A Successful Failure, the Fat Man and Little Boy, and the Principle of Solutions
Plan B evolves from Plan A. So unless you’re a pure start-up, you’re already doing business, working on some kind of Plan A. Evolution begins with the current state of things; therefore, in order to evolve you have to first take inventory of what you have, to take stock of your current tactics. The route a rock climber will take is dependent on the equipment he’s carrying—the length of the rope, the nuts, bolts, cams, crampons, and other things. It’s dangerous to climb on snow and ice without crampons, so if he doesn’t have them his routes are limited to pure rock pathways. Similarly, an architect can’t begin drawing plans for a building unless he understands the materials he’ll use to construct it. Understanding the tactics you have available—and identifying those you need that you don’t have—is vital both in devising an original business plan and in adopting it.
On April 14, 1970, Jack Lousma sat at a console in NASA’s Mission Control Center in Houston. Jack was the capsule communicator, or CAPCOM, for the third flight to the moon. All communications were managed by the CAPCOM, and it was his job to relay information between the flight crew and ground crew. When the flight commander, John Swigert, Jr., said, “Okay, Houston, we’ve had a problem here.” He was speaking to Lousma, who responded, “This is Houston, say again please.”
So began the real-life drama portrayed so well in the popular movie about the crisis. Apollo 13 is a dramatic example of evolving a successful Plan B. Once NASA had defined the new problem it had to solve, it dramatically changed the strategy and the objectives of the mission. Lousma turned around to signal Gene Kranz, the flight director, man responsible for mission operations, and ultimate decision maker for the flight. Kranz had heard the exchange between Swigert and Lousma and was already making his way across the room to the main flight control console. Kranz was a no-nonsense, crusty former fighter pilot who was a close friend of Swigert and Lousma. He wore a trademark flattop, like a marine’s, and was dressed in a white vest designed and sewn by his wife. Kranz was able to put together a brilliant Plan B by weighing all the options he had available, and in order to determine those options, his first order of business was to take an inventory of his resources.
Apollo 13 was several days into the mission, 200,000 miles from Earth and headed toward the moon, when the incident occurred. A minute before Swigert’s famous “problem” message, Lousma had directed the flight crew to stir the cryogenic tanks. Hydrogen and oxygen naturally separate, stratify, and so give false quantity readings. A minute after the stir the astronauts heard a loud bang, followed by a loss of electrical power and the unintended firing of the attitude control thruster. Lovell thought that a meteor had hit the spacecraft. Actually, the oxygen tank had exploded when the wires to the stirring fan short-circuited and ignited the insulation and then the contents of the tank. Initially, though, no one knew what had happened.
Gene Kranz immediately took control. For the next few minutes, he assessed the situation. It was dire. Not only had the crew lost most of their oxygen, they were also running short on electricity and water. Within two hours, most of the oxygen in the command module was gone and the crew was faced with little or no power. They faced dehydration and, ultimately, asphyxiation.
Kranz quickly changed the mission of the flight from landing on the moon to getting the astronauts home alive. He gathered his ground crew in a conference room just down the hall from the control room. In the room were the men responsible for navigation, guidance, communication, life support, electric power, water management, crew safety, and propulsion. He asked each of them for a status report. What resources did they have available? And what resources did they need? Then he took out a folder that contained the emergency abort plans that had been drawn up three years earlier. He read the highlights of the plan to the team. It called for a direct abort trajectory, that is, using the main engines of the command module to reverse the direction of the spacecraft and head back to Earth. As Kranz relayed this information, the propulsion director started shaking his head. “We can’t do it,” he said. A direct abort, he explained, is feasible when a spacecraft is still in earth orbit or under the gravitational pull of the earth. At this point in the mission, however, the craft was more than halfway to the moon and thus under the moon’s gravitational pull. Besides, the command module had lost enough electrical power to make the firing of the engines impossible. Whoever had drawn up the contingency plans hadn’t foreseen a case in which an emergency happens more than halfway to the moon.
So Kranz began working on a Plan B, using the inventory of resources he had listed on his legal pad. The strategy was ingenious. He called it a “free return” option. They’d use the pull of gravity of the moon to slingshot the command module around the backside of the moon and then, using a carefully timed burn, push the module out of moon orbit and into a trajectory back to Earth. Immediately, though, the life-support officer deemed the idea impossible. The module had lost power, water, and oxygen and couldn’t support the crew for the four days it would take to do the slingshot. “Okay, then,” Kranz said, “what about using the lunar module as a lifeboat?”
Once again, his team began taking inventory of the resources. The lunar excursion module (LEM) was a separate spacecraft designed to take two astronauts from moon orbit down to the surface and back up again. It could sustain two people for two days. Now Kranz was suggesting that it support three people for four days. His life-support officer thought it could work.
The LEM had enough oxygen to repressurize itself after several “moon walks,” which could now be repurposed to support the three astronauts. And since it used batteries instead of fuel cells, it also had electricity and water available. The propulsion and life-support officers said the margins were razor-thin and they’d have to keep the LEM at the lowest possible power levels. But then another objection came up; since the LEM hadn’t been designed to have three people in it for four days, there would be a toxic buildup of carbon dioxide that would asphyxiate the crew after a few days. The command module had several canisters of lithium hydroxide that was used to “scrub” the carbon dioxide out of its air but they were incompatible with the LEM’s system. So Kranz created a tiger team to solve the problem. A few hours later they had jury-rigged a device they called “the mailbox” that joined the cube-shaped canisters to the cylindrical sockets in the LEM by drawing air through a hose from a space suit.
There were dozens of other problems to solve. For example, the command module wasn’t designed to be powered down and then restarted again in midflight. But that’s exactly what they’d have to do since they’d have to get back into the module in order to reenter Earth’s atmosphere. Another tiger team was sent to another conference room to figure out how to do it.
And so the crew of three abandoned the module and moved to the LEM for the next few days. Because power was so limited, no more live TV broadcasts were made and even voice communications were sparse. The nation held its breath, and four days later the astronauts splashed down in the Pacific Ocean, four miles from the recovery ship.
A Successful Failure
We can only imagine the intense pressure that Kranz, Lovell, and the others felt following the explosion and the resulting drama of getting the astronauts home safely. A few weeks later NASA called the mission a “successful failure.” To this day, the crew still holds the Guinness world record for having traveled farther away from the planet than any other human beings (the farthest point being the back side of the moon orbit during the slingshot trajectory). For us, it’s the ultimate Plan B and illustrates several important concepts when it comes to the evolutionary execution of a plan. We can’t make good adjustments without understanding the tactics available to make them. In solving the Apollo 13 crisis, Gene Kranz intuitively knew that before he could make adjustments to the original plan, he had to take inventory of the resources at hand—how much oxygen did the spacecraft have? how much power? water? propulsion?—and the tactics they had available.
Too often in business, strategic decisions are made without a rigorous understanding of and consideration for the tactics that can be employed, and too often business managers are asked to solve problems without the tools they need to do so.
So before you begin constructing a Plan A, and before you begin making adjustments to it to create Plan B, you have to take a tactical inventory of your business. That means going through your tactics, one by one, to make sure that they are consistent with the problem you are solving and your hypothesis for solving it.
Taking a Tactical Inventory
Before Eisenhower constructed the plans for D-Day, he and his team took an inventory of the men, machinery, weapons, aircraft, and seagoing vessels they had available for the invasion. They then used the inventory to create a range of possible scenarios. They could land at Calais or Cherbourg or on the beaches of Normandy. For Ike, Normandy was the most interesting scenario because it was the least likely place and so had the fewest Nazi defenders. But that solution, as we’ve discussed, created a new set of problems: how to unload troops, materials, weapons, tanks, supplies, and other materials on a barren beach. Like Kranz, Ike used his tactical inventory to devise an ingenious solution: they’d build a temporary harbor out of the boats, landing craft, docks, and other materials scattered across the southern reaches of the United Kingdom.
This is a practice that few businesses formally use. As we’ve said, the separation of tactics and strategy is one of the fundamental flaws in the planning and execution processes of most businesses today, and the first step in solving this problem is for a business to develop a deep understanding of its tactics.
In the last chapter, I explained the core health care problem that Kaiser Permanente set out to solve: reducing high costs while improving the quality of care. The company then established the hypothesis that providing an incentive to diagnose early, treat quickly, and reduce the length of chronic care would solve this problem—or go a long way toward doing so. It was a great theory but one that would take a lot of work to implement. How did Kaiser make it happen?
In working with one of the divisions of Kaiser to do just that, our first order of business was to list all of the tactics available. For Kaiser the list is huge because the business model is so complex. This means that a tactical inventory is even more important. We came up with two major groupings, which followed from the fact that KP is a combination of a care provider (doctors and hospitals) and an insurance company.
The care part of the company has thousands of specific tactics, including checkups, medical records, diagnosis procedures, diagnosis equipment, operating procedures, operating equipment, patient experience, and so on. The list is huge but important to create and essential for the leaders of the care part of the company to understand. Once this list is created, we can then go through it, step by step, to align the tactics with KP’s strategy and hypothesis for solving the defined problem. For example, since early diagnosis is a critical part of our business model, it means that it requires yearly checkups of its members, early screenings, and a deep investment in diagnostic equipment. This is what we mean by alignment. It is as a result of this work, that, as mentioned before, 90 percent of Kaiser members who get breast cancer are diagnosed in the early stages of the disease versus about 67 percent for the national average.
The insurance part of the company also has thousands of specific tactics. These include underwriting, pricing, various insurance plan options, customer service, marketing, advertising, sales, account management, and member communications. Like the care tactics, it needs to align the insurance tactics with its strategy. For example, KP has to align its member communications and advertising tactics with its overall strategy, meaning it needs to educate consumers as to the theory behind the model and the benefits of it to members. It must do this with its communication tactics, including its website, television advertising, brochures, billboards, radio, e-mails, and enrollment fairs at large companies.
Taking a tactical inventory is not a onetime thing. It needs to become part of your ongoing business process, and, as we’ll see later in the book, the evolution of a business model is driven, in great part, by the understanding of available tactics and evolution of new ones. We must constantly improve our existing tactics and look for new ones to employ. For example, during our work at Kaiser we were not using social media as part of our communication mix, and we’ve now included it in our inventory.
Your tactical inventory will give you and your organization tactical awareness, helping you to think in terms of strategic alignment and allowing you to better assess your strategy, whether you are playing the right game, and whether you have the resources to actually solve the problems you’ve identified and to do so better than your competitors.
The Principle of Solutions
You should think of the constant assessment of your tactics as the ongoing search for new and improved solutions to your problems. This is the principle of solutions. The adaptive manager is the one who’s always working to expand her inventory of tactics and improve them. To be an adaptive manager, you should constantly be studying other businesses with similar problems to discover more effective tactics and have people working specifically on tactical development. I would even go so far as to suggest that larger companies create the position of vice president of tactical development.
Some managers are so tactically focused that they even develop parallel projects: two sets of business models operating independently, solving the same problem but doing so in different ways. For example, Procter & Gamble makes several different laundry detergents with different brands that employ different tactics. But the most dramatic example is the one created by J. Robert Oppenheimer, the theoretical physicist who managed the Manhattan Project during World War II. Oppenheimer was the epitome of an adaptive manager.
The Fat Man and Little Boy
In January 1939, before the outbreak of World War II and before the Nazis invaded Poland, two German chemists, Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann, stunned the scientific community by successfully splitting a uranium atom by bombarding it with neutrons. A month later, Robert Oppenheimer, working through the math, realized that an atom bomb could, theoretically, be constructed using a similar technique. Later in the year, as war became eminent, Albert Einstein sent a letter to President Franklin Roosevelt that warned him “that extremely powerful bombs of a new type may be constructed.” He continued, “… a single bomb of this type, carried by a boat and exploded in port, might very well destroy the whole port together with some of the surrounding territory.” Roosevelt established a committee to explore the idea, but for two years nothing really happened.
Then, in 1942, Roosevelt became more and more interested in “the bomb.” He created the Manhattan Project and assigned General Leslie Groves, a tough and no-nonsense administrator to the project (Groves had just completed the construction of the Pentagon, the largest building in the world, and had done so ahead of schedule and under budget). Groves was given an open checkbook and told to recruit the top scientists in the country. It would become the largest engineering project in the history of the country, employing 130,000 people and costing more than $22 billion in today’s dollars. Though Groves was a competent engineer, he knew very little about theoretical physics and even less about quantum mechanics. He needed a scientific director to lead the project, and on his short list was the name J. Robert Oppen-heimer.
Though no one denied Oppenheimer’s brilliance, few thought he was right for the job. He had no administrative experience, and he was considered eccentric, somewhat aloof, and rather condescending. The FBI actually considered him a security risk because at Berkeley he’d dabbled in left-wing politics, and he was thought to be a clandestine member of the Communist Party. His brother and wife, after all, were both “card-carrying Communists,” as were many of his friends and associates. And he was a theoretical physicist, not an applied scientist or engineer. This was clearly a project that needed to bridge the gap between theory and application. Even so, Groves picked him for the job, and, much to most people’s surprise, he became a brilliant leader and administrator. As Victor Weisskopf, one of the renowned scientists working with him, later recalled:
He did not direct from the head office. He was intellectually and even physically present at each decisive step. He was present in the laboratory or in the seminar rooms, when a new effect was measured, when a new idea was conceived. It was not that he contributed so many ideas or suggestions; he did so sometimes, but his main influence came from something else. It was his continuous and intense presence, which produced a sense of direct participation in all of us; it created that unique atmosphere of enthusiasm and challenge that pervaded the place throughout its time.
The problem Oppenheimer was solving was splitting the atom, and there were two possible theoretical solutions, both based on the idea that there are two types of forces, strong and weak, that hold the nucleus of an atom together. It you break those forces, as a side effect, a tremendous amount of energy is released. The first theory is called fission, and it involves the splitting of an atom into two smaller parts. The second is called fusion, and it involves bringing two atoms together (that is how the sun produces energy). Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann had proved that fission is possible, so Oppenheimer chose to concentrate his team of thousands on the making a fission bomb. Edward Teller, on the other hand, was the lone believer in a fusion bomb and headed up a team of one that conducted a parallel development of the idea. Years later he’d become the father of the H-bomb, the fusion bomb, and a much more powerful weapon.
With the fission bomb, there were thousands of tactical decisions that needed to be made to solve thousands of cascading problems. The two highest levels of those subproblems were making the fuel for the device and constructing a triggering mechanism. The splitting of an atom requires that the atom be unstable, and it turned out that uranium and plutonium are the easiest elements to split because their atoms are the most unstable. Oppenheimer couldn’t decide which material was best, so, again, parallel projects were conducted. In Oak Ridge, Tennessee, a huge plant was constructed to manufacture the type of uranium needed, and at the same time in Hanford, Washington, another plant was constructed to manufacture plutonium.
Meanwhile, various triggering devices were tested. Again, two different tactics emerged as the most promising. One was called the “gun approach,” and it involved shooting an atom at another atom; the other was called the “implosion approach,” and it involved compressing an atom using chemical explosions. As it turned out, for technical reasons, the gun approach works best with uranium and the implosion approach works best with plutonium. So Oppenheimer paralleled those tactics as well.
This eventually led to two separate bomb designs: a large plutonium bomb with charges that caused an implosion (it would be the second bomb, the one dropped on Nagasaki and known as “Fat Man”) and a smaller uranium bomb that was triggered with a gun charge (known as “Little Boy,” the one dropped on Hiroshima). As you know, both were successful designs. This is the epitome of how an adaptive manager can use a focus on the tactical solutions to all subproblems to evolve an effective, flexible plan. Or, in this case, two separate plans.