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 public 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.
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?”
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 ascended, 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.
When I first learned about the accident, I didn’t think to ask the caller whether he knew that the bollards had pierced the body of the car, or whether he only believed that because someone else had told him, but I should have. Not that it would have changed the outcome, but now, when I hear about a problem, especially a big one, I ask the questions: “Do you know that for sure? Did you see or hear that yourself, or hear it from someone else?” Verifying the accuracy of information is essential to fixing the right problem or managing a response.
When faced with a challenge, my former colleague Bill McConnell often wondered out loud whether he was “chasing ghosts,” that is, acting on something he believed was there, but really wasn’t. If you haven’t witnessed the problem yourself and you can’t immediately verify the details, sometimes you have to err on the side of acting as though the ghosts are real. Our security team, for instance, was regularly confronted with packages or backpacks sitting unattended at one of our event sites, either in plain sight or discovered hiding behind a door or garbage can. Thankfully, in every case of which I am aware, the lone item was an innocent box filled with merchandise, supplies left unintentionally by a careless worker, or a backpack of work materials temporarily stashed in a hiding place to keep it from being stolen.
On April 15, 2013, however, an unattended backpack left near the finish line of the Boston Marathon was anything but innocent or unintentional. Two pressure-cooker bombs exploded, killing three people and injuring hundreds. This occurrence demonstrates the importance of chasing those ghosts every time because there is a possibility that lives, or safety, are at risk. The best outcome is an entirely wasted effort because it turns out to be nothing. The next best outcome would be quickly taking whatever decisive actions are necessary to protect the safety of everyone in the vicinity.
In most non-safety-threatening situations, however, chasing ghosts is unproductive. We may have to do it sometimes because the risks of not acting on some possibilities might be economically or reputationally damaging. For instance, it may be prudent to hold off on launching a new campaign because of unsubstantiated reports that the celebrity hired as a spokesperson was involved in a controversy or a criminal act. The reports may turn out to be based on nothing, but proceeding without cautious investigation would be unnecessarily and dangerously risky.
That’s why it is essential to verify as many details as we can in the opening moments of an incident or crisis, helping us identify what problem we are really trying to solve. When 125 people reportedly arrived with tickets that failed to scan at the security checkpoint, we could have been facing a failure of our ticket-scanning equipment, a corruption or loss of connectivity to the database of ticket bar codes, an attempted security breach, or a counterfeit ticket problem. Today, I can’t say for sure whether there were 125 people really waiting in the rain because I didn’t ask whether the Gate Supervisor had encountered the entire group or had only interacted with the “tour organizer,” who may have trotted out the story after his tickets were rejected by the system. Rather than spending time chasing ghosts trying to ascertain whether the scanning system was at fault or defeating the purpose of scanning tickets in the first place by waving through some number of wet and allegedly unhappy people through the gates with our apologies, we tried to catch the ghost by visually authenticating the tickets. In the meantime, as ghosts are wont to do, the problem vanished.
After verifying the details, the next component of identifying the problem we are trying to solve is understanding whether we are dealing with the root cause, or just a symptom. Chris Barbieri was working in the information technology (IT) department of a bank on a Monday afternoon when he and his colleagues became aware that its servers were infected by an insidious software virus. A computer virus can be pretty disruptive for any business, but it can have far-reaching effects on a financial institution that go well beyond simple inconvenience. An inability to access customer data or process transactions can profoundly affect the well-being of not only the bank, but also of the businesses and depositors the bank serves, resulting in significant reputational and financial damage. The problem seemed isolated to just one of the bank’s many technology systems and the team moved quickly to restore it to a fully functional condition before the day had ended.
By Tuesday morning, however, it was clear that the virus they thought had been scrubbed from the affected area had been working overnight, infecting virtually every software system in the bank. As more and more symptoms developed, the IT team was under enormous and continuous pressure to keep the bank running without interruption, and with a minimum of inconvenience to its customers. Having acted quickly to knock down one problem, only to have new symptoms develop literally overnight, the IT team understood that the issue they considered conquered was just one symptom of a much larger and more sinister root cause. A virus had been launched to purposefully wreak maximum havoc on their business. Barbieri recollects a frustrating game of whack-a-mole as the team struggled to resolve one symptom, only to have new ones spring up over the course of the week. “What exactly is the problem, what and who did it affect, and how do we contain it?” Those were the most important questions Barbieri and the team needed to answer as quickly as possible.
After the fact, Barbieri and his colleagues undertook a root-cause analysis to determine how and why the attack happened, and how they would keep it from happening again in the future. (See Chapter 23.) Analyzing precisely why they were vulnerable, however, was secondary in the urgency of time to addressing each of the symptoms as they arose. Since they still had to support the bank’s overall business, the team delegated the recovery efforts to the people who could best fix each of the problems as they emerged, and everyone else returned to their day-to-day functions. The business could not suffer from the secondary, unintended effects of all technology resources being focused on the virus attack.
The bank’s IT team identified the most important things they had to do:
• Actively engage in recovery efforts for each affected system as they occurred
• Continue the uninterrupted delivery of essential bank services to its customers
The business chose not to allocate all of its specialized resources to solving what had gone wrong, so it could continue to serve the needs of the bank and its customers. Also, it did this to avoid unintended consequences that could arise while everyone else’s attention was diverted to the crisis.
Often symptoms must be addressed faster than the root cause. At 5:00 a.m. on Sunday, December 12, 2010—the day of a scheduled game between the Minnesota Vikings and the New York Giants—the snow that had accumulated atop the Minneapolis Metrodome during a powerful blizzard proved to be too much for the air-supported roof to withstand. Crews had been working throughout the storm, using steam and hot water, to clear away as much snow as possible until heavy winds threatened to sweep the crew off the roof. The building’s heating system applied warmth from below and more hot air was fed between the two layers of the fabric roof in an effort to melt the snow collecting above. Thanks to the deeply cold temperatures, however, snow continued to pile on top, as deep as two feet in valleys between the roof panels.
Our phones rang a few minutes after the roof failure, alerting us of an imminent all-hands conference call. We weren’t jumping on the phone to plan how to fix the Metrodome roof or to investigate why it gave way. We were going to discuss where and when the game scheduled for that afternoon was ultimately going to be played, and to start planning where the final Minnesota Vikings home game would be staged a couple of weeks later.
Similarly, the first and most important thing during the Super Bowl XLVII power outage, on February 2, 2013, was not turning the lights back on. It was to take steps to avoid panic setting in among the fans in the half-dark stadium. That’s why one of the first things we did was to ensure that the public address system was activated and that we knew what we were going to say to the crowd.
Superdome executive Doug Thornton was fielding reports from his engineering team assessing the cause of the electrical malfunction:
DOUG: “Frank, we lost the ‘A feed.’ ”
FRANK: “What does that mean?”
DOUG: “That means we have to do the bus tie.”
FRANK: “What does that mean?”
DOUG: “That means about a 20-minute delay.”
Doug and I had discussed the recent upgrade to the electrical system during the planning stage, so I knew what the term “bus tie” meant. The backup cable installed by the power company would have to be connected into the side of the building that was now in darkness. What I really wanted to know was how long it was going to take, and Doug was ready with an answer that proved remarkably accurate. I didn’t realize it at the time, but Doug and his operations team had been actively working through the recovery process from the moment the lights went out, and not a moment too soon.