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CAN THIS DAY GET ANY WORSE?
We’ve all been there. A personal or professional crisis suddenly strikes, and the stakes are high. Your heart beats faster. Your blood pressure rises. You alternately feel overheated and chilled; beads of sweat are erupting on your forehead. Things look like they are rapidly heading south, or maybe they have already traversed the equator. You have that hollow feeling in the pit of your stomach and you wonder what you might be doing for a living tomorrow. Your boss and your company are counting on you to make things right. Your family is counting on you to make things right. Your daughter’s orthodontist, ballet instructor, and hockey coach are all counting on you, too.
It might be entirely up to you to make things right and make them right fast. Or, you may be a member of the team that is suddenly catapulted into a murky and unforeseen reality that needs to be navigated to get things back on the right track. Whether you are leading, being led, or totally on your own, the pressure is on and tempers are rising. Things are beginning to look awfully dark, indeed.
If you’ve been so uncommonly lucky that nothing has gone so seriously wrong, as any of the above, for you in your professional, academic, or personal life, let me provide you with a level of confident assurance. It will, and you need to read this book even more quickly and urgently than the rest of us. I guarantee that if nothing has gone seriously wrong for you at least once so far, something is going to go terribly, horribly, and spectacularly wrong sometime, somewhere, and somehow, despite your very best intentions, your painstaking and expert planning, and your unfailingly optimistic worldview. And, when you get past the first thing that goes terribly, horribly, and spectacularly wrong, guess what? There’s another crisis coming, and when it arrives things will look dark all over again, and very possibly even worse.
And, I’m an optimist.
I’ve had days when things looked particularly dark. If you were among the more than 108 million Americans watching Super Bowl XLVII on February 3, 2013, my own encounter with something going terribly, horribly, and spectacularly wrong probably looked pretty dark to you as well. That was when the second power failure of the night hit the Mercedes-Benz Superdome in New Orleans. When the first power failure hit, the San Francisco 49ers defense had already played 30 minutes of football.
What was that moment like, and what were we feeling? Well, imagine the very worst moment you have ever had at the office. If you are very, very lucky, only you or perhaps a handful of customers or clients will notice what went wrong. Imagine, instead, that 80,000 of your best, highest-paying customers are not only keenly aware that things are not going very well, but that every one of them are right outside your door expecting you to make things right. Watching them watch you are more than 3,000 accredited members of the press tweeting, posting, and postulating in real time on the confusion around them in the eerie indoor twilight while you are searching for a solution to a pretty noticeable problem.
Now, imagine tens of millions of TV viewers across America licking Buffalo sauce off their fingers so they can tap their neighbors on the shoulder without leaving greasy, red memories on their jerseys, too. Roughly 18 million more viewers experienced the worst TV moment in Super Bowl history than the pointedly unscheduled guest appearance at a notorious halftime show nine years before.
It couldn’t get any worse, right? No, it’s not a sundae without a cherry. So, let’s top it all off with an award-winning TV journalist and documentary crew from 60 Minutes standing right next to you, with cameras rolling for an ad hoc interview at the very moment you suddenly needed a change of underwear. A little pressure? Yes, you would think, with a generous helping of heart palpitations, cold sweats, and a side of acid reflux.
I’m happy to report that from this point things didn’t get any worse that night. But, they could have. In fact, we may have been mere seconds from what could have instead been an irrevocable, unrecoverable, premature ending to what was then the third most widely-viewed TV program in American broadcast history. Thanks to the quick-thinking team of well-prepared professionals in the Super Bowl’s event control center and throughout the Superdome, things got a lot better. After what Armen Keteyian termed “34 of the most surreal minutes in NFL history,” Super Bowl XLVII resumed to a brighter, if somewhat controversial conclusion, ripe for conspiracy theorists hypothesizing on what exactly went wrong, why, and at who’s behest.
The moment the lights went out in New Orleans was stressful for a lot of people. I felt more than a little of that pressure because I was the NFL’s senior executive in charge of events at the time, and managing the Super Bowl was one of my chief responsibilities. My game-day office was a specially-constructed booth perched high above the crowd called “NFL Control,” the nerve center for Super Bowl operations. From there, every aspect of the game-day experience could be monitored and managed, from football operations and officiating to stadium operations and transportation. Law enforcement and public safety, security, broadcasting, social media, public relations, transportation, medical services, hospitality, and more were all in our team’s hands. NFL Control was well-named because every part of the game-day plan was timed to the second, planned to the square inch, and closely monitored from the beehive of activity in the booth. When something went wrong, NFL Control was either the first to know, or the next to find out. And, the first person to take the heat, well, that was me.
If you manage a project, department, brand, company, or heaven forbid, an event, you’ve been there, too. Things go wrong all the time and you have to make them right when they do. Maybe you’re a team member, project coordinator, customer service representative, or a salesperson. No matter the role, when something goes wrong, you will likely feel some share of the stress generated by the specter of impending failure and what that may mean for your coworkers, friends, or even your own livelihood.
This book will not solve your crisis when something goes wrong. You will. But, this book will give you the tools to help you avoid, forestall, and manage crises when they happen. This book is not designed to turn us into courageous peace officers, fearless soldiers, or brave firefighters. Not in the literal sense, anyway. This book will not turn you into the next airline Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, Apollo 13 Commander James A. Lovell, Jr., or Pakistani activist Malala Yousafzai. Fortunately, the vast majority of things that go wrong will not suddenly plop you in the improbable position of being thrust onto the world stage.
Unfortunately, however, there are a vast number of things that can and will go wrong. You won’t require superhuman Spider-sense, the reaction time of The Flash, or Bondian savoir faire to cope with the challenges you face. But you will need to think ahead, act fast, and stay cool when they do go wrong.
What to Do When Things Go Wrong is about preparing regular people like us, whether we are accomplished in our fields, working our way up, or just starting our career journey, to find effective solutions in a productive and timely manner when we are faced with a challenge to our success. It is a prescriptive playbook designed to prepare us for the blips, bloops, blunders, crises, and disasters we will inevitably encounter, illustrated by real-life stories drawn from the experiences of project managers from sports, live events, business, and life in general, including my own.
THE FIVE PHASES OF CRISIS MANAGEMENT
What to Do When Things Go Wrong will explore the five critical phases of crisis mitigation and management. While not everything that goes wrong is a crisis, many small problems become bigger ones if they are not handled thoughtfully, quickly, and correctly. It is not easy to be thoughtful, quick, and correct all at the same time. So, it is way better to start being thoughtful before something goes wrong than after it has already happened.
1. Imagine
The first step is to Imagine. You can call it brainstorming, or ideation, or “blue-skying”—whatever business buzzword you’d like to apply. Imagining is not the same as planning. Imagining happens before and inspires better planning, but continues throughout the preparation process, and even as planning matures and shifts into execution.
When you start a project, you will almost certainly know your desired outcomes and why they are important. You may have identified some of the strategies that will guide your thinking. You might even have a very good sense of the tactics you will employ to reach your goals. That process—identifying your objectives, developing your strategies, and outlining your tactics—is the well-worn roadmap to success. Great managers are laser-focused on crafting excruciatingly detailed planning documents, schedules, Gantt bar charts, PERT (Program Evaluation Review Technique) flowcharts, and runs of show, which are the tools of the trade to keep projects moving forward. Developing these plans takes experience and expertise, and if everything clicks along just as it should, the desired result is almost certain to be achieved.
Having applied a vivid imagination comes in very handy, however, when things don’t click along. Before that happens, you need to have taken off your rose-colored glasses, put on a pair of shades, and imagined all the things that could go wrong. You don’t have to be Stephen King to perceive the monsters under your bed. Even a child can do it.
2. Prepare
The second step of attenuating the effects of the limitless things that can go wrong, and managing them when they do, is to Prepare. This involves applying all those dark imaginings and analyzing how those scenarios might destroy your expertly crafted plan. Simply, it is planning for the unplanned. You will, no doubt, have a finite amount of resources, ranging from time and money to staff and materials. You will have to decide how to deploy them in ways that are most likely to prevent problems, large and small. In my mind, when I’m thinking about what could go wrong, “prevent” and “prepare” are essentially interchangeable.
3. Execute
The third step is to Execute. Planning and preparation are over. The time to roll out your most ambitious project yet is now. Or, maybe you are facing something less dramatic, but equally important: the day of your big presentation in front of the C-suite suits or the opening of your new bank branch. Execution is putting your impressively meticulous plan into action, all the while remaining vigilant and at the ready to deal with those monsters if they peek their heads out from between your slippers. In many ways, the thing that distinguishes the execution phase of a project is the fact that time becomes both the most important force and the most precious resource. Your roadmap has been set, and your project has been faithfully following the route you’ve laid out, but suddenly, something happens that requires a detour.
4. Respond
What you do when you discover that the bridge is out on the route you intended to follow is the fourth step: Respond. Your imagination helped you develop some clever, foolproof contingency plans. You did all your homework and took every reasonable, and perhaps even a few unreasonable, precautions. You prepared yourself. You prepared your team. And despite all that, something went wrong. Why? It doesn’t really matter right now. That’s a conversation for later. But don’t take it personally; it’s often just a law-of-averages thing. The world is complex and sometimes something out of your control simply goes wrong, for instance, a power outage at the Super Bowl. You must make it right and you have to do it fast because the clock is ticking, and if you don’t . . . well, who knows what might happen. Make the right decision, and you’re back on the road to recovery. Make the wrong decision, and you might just turn a smaller problem into a full-blown disaster. Sometimes making the right decision takes just a little longer than making the wrong one, but that doesn’t mean that time is on your side.
5. Evaluate
The process to candidly evaluate the results of your planning, execution, and response begins soon after the project has concluded, and may continue for weeks or even months. Most efforts are measured against numbers-driven key performance indicators, like net income, sales growth, performance versus budget, attendance, broadcast ratings, or changes in consumer sentiment. Whether things went wrong or flawlessly from an operational perspective, these important metrics can spell disappointment or distress if they are not accomplished to the company’s expectations. The evaluation process should also include a frank assessment of the intangibles that do not always show up on a spreadsheet or in a box score, including what went wrong along the way and why, because fixing them can improve efficiency, delivery, and the bottom line in the future. Then, it’s time to start imagining all over again.
I know that all of this sounds pretty gloomy, and that I’m someone who looks at the glass half-empty. But it’s quite the contrary. When I manage a project, I’m optimistic that all the planning, experience, and education my team and I have accumulated will either drive the desired outcomes or help us manage the situation if those outcomes prove elusive. In order to remain confident, however, I have to play the role of a pessimist and force myself to imagine and prepare for the worst.
How does having managed nine Super Bowls qualify me to help? By itself, it doesn’t. But, when you spend three decades managing more than 200 high-profile sports and entertainment events across the globe for high-profile brands—including the National Football League, the National Hockey League, and Radio City Music Hall—you are bound to encounter a few glitches. More likely hundreds of glitches, in every size, shape, severity, and variety. I’ve learned that the problems don’t always follow patterns, but the solutions often do.
ONE OF THE WORLD’S MOST COMPLEX AND VISIBLE PROJECTS
At their core, events are just projects. They are often very visible, very complex, and very interesting projects, but planning an event is very much like crafting a business plan to start a new company. You identify your objectives, develop a strategy to achieve them, create a budget that allocates your available resources, and focus your team of dedicated subject experts on executing the tactics required to generate the optimal result. Managing events is also very much like overseeing a project to develop a new product, formulate a new marketing plan, expand into new territories, or install a new telecommunications system. All these efforts require meticulous planning and an imagination that can visualize the damage if deadlines are not met, an accident occurs, or a failure unfolds due to either human error or simple bad luck.
The number of things that can go wrong at a “mega-event,” like the Super Bowl, is dizzying. All for a single football game on a Sunday evening, it requires the conversion of the host stadium to accommodate thousands of media, domestic and international broadcast facilities, hospitality pavilions, fan activities, and operational compounds, inside a hardened security perimeter that can require as much as 2½ miles of barricades and fencing. Beyond the sports match, event day includes hours of pregame broadcasts on multiple networks, a 10,000-guest pregame Tailgate Party, and a famously spectacular and highly produced halftime show. Outside of the stadium, the Super Bowl devours tens of thousands of hotel rooms for fans, business partners, and workers; gobbles up convention centers, theaters, and public plazas for a week-long schedule of fan festivals, broadcasts, awards dinners, concerts, and galas; and a dizzying number of parties hosted by the league, business partners, media outlets, charities, and other organizations. Arrangements must be made for indoor and outdoor training facilities for the competing teams, hundreds of charter buses and private planes, hundreds of thousands of square feet of temporary offices, media workrooms, security and law enforcement command posts, and storage facilities dotted across the region.
By game day, as many as 20,000 people—most of them local—will have received credentials as full-time, hourly, volunteer, media, or contractor staff to service the needs of the event, fans, guests, or partner companies of the NFL. Even if the program of activities was exactly the same each year, the process of acquiring and managing all of these assets and coordinating the diverse schedule of events that they support requires an enormous planning effort because the Super Bowl moves to a different location each year. As a result, the Super Bowl occupies an entirely different footprint annually based on the size, layout, opportunities, challenges, and the political vagaries of each host region. The Super Bowl is truly a “mega-event” composed of millions of details, and as anyone who has worked on a mega-event will tell you, it is inevitable that something, somewhere, sometime, will go wrong every time. Hopefully they are small, largely unnoticed problems, but sometimes, they are large, and very noticed. But, with so many moving parts, it is impossible to avoid the occurrence of at least some of those blips, bloops, and blunders.
LEARNING FROM THE THINGS THAT GO WRONG
Looking after Super Bowls, as well as many other mega-events over my career, I’ve had my share of uncomfortable moments that generated some combination of annoyance, frustration, anxiety, and stress. They often produced disappointment, anger, nausea, and self-doubt. But, as they inevitably piled up over more than 25 years of managing major sports events, I started to notice a number of consistent truths, and those led to learning how to plan better and how to more capably manage when things went wrong.
It is often said that you learn more from things that go wrong than from things that go right. I heartily agree. But between you and me, I would rather learn from things that went wrong for someone else. That’s the priceless opportunity that this book gives you: to learn from my mistakes.
Some of the things that have gone wrong for me have been predictable and avoidable, and some of them have been solvable. But, not everything is. Sometimes, a problem can’t be solved, but it still must be managed. All things that have gone wrong can teach us something, once we’ve gotten past the pain and the bruises to our egos. And if we handle them the right way, we can turn a really bad day into one that was not so bad after all.
Chances are you won’t manage something as complex or as exposed as the Super Bowl. But whatever project you’re overseeing, or whatever presentation, meeting, or important customer interaction you’re engaged in, if that activity is important to your company or livelihood, then that’s YOUR Super Bowl.
My hope is that when you’ve finished this book, your sleeping will have improved because you are better prepared. And when things do go south—because they just will—you’ll be able to identify, evaluate, prioritize, and respond to the challenges as they pop up on your virtual radar screen. What to do when things go wrong? In many ways, that’s life’s ultimate question. With this book, you’ll be able to answer it. Even if 60 Minutes just so happens to be standing beside you when it does.