We have all heard the expression “take a deep breath” when we react too quickly, too angrily, or yes, too anxiously. That is spectacularly appropriate advice because a common reaction to stress is hyperventilation, a greatly increased pattern of breathing that can significantly amplify anxiety and lead to an attack of panic. Hyperventilation literally changes your blood chemistry, increasing the percentage of oxygen in your bloodstream and greatly reducing the level of carbon dioxide. As a result, the affected person can start to feel shortness of breath, sick, and dizzy; these sensations of losing physical control, in turn, can further increase anxiety. The old remedy of breathing into a paper bag works because breathing back in what you just breathed out rebalances the level of carbon dioxide in the bloodstream. So, when you feel that first release of adrenaline, by all means take that deep breath, engage your cerebrum, and get to work solving the problem. That’s how you will combat your own panic.
PANIC IS CONTAGIOUS
There is another important reason to take that deep breath and to consciously redirect your anxiety to problem solving. That is because panic is contagious. It is particularly virulent if you are leading the team evaluating and managing the problem. If we exhibit symptoms of panic, one of two things are inevitable. The first is that some members of your team will also tend to panic. They will think: “People around me, including our leader, are losing control, so things must be hopelessly and irretrievably messed up.” The second alternative is perhaps a little better. Your team will begin to ignore you and concentrate on what they need to do to avoid panicking themselves. Remember, panic is often characterized by irrational behavior. Who is going to take remedial cues from someone who is not thinking logically or clearly?
It is also difficult for team members to maintain their own composure under stress if another teammate is exhibiting the debilitating symptoms of anxiety or panic. As poorly behaving colleagues can have a deleterious effect on the team’s overall response, it is often best to remove those people from the situation until they have recomposed themselves, assuming they can at all. It is not usually effective to simply instruct overreacting participants to calm down, especially when they are in the throes of an extreme case of anxiety and panic. It is better to separate them from the response, and if possible, remove them physically from the scene.
An experience described in the Report of the Director of Hawaii’s Emergency Management Authority illustrates this point. (See Chapter 18.) The individual who activated the alarm failed to respond to instructions to send a notification canceling the civil defense message and instead sat inertly and confused at his station. Another team member had to take control of the dazed individual’s computer to send the cancellation. According to the report’s findings, the unresponsive team member did not contribute in any way to the effort to correct or recover from the incident.
Fortunately, “not panicking” is likewise contagious. A calm-and-focused environment encourages everyone working on a problem to behave similarly. There was certainly a sense of urgency at NFL Control to get power restored as quickly as possible, and there was a significant amount of uncertainty as to what had really happened. There was an enormous amount of stress when the lights first went out and the combined biomass of the room was no doubt thick with adrenaline. But there were no raised voices, no pounding of tables, and no fleeing to the exits. There was only an atmosphere of “What do we do now to get the lights back on and what do I need to do to help with the response . . . just like I did 10 days ago?” Thanks to the drills we had performed, switching from being held hostage by our limbic systems to applying our cerebrums to overcome them was a completely familiar tack.
We did not take flight, physically or emotionally. We stayed to fight through the problem mentally. Immediately after I asked Doug Thornton for his insights into “What do we do and when do we do it?” we recognized that the fans in the stands had even less information than we did. All they knew was that the lights had gone out. Connectivity to the outside world, and within the stadium, was extremely limited. All data access points, telephone antennae, and radio transmitters on our side of the stadium were dead, but the other side of the stadium was still powered, and it was likely that fans were checking their social media feeds and texting their friends and families. We did not know what rumors and misinformation might be circulating and we had to ensure that those rumors, or the absence of information, did not increase anxiety or incite group panic. We didn’t have much information yet, but it was essential for us to be the source of the most authoritative information as soon as possible, with whatever we had.
With no power to the video screens, we could start texting to the opt-in database of ticket holders, but the only way to get to everyone was with an announcement over the public address system. Most stadium and arena PA systems have backup batteries for just such life-safety purposes. The public address announcer, however, was not at NFL Control. He was in the booth where controls for the video scoreboard and audio systems were located, on another level of the stadium. We hurriedly sketched out a script for him, and one of our teammates sprinted down the darkened staircase to get him the message: “Ladies and gentlemen, we have experienced a partial interruption in electrical service. Please remain in your seat and service will be restored momentarily.” Everybody heard the announcement, but many people didn’t listen.
Instead, they got out of their seats and went on a search throughout the concourse for beer taps that were still working. They succeeded. The NFL enjoyed the best half-hour of beer sales in the history of the Super Bowl during the partial power failure. And, while fans were breaking beer consumption records instead of breaking through exit doors, NFL Control got very busy.
20
RIGHT HAS LEFT THE BUILDING
It only takes an instant for the trajectory of your day to change. We are cruising toward success and, suddenly, we see things turn south before our eyes. Or, perhaps we get the bad news from someone else who is passing it along.
“You’ve got to get over here right away.” Unless you’re being invited to your own surprise birthday party, it’s never good if those are the first words you hear when you answer the phone. My adrenal glands slammed into first gear before the sentence was even completed. “Part of the halftime stage collapsed and some of the crew were pinned underneath.” It was the Tuesday night before the game and the halftime team had been practicing the assembly of the stage under a large tent in the Dolphin Stadium parking lot. “Four people have been hurt,” the production manager continued, “and two have been airlifted out by helicopter. The media are all over the place.” There are no secrets at the Super Bowl, especially not at the stadium. Then, the worst of all possibilities: “There may be two fatalities.”
Bill McConnell, our director of event operations, and I had just swallowed the first bite of a long-deferred, late-night bar burger in Fort Lauderdale. “I’ll call you from the car. Let me know the minute you hear anything else.” We threw cash on the table, abandoned our uneaten meals, and ran several blocks to the hotel to grab my car and race the 20 miles to the stadium. On the way, I called our teammates from the media relations department to meet us for the ride back to the stadium. Then, while still huffing back to the hotel, I called Dr. Ric Martinez and filled him in.
“Call the ER in Miami and find out how many injuries there are and how serious.” I told him about the report of fatalities and asked him to speak to no one but the hospital and me. As head of our Super Bowl medical team, Ric had established working contacts with every hospital in the area. While Bill met our media relations team in the hotel lobby, I screeched around to the porte cochère in my SUV. The group of us were on our mobile phones during the entire ride, each communicating with a different set of stakeholders and periodically updating the others as we finished one call and started the next. I had called our legal and finance departments and our insurance agency. Bill was talking to the stadium manager and production director from the halftime crew. Our publ
ic relations (PR) pros were briefing their team and monitoring the latest updates from media reports.
From the freeway exit, we could see satellite dishes reaching into the night sky on the tall, spindly masts projecting from the news vans in the parking lot. We drove into the halftime compound, an area that was routinely prohibited to the media to prevent unauthorized photography of rehearsals, and entered the tent to examine the site of the accident and meet with the producer and his team.
Of anything that could possibly go wrong, the specter of a loss of life overshadowed all else. So we all waited eagerly for Ric to verify the early reports. While we did, we redirected our anxiety to exploring our course of action if, in fact, there were fatalities, and the plans to repair the stage if the League determined to go ahead with the show. The stage designer was already working on the latter.
While we checked our phones constantly for missed calls and updated news, we recollected that the NFL had been faced with a tragic incident in New Orleans a decade earlier. One of 16 bungee jumpers rehearsing the halftime show was killed on the Thursday night before the game, striking her head on the floor of the stadium after a 100-foot fall. Appropriately, the league eliminated the bungee stunt from the show and a graphic memorializing her heartbreaking death accompanied the telecast. Tostitos tortilla chips, a sponsor, canceled the airing of a commercial in which comedian Chris Elliott appeared to bungee-jump from a blimp to within arm’s reach of a football field to delicately dip his chip into a jar of salsa. A company spokesperson acknowledged that the only respectful thing to do was to air a different ad.
I started when Ric rang us back. He was in touch with the emergency room and reported that all four members of the crew were alive and diagnosed with non-life-threatening injuries. All were conscious and one or two were going to be admitted to the hospital to spend the night under observation. Ric was going to stay in touch with the physicians on the case and alert us immediately if anything changed. We all breathed a collective sigh of relief. Aside from wishing the crew members a speedy recovery, the problem the team would be wrestling with was the repair and reinforcement of a broken section of the stage, not the powerfully devastating circumstances of a fatality on the crew. The show on February 7, 2010, featuring The Who, was staged on game day without further incident as part of Super Bowl XLIV’s record-breaking broadcast to 106.5 million American viewers.
DO YOU KNOW IT OR DO YOU BELIEVE IT?
Under the circumstances, it was entirely appropriate to treat the initial speculation about fatalities from the halftime stage collapse as though it was fact. We began preparing, but not acting on that basis because we had not yet verified the rumor. Yes, there was an accident, and that itself was bad enough. We knew with certainty that there were injuries because the production manager who called us had witnessed the collapse himself and immediately called 9-1-1 for assistance. What we didn’t know for sure was how accurate the report of fatalities was until Ric Martinez’s call. Meanwhile, as the stage failure was not among the contingencies we had planned for, we collectively began charting our courses of action for two possibilities:
• What we would recommend if the very worst was true
• What we would need to do if the show was to proceed
There was no time to waste waiting for confirmation of either scenario, so we considered them both.
During our years of working together, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell often pointed to the distinction between “knowing” and “believing” that something is true. For the most part, our conversations related to the other day-to-day responsibilities of my job, but his admonition to distinguish between what we knew and what we believed was even more relevant when confronted with something that has gone horribly wrong. The very first words of the very first conversation, phone call, or text, will activate your body’s instinctive trouble response and set the clock in motion toward recovery. In the meantime, the best place to direct the nervous energy in your adrenaline-spiked bloodstream is to engage your cerebrum and begin applying your problem-solving skills. The first step is to make every effort to verify the information you have received. If you have witnessed the problem with your own eyes, then that may be all the verification you need. If you did not, and are hearing about it from someone else, then the second question might be: “Are you there?” “Did you see it?” or, “How do you know?”
Verify the Details
There was no question that a section of the halftime stage had collapsed. The production manager who called me saw it himself and the very first and most appropriate response was to immediately call for emergency medical assistance. The call to me was secondary to getting the injured crew members to the hospital. What was not clear was the extent of their injuries. I don’t recollect where he had heard that there were fatal consequences, but that was a “do you know or do you believe” moment, and the reason we called Dr. Ric Martinez right away.
Every time something goes wrong, the areas of priority, focus, and action that emerge will be defined by the details. There would have been an agonizing set of consequences if someone had died, so getting clarity on that detail was exceptionally important. Additionally, a media story of greater tragic significance would have been generated, requiring sensitivity and respect. A candid debate, internally and externally, would have ensued on the advisability of staging the halftime show. An investigation of immense gravity would no doubt have been required. The rest of everything we did that week would have to be evaluated in the context of a regrettable new reality. We began preparing for that possibility the moment we received the first call, but knowing that medical personnel had already been on the scene, we started the process of verifying the details so we could concentrate our responses on what we knew, and prepare possible responses for the things we didn’t.
At Super Bowl XL in Detroit, we also knew that an incident involving a star player had unfolded. Though the details were not entirely clear, what I heard was enough to raise the hair on the back of my neck. What fans may best remember about that game were the things that went wrong on the field for the National Football Conference (NFC) champion Seattle Seahawks, and for the NFL’s football operations and officiating departments. A series of exceptionally damaging flags thrown by the officials on the field resulted in what NFL Films ranked as “one of the ten most-controversial games in NFL history,” and what some sports pundits at the time decried as a rigged result favoring the Pittsburgh Steelers of the American Football Conference (AFC). What I most remember, however, was the phone call I received shortly after Seattle Seahawks quarterback (QB) Matt Hasselbeck’s arrival at General Motors World Headquarters earlier that week, and circumstances that would have played very nicely, though falsely, into the hands of the conspiracy theorists.
The building’s large public atrium had been converted into the Super Bowl Media Center’s “Radio Row,” an assembly line of snugly-packed tables where broadcasters from across the country could host their talk shows and sports reports for the week. In car wash fashion, players and coaches, past and present, negotiated through the labyrinth of radio stations, participating in any combination of broadcasts in a very time-efficient manner.
Players and coaches from the competing teams were transported from their hotels or team practice facilities throughout the week in escorted vehicles and driven into the building through a secured underground garage. A guard greeted the two chauffeured cars as they rolled up to the gate, one behind the other. After checking the manifest of expected arrivals against the identities of the passengers in the first car, a guard activated the switch that retracted the heavy steel posts blocking the entrance down into the concrete floor. The system was designed to admit one vehicle at a time, automatically raising the thick, impenetrable posts into position, again obstructing the driveway to repeat the process for the next arriving vehicle. For reasons that are still unclear, the second car in line followed the first through the checkpoint without stopping for the guard as the steel posts ascende
d, impaling the undercarriage of the vehicle containing, yes, you guessed it, Seattle QB Matt Hasselbeck. At least, “impaled” was the word I distinctly remember hearing when I got the call moments later, and that is why my limbic system began doing its job before I could even imagine a helplessly perforated football star being scooped out of a ruined Cadillac, in whole or in part, by the Jaws of Life.
“What do you mean impaled? Is everybody ok?”
“The bollards came through the floor of the car,” was the heart-stopping response. “No one is seriously hurt, but the car is a wreck and we’re not sure, but Hasselbeck may have a neck injury.”
In football culture, it is common practice for coaches to conceal information from the public and the opposing team to maintain any of the advantage that secrecy and uncertainty can generate. The Super Bowl is an exception only in that there is even more of it. So, after the call on roughing the passer’s car, it was not clear whether Hasselbeck’s references to neck pain during his visits to the Media Center would eventually impact his appearance in the game. The cone of silence descended over his condition for the rest of the week. We knew the team’s medical staff was not going to tell us, or Ric, anything. There was nothing we could do to affect the outcome except manage the media response when there was something to respond to, so we returned to our regularly scheduled program of getting ready for the Super Bowl.
What to Do When Things Go Wrong Page 22
