined so far. How detailed and robust should those plans be? Those plans should be as detailed and robust as necessary to make them effective and actionable, because a contingency plan that does not address how severe a challenge can be is truly a wasted effort if that crisis strikes.
Contingency plans for Super Bowl XLV—held on February 6, 2011, at Cowboys Stadium (now AT&T Stadium), in Arlington, Texas—anticipated the possibility of snow and cold the way the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex usually experiences it. Frozen precipitation is certainly a possibility in February, but more often than not, whatever falls melts away within a day or two. If probabilities worked against us, it would choose to snow precisely on the morning of the event like it did the prior year, when more than 12 inches fell right before the NBA All-Star Game. But, for the preceding 24 years before 2010, no winter in Dallas saw a total as much as the 4.3 inches that blanketed the region the week of the Super Bowl. We were prepared for that, or so we thought.
Recognizing the possibility of wintry conditions descending during the hours and days leading up to the game, the North Texas Super Bowl Host Committee dedicated one of their key logistics experts to the task of developing a winter weather response plan. We did not need a plan that cleared frozen precipitation from the entire region, just the parking lots, major highways, and primary routes between key locations like the stadium, team hotels, practice facilities, media center, and headquarters hotels, shrinking the focus of snow-clearing activities to “just” 1,600 square miles.
Depots of snow melting materials and sawdust were established at strategic locations throughout the area and spreader trucks from other, more snow-susceptible cities in Texas were redeployed to the Dallas–Fort Worth area. A winter weather command center was established to coordinate clearing activities and detailed schedules were developed to prioritize which routes required the most urgent attention at any given hour on any given day.
For most of the month leading up to Super Bowl XLV, it looked like we and our host committee partners had invested time and talent on a wasted exercise. Then freezing rain, sleet, and snow began falling the Monday night of Super Bowl week. The winter weather command center was activated and began monitoring roadway conditions across the region. A fleet of trucks hit the roads to spread the stockpiled chemicals that were effective at temperatures above 20 degrees. Unfortunately, the mercury had plummeted overnight to the single digits and teens. By then, every asphalt surface was glazed with ice and nearly impassable, forcing the closure of schools and many businesses for a solid week.
I cautiously negotiated my car through a 19-mile labyrinth of stranded tractor-trailers and SUVs, their headlights pointing in every direction along Interstate 30. Tuesday was Super Bowl Media Day at Cowboys Stadium and, notwithstanding the hazards on the road, the two teams and the media had to likewise serpentine between the obstacles on the highways to the event. The media and the Green Bay Packers were staying in downtown Dallas; the Pittsburgh Steelers were lodged in downtown Fort Worth, 35 miles apart. With highways better suited to ice hockey than motor traffic, that proved to be a suboptimal strategy. Pittsburgh’s buses crept with glacial deliberateness into the stadium parking lot, led by a truck spreading a superfluous carpet of sand before them. Steelers owner Art Rooney, Jr., was the first to alight from the bus and only the first to remark that “this was a bad plan.”
We had a reasonably good contingency plan to
deal with snow and ice as is occasionally experienced in North Texas, but not robust enough to cope with the sudden, unreasonably colder-than-normal temperatures we experienced for the week. Because of the materials we chose to deploy, our finely-detailed and expertly-crafted snow removal plan was essentially useless; our plan was an intricate and fully thought out half-measure in the unusually extreme conditions. We were confident in the plan that assembled an impressive fleet of spreaders and a massive quantity of materials. Not once did we ask ourselves “what if it’s even colder and for even longer?”
PLANNING FOR THE PREDICTABLE
In the northeast, it is completely predictable that measurable snow will accumulate throughout the winter and if our plan for Super Bowl XLVIII had been to count on the sun to melt the ice, we could have been waiting until April. The Super Bowl had been staged in winter-weather cities before, but never in a stadium open to the elements. In Dallas, we only had to worry about how people would get to and around the city, but we were presented a whole new level of complexity at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey. The weather could affect every aspect of the game itself, from the field and sidelines to the grandstand and concourses, and safety was our number one concern.
New Yorkers may complain loudly and often, but other than transforming our airports into some of the world’s most hopeless and densely-populated dormitories, snow doesn’t usually stop us. It just slows us down. Since accumulating snow was predictable at some point over the winter, we had to plan as though the Farmer’s Almanac was even more right. What if a blizzard event actually did strike the region at the worst possible moment? Or, at a moment that was only a little better than the worst? If the storm smacked us on Super Bowl Sunday itself, crippled the region’s roads and railroads, and rendered the stadium unsafe for fans or players, how and when would we be able to play the game? Monday Night Football was not unheard of. Tuesday night was also an option. What if the snowfall was so prodigious and the wind was so powerful that essential infrastructure and services were severely crippled, and first responders and equipment had to be redirected from game-day operations to emergency management duties?
What to Do When Things Go Wrong Page 7
