Have you ever been stuck in traffic and wondered whether it would be faster to walk than to sit there? Phil Pritchard KNEW he could. So, he tugged Lord Stanley’s box out of the cab, while he was still blocks from the Forum, and pushed the box across the ice coating Boulevard René Lévesque in the -24 °C (-11 °F) temperature. He couldn’t tell us any of this because, alas, we did not possess the brick-sized phones available in 1993. When he arrived at the truck entrance to the Forum, Phil’s face and extremities were red from the cold, but his hardy Canadian core was successfully warmed by the exertion, victorious over hypothermia. Lord Stanley, in his metallic glory, was not so lucky. All three dozen pounds of his gleaming, finely polished silver skin had cooled to the below-zero temperatures outside, so when it was quickly thrust into The Rocket’s hands, it was simply too cold to handle. It fell from his grasp, pealed like a church bell, and lay sad and dented on the Forum ice.
No matter what would happen over the course of the day, it would be hard to get past having damaged the Stanley Cup. That’s because the TV monitor, tuned to the live French-Canadian broadcast, treated viewers to repeated slow-motion replays of the moment of infamy from multiple camera angles, with close-ups on the looks of anguish by the players. Happy birthday, Lord Stanley!
DON’T BLAME IT ON THE BOSS
I fully acknowledge my slight tendency toward obsessive-compulsive behavior. Left to my own devices, I would have never planned to have the Stanley Cup show up a half-hour, or even an hour before we needed it. I’d have wanted to have it there at least two hours, maybe even three hours, before the event began. My boss needed it at his sponsor brunch, and I hoped all would go exactly as planned, and if it did, it would be there in time. Well, we all know how often everything goes exactly as planned.
It’s hard to argue with bosses, especially in your first year on the job. But I have found that at least some of them are reasonable and willing to negotiate with you if you spell out the things that could go wrong and that could wind up embarrassing them along with yourself. It was incumbent on me to lay out the consequences of something going wrong and negotiating Lord Stanley’s release before the end of the brunch. We could have even created a ceremony for its exit from the ballroom. I didn’t do that, and I owned the problem as a result. The outcome was my fault, not his.
Truly, hope is not a strategy. I should have abandoned hope and instead articulated the ramifications of the Cup arriving late for myself and my boss. He may well have agreed that the risk was too great not to allow us to move the trophy to the arena before the brunch was over and the entire episode might have been avoided. It is equally possible that despite my diplomatic best, my boss would have chosen to not agree to cooperate. It would still be my fault, not his. I should have had contingency plans for that possibility, as well, long before we were faced with the necessity for last-minute, and ultimately flawed, decision-making.
In hindsight, I realize that a contingency plan was required, including the need to closely monitor the weather’s effect on traffic and making another pitch to the boss when conditions favorable to gridlock were developing. Further, we should have had a plan on what to do if the trophy simply did not arrive at the arena by a certain time. We could have, for instance, had a plan that would have moved the presentation to an intermission, or during a break in the middle of the game.
We didn’t have a contingency plan in place, so I made the decision to cancel the original plan and move on, and then hastily I un-canceled it after Phil’s desperate dash to the arena. We were so relieved that the Cup had so miraculously appeared at the last moment that no one had considered its “too-cold-to-handle” condition. At the potential cost of ignoring the centennial, and with no other plan ready to activate, we urgently put the Cup into the Rocket’s hands. Our entire plan fell apart because its underpinning was based purely on the hope that the Cup would be there. That wasn’t the boss’s responsibility. It was mine.
When we don’t, or can’t, win an argument with our boss, it’s up to us to develop the contingency plans required to deal with the problem should we end up being right and things go wrong as a result. Being right, but not prepared, will be no consolation.
“SUPERSTITION AIN’T THE WAY”
Coaches, athletes, event organizers, and normal humans frequently invest in a form of hope when they embrace superstitions, activities they believe will avoid or lead to certain outcomes. Some athletes refuse to shave or alter their pregame meal during the playoffs. Michael Jordan was thought to have worn his lucky University of North Carolina shorts under his Chicago Bulls uniform, inspiring the trend of players wearing longer shorts in the NBA. Baseball fans often join their home team’s players, sporting their “rally caps” backwards and inside-out to encourage a come-from-behind shot at taking the lead. Do they work? Maybe a little bit in the locker room. As Yogi Berra is quoted as having said, “Baseball is 90 percent mental. The other half is physical.” If athletic performance is dependent on mental and emotional preparedness in addition to the physical, then superstitious routines may help reinforce confidence to some degree. Any small competitive edge can make the difference between winning and losing.
I’m not sure the same holds true off the field. If performing a ritual superstition is a way to make yourself feel better, I suppose there’s no harm in it. But if it’s a way to “protect” yourself and your project, it’s doing you no good at all. Perhaps quite the opposite.
Hawaiian Ti Leaves to Repel Evil and Bring Good Luck
I learned the event business at Radio City Music Hall from a mentor, genius, and certified crazy person, who oversaw all the shows the company produced outside the theater. He was as creative as they come. He was a perfectionist who demanded that every detail was addressed. While producing an event at the Waikiki Shell in Honolulu, Barnett Lipton noticed local stagehands carefully hiding Hawaiian Ti leaves around the site. Local tradition suggests that in the right hands, the Ti plant possesses properties that repel evil and bring good luck. One of the elements of luck that Barnett had most hoped for in this humid tropical environment was an evening under the stars without rain, and he was indeed blessed with just such an evening.
We find it easy to believe superstitions when they seem to “work” much of the time. For as long as I worked with Barnett, he insisted we find a local florist, in every city every time we staged an event, to procure a supply of Hawaiian Ti leaves. At first, I thought he was kidding, but he was deadly serious.
Back when the summer and winter Olympics were held the same year, the U.S. Olympic Committee staged an enormous multisport event just for American athletes during the three intervening years, called the U.S. Olympic Festival. Barnett produced the opening and closing ceremonies for the 1989 U.S. Olympic Festival in Norman, Oklahoma, and I was the associate producer in charge of talent. Part of my job was to manage the enormous number of rehearsals during the month leading up to the event. Some of the rehearsals were held at Memorial Stadium; others were held on football fields dotted throughout the area. One evening, we were rehearsing a segment that involved a few hundred local dancers when the skies to our south darkened ominously to a deep purple-black, punctuated by forks and brilliant flashes of lightning and deep rumbles of thunder. An open football field surrounded by metal grandstands is one of the last places you want to be in a thunderstorm, so we stopped the rehearsal and moved everyone to shelter. As powerful as nature’s sound-and-light show was, the storm skittered off somewhere beyond the end zone and we never saw a drop of rain in the stadium. Rehearsals resumed after about 20 minutes. Afterwards, the two-mile drive back to the hotel was sobering. The state road running outside the University of Oklahoma was flooded with deep, nearly impassable ponds of rainwater and covered with thick, heavy tree branches.
Barnett was in the lobby waiting for me and looked relieved when I drove up. A severe microburst had ripped through the area dropping hail and torrential rain. At the stadium, however, we had already hidden Ti leaves at every ent
rance to the field, under the stage deck, and behind the speaker stacks. Even Barnett was impressed, and you can bet your lucky socks I made sure, without being asked, that there were Hawaiian Ti leaves ready for every event from then on.
I brought that hope with me when I went to work for the NHL, and there were Ti leaves hidden all over the Montreal Forum on the day when the Stanley Cup made its rapid descent to the ice. That was the day that I learned that although plants can do amazing things, like making their own food out of sunlight, at least in my hands they can’t keep bad things from happening. I gave up investing any hope in superstitions, even ones that seemed to work sometimes. More importantly, I realized that the very notion of investing in hope itself is a counterproductive endeavor. I wouldn’t say that giving up hope as a strategy helped me to sleep better. Quite the contrary, it kept me up nights more often. I recognized that hoping a reality into existence isn’t the same as helping it into existence. We can’t really affect the outcome with hope, or truly apply it to being totally prepared for everything that can go wrong—like a winter storm in Montreal or a torrential cloudburst in Oklahoma.
8
PREPARE FOR ANYTHING
Are your plans actionable for all you can foresee going wrong and not just plans that look good on paper? If you have committed to giving up on hope as a preparation strategy and you have begun developing the contingency plans that are most likely to be activated when things go wrong, it is time to start leveraging the essential tools that will inoculate you, your project, and your company when they do.
You and your team have been working around-the-clock, missing meals, and losing sleep over every detail of your core plan and everything you can imagine that could possibly go wrong. You have pored endlessly over the schedules, deadlines, processes, and formulas to move your project forward. You have identified potential weaknesses, flaws, delays, bottlenecks, and threats, and have developed contingencies that will guide your course of action should one or any combination of those things transpire. You believe you have plans that provide the framework for what you will do in case of a labor dispute, an engineering failure, a structural deficiency, a regulatory challenge, or the malfeasance of key staff members or spokespeople. But the work is far from over.
YEAH, WE’VE GOT THAT COVERED
Do we have that covered? Do we really? It is certainly tempting to think so.
Perceiving potential threats to success and drafting the responses we believe to be most appropriate to deal with them provide only the blueprints for contingency planning. We have not yet gone far enough to define a complete and viable course of action.
When architects design a building, their drawings and blueprints convey how the new structure will meet the functional and aesthetic objectives of the developer. They illustrate what the edifice will look like, how it will accommodate the needs of its tenant-customers, and how it will incorporate the requirements of building codes that keep occupants and visitors safe.
However, what blueprints do not do by themselves is tell the engineering and construction teams how to build the building. They tell the contractor exactly where the massive air conditioning unit should be mounted on the rooftop, but don’t provide guidance on when, in the construction process, it should be installed, or how it will get up there.
Our project contingency plans are like that. We apply our training, intelligence, and skills to developing the right blueprint for handling various challenges. The preparation process, however, may not be complete until we have determined how we and our teams will put those plans into action. Until then, they may only look good on paper.
As the architects of our projects, we know how to develop plans that will define how our Plan A will be constructed. We are also the operations team that must analyze and evaluate the contingencies to make sure they will work when we need them. Chances are, our contingency plans will make intellectual sense. The question is, if they are the right ones, have we put enough thought into ensuring they are actionable? Allow me to illustrate.
The crowds of fans on the west side of Cowboys Stadium (now AT&T Stadium) were well in excess of what anyone expected. We had installed nearly 100 magnetometers, walk-through metal detectors, on the east side of the stadium, where all the major parking fields were located. Less than a third of that number were installed on the west side, where only NFL buses were expected to arrive.
The Super Bowl is designated as a National Special Security Event (NSSE) by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, requiring extraordinary measures to protect attendees against potential acts of terrorism and criminal activity. What that means at the Super Bowl is the establishment of a hardened perimeter of concrete barricades and fencing extending no less than 300 feet around the stadium. It is almost always a great deal more than that. The NFL Tailgate Party, a massive pregame extravaganza for 10,000 of the league’s closest friends and business partners, was most often located inside the perimeter, so the guests could be cleared through the magnetometers (mags) on their way to the pregame soiree and then head to their seats in the stadium without additional screening. Areas supporting operational compounds for broadcasting, law enforcement, and equipment storage are also enveloped by the barricades, increasing the amount of fencing to as much as 2 1/2 miles. It makes for a very large footprint.
Because parking permits at the Super Bowl can cost hundreds of dollars, they serve as a great revenue opportunity for the event and also a powerful incentive for fans to find parking somewhere else. As a result, hundreds of fans that year found spaces in cheaper lots west of the stadium, which were operated by pop-up entrepreneurs at fast-food joints, big-box stores, and in residential driveways. The entrance at the west gate was simply overwhelmed with many more people than we had ever expected to show up there. The queues grew to such a length that by the time the gates opened, waiting times for the earliest arrivals to get through security could be expressed in hours.
ASK NOT JUST “WHAT,” BUT “HOW”
The notion that a set of gates could become overcrowded was totally foreseeable every year, and on paper, we had a plan for exactly WHAT we would do. We anticipated directing people away from overburdened gates to entries that were less crowded. When it came time to act, however, we quickly determined that we had no good plan for HOW we would accomplish that. As a result, we learned the hard way that it is essential to not only have a strategy (i.e., to move fans away from more crowded to less crowded gates), but also to have a fully thought out tactic (i.e., how we would move the fans to another gate).
Like Texas itself, Cowboys Stadium is a very big place and the security perimeter more than doubled its footprint. Even some of the streets surrounding the stadium were swallowed up by the perimeter, so any fan who wanted to walk from one side to the other would have to circumnavigate a very long, circuitous, unmarked route to get there.
We began instructing security guards along the queue to inform fans that the wait to enter was much shorter on the other side of the building. Unfortunately, there were no signs to follow or instructions to explain to the fans how they could get to the other side. Also, there was no staff to direct the fans along the way. So rather than abandon an endless, frustratingly slow queue to undertake a lengthy journey to an uncertain fate, fans stayed right where they were, simmering and rightfully unhappy.
Super Bowl XLV, held in 2011 in North Texas, unearthed a great many flaws in the way we planned, managed, and executed our events. We were reasonably skilled at identifying what contingencies we needed to consider, but it was equally important to visualize and develop a realistic plan that defined how we would execute them. Had we added the “how” tactic to our “what” strategy, we would have had a system to communicate wait times, signage to direct fans around the building from the west side to the east side, and staff assigned to assist them along the way. If we had better developed our “how” in this case, we would have also discovered that our blueprint that installed security gates only on two sides of the stadium
was flawed and that the long and arduous route was far too long to be a reasonable alternative.
We feel better prepared when we have imagined a potential obstacle to our success and have developed a response to meet the challenge head on. It is certainly tempting at that point to “tick the box” and move on to the next challenge, but until you’ve fully thought through the course of action, the “how,” you may only have a strategy, and not the tactic that defines a viable contingency plan.
PLANNING FOR THE UNPREDICTABLE
We now know that the first step in contingency planning, identifying the most likely things that could go wrong, and the second step, having a strategy to address the issue if one or more of them do go wrong, comprise an incomplete process without knowing exactly how you will realistically and reliably execute the strategy. But, can we, as counterintuitively as it sounds, develop strategies and tactics to also deal with the unforeseen and unpredictable? The answers are “yes” and “no.”
The more complex our project or plan and the more unpredictability we face, the more things that can go wrong. We cannot have a plan for absolutely everything, but we can get closer to the ideal of a better-prepared system for things we can control, the things we can’t, and even the things we will never see coming. What is unforeseeable to us can often be perceived by others who are not bogged down by the enormous investment of detail and planning that has consumed the core planning group. Fresh sets of experienced eyes, unbiased brain cells, and uninvested investigators can make our preparations stronger.
What to Do When Things Go Wrong Page 9
