February 4, 2013, the day after Super Bowl XLVII, now remembered as the “Blackout Bowl,” was rife with speculation and conspiracy theories. Based on what happened in the second half of the game, it was at least somewhat understandable. When the lights cooled, so had the players. The Baltimore Ravens had built a commanding 28–6 lead early in the third quarter, but the momentum had definitively shifted when play resumed after the power was restored. First, Colin Kaepernick led the 49ers on an 80-yard drive to set up San Francisco’s first touchdown of the night. Ravens quarterback (QB) Joe Flacco was later sacked by Ahmad Brooks, forcing the Ravens to punt from deep within their own end; it was returned by Ted Ginn, Jr. all the way to the 20-yard line. This set up a second unanswered score and narrowed the margin to 8 points, 28–20. The 49ers added a field goal before the quarter expired, bringing them to within 5 points of the Ravens, the team that had been ahead by 22 at the half. The teams remained separated by the same number of points when the game ended, 34–29. The Ravens’ win avoided an upset, which might have more concretely entrenched the claim that the power failure was a purposeful effort to revive the 49ers and revitalize fan interest and sagging TV ratings for what had been to that point an undeniably lopsided contest.
“I’m not gonna accuse nobody of nothing because I don’t know facts,” said Baltimore Ravens Hall of Famer Ray Lewis, who was on the field when the lights failed. “But you’re a zillion-dollar company, and your lights go out? No. No way,” he speculated. “You cannot tell me somebody wasn’t sitting there and when they say, ‘The Ravens (are) about to blow them out. Man, we better do something,’ ” he surmised. “That’s a huge shift in any game, in all seriousness. And as you see how huge it was because it let them right back in the game.” Whether Ray Lewis really believed that or not, I cannot say. But, five years later he was sure to pop a reference to it into his 2018 Hall of Fame enshrinement speech in Canton, Ohio; it was a boisterous and entertaining monologue that was only one minute shorter than the blackout itself.
So, it is possible that a stadium’s electrical system can be sabotaged. Did it happen that way in New Orleans? There is a prodigious mountain of evidence to suggest otherwise.
We didn’t wait the six weeks it took for a forensic electrical engineer to complete a third-party investigative report before we got serious about how to avoid the career-ending possibility of a recurrence a year later. It was an established fact that the relay opened. Unless it was defective, that meant it detected an excessive increase in power consumption. Our own consultant introduced us to the concept of an electrical budget, a plan that is just like a financial budget, but one that evaluates how much power we need versus how much capacity we have, circuit-by-circuit, and minute-by-minute.
In New Jersey the following year, we would be hosting an even greater number of big events on game day at the complex than we did around the Superdome. So we began planning a test of the electrical system, simulating how it would respond to the uneven pattern of power consumption as parties and concerts ended, the game began, the halftime show unfolded, and the second half resumed. Although everything checked out fine, we still added four sets of backup generators to restore power in seconds if we still had to.
Meanwhile, the official investigation in New Orleans wrapped up. The new, upgraded electrical relay on the “A feed” did not appear to be defective. It did precisely what it was supposed to do and tripped when it sensed an increase in electrical current that was in excess of its normal factory default setting. Those last four words turned out to be the root cause of the power failure. As you might imagine, the Superdome is not a “factory default” kind of building and its electrical infrastructure would have tolerated a higher load. It’s just that no one reset the relay to accommodate that essential piece of information.
Who should have known to recalibrate the relay for the stresses and strains of a major entertainment venue and the non-normal demands of a Super Bowl—the manufacturer, the utility, or the building? That may still be in dispute, but it doesn’t really matter. Here’s what does: the fast action of the Superdome operations team saved the Super Bowl from being canceled outright. You see, both relays—one on each of the feeds, “A feed” and “B feed”—were installed with the same factory settings. That means if the building staff hadn’t immediately started to shut down the HVAC (heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning) system, the refrigerators, the nonessential lighting, and other power drains on the side of the building that did not fail, most likely the power would have gone out throughout the entire building, and possibly within seconds of the first failure.
I wouldn’t have known to ask for the systems to be shut down, but I’m grateful that teammates who were both knowledgeable and empowered did when the heat was on and the lights were off. If they had not, my friends, it would have been “game over” for Super Bowl XLVII, a minute and 38 seconds into the second half. There was only one backup feeder. If the second one had failed, we would have been done for the night. Doug Thornton was right when he told me he couldn’t guarantee it wasn’t going to happen again, but he and his team had taken the steps that made it a whole lot less likely, and for my money, they are the unsung MVPs of Super Bowl XLVII.
There are a great many lessons to be learned after every Super Bowl—not just after the one when the lights went out; the one threatened by the protest against a new law; the one stricken with snow, ice, and unusable seats; or the one where everyone used the trains like we asked them to. In fact, there have always been lessons to be learned and improvements to be made after every project that I have worked on during my 30-year career of organizing and producing events. Even when things seem to go completely or mostly right, we commit to evaluating how we can make our projects more successful, profitable, and cost-effective; meet more of our objectives; or simply just make the customer experience better. And, when they go wrong, we thoroughly examine how we could have avoided that outcome, foreseen the challenges, been better prepared, or improved our response.
It is not always easy to get down to the serious business of evaluating how things went on a project, especially after a particularly stressful experience. Our bodies often undergo a curious physical rebound after being stoked by adrenaline, including a phenomenon called the “let-down effect.” Once the source of the stress has passed, the evolutionary autoimmune response that protected us while we were unconsciously choosing between “fight or flight” reverses. We become more susceptible to the maladies we are as individuals prone to, from migraines and digestive discomforts to skin flare-ups and fatigue. That’s why it is very common for us to get sick or feel discomfort after a particularly stressful time. There is, however, evidence that when we manage the stress we experience, we also manage the severity of physical let-down effects afterwards.
We can experience let-down effects after a pressure-filled, results-driven project, even when things have gone pretty well. When they haven’t gone well at all, we can also feel disappointed, defeated, even despondent, professionally humiliated, and fearful for our jobs. The late NFL coach George Herbert Allen Sr., a veritable quote-machine, is credited as having said that losing the Super Bowl was “worse than death because you have to get up in the morning.”
There’s no two ways about it. Shaking off the lousy way we feel after we have invested our time, talent, and personal brand into a project that has, despite our best intentions, still spun a bit out of control, is tough. Maybe it was our fault that things went wrong, and maybe it wasn’t. Perhaps we were successful in getting things back on track, or maybe we couldn’t, but it was not for the lack of trying. We may have managed the issue to our best ability, or perhaps our own direct actions contributed to a result that could have been better. Coach Allen’s sardonic quote reflected the stinging agony of having coached Washington in its Super Bowl VII loss to Miami on January 14, 1973. But the loss hardly made him a loser. When Coach Allen retired from the NFL five years later, he owned the tenth-best record in League history, with a .705 winning percentage, and he was enshrined in the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2002.
I’ve never lost a Super Bowl, at least not on the field, so I can never fully comprehend the depth of Coach Allen’s disappointment. But, I have woken up many mornings after feeling defeated and dejected by far less than ideal results. Some I can laugh about now, and some still hurt to think about. But I’ve learned that the keenness of the sting subsides. We can’t go back and change anything we did, but we can own what happened, learn from it, share our learning with our teammates, and lessen the probability or the impact of a repeat occurrence. It seems trite to say: “Hey, stuff happens. Don’t be too hard on yourself,” and I can’t remember ever feeling better after hearing it. It is entirely natural to be unhappy with failure and to be disappointed with a poor result. Endure the sting and own it, but it’s what you do next that is essential, and that is to commit to being better prepared for next time. As Coach Allen also observed: “Winning is the science of being totally prepared. There is no detail too small.”
Thankfully, things don’t always go wrong, and not all of us get sick or emotionally spent as our projects wind down. Many managers I have spoken with, however, share what I call “project postpartum.” There is a bit of melancholy that our endeavor has been completed, and it seems that the longer we have been working on it, the deeper we have invested ourselves, and the greater the level of pressure we endured, the greater the sense of wistfulness. Part of this response is due to the sudden reduction of the stress hormones that had been coursing through our circulatory system, and part is due to the absence of the stimuli that precipitated their release in the first place. Suddenly, there seem to be fewer unrelenting deadlines, and just a little more room to breathe. By all means, take that breath whether things went predominantly right or mostly wrong, but not for too long. The project is not really over until we address a new set of self-imposed deadlines—our “project postmortems.”
My former Radio City Music Hall boss, Barnett Lipton, hated that expression, and I understand why. Postmortem literally means “after death,” and refers to an investigation into the cause of someone’s demise. Once the project campaign is behind us, it’s time to candidly evaluate every aspect of our performance. Did we meet our objectives, and if our metrics for success didn’t measure up, why weren’t the results as good as we had hoped? Were our original goals and expectations reasonable? In which ways did we succeed, and in which ways did we fail? How can we improve the outcome in the future? What should we keep doing, what should we stop doing, and what should we do better?
I always try to write up my own perceptions in an after-action report within a few days of completion. Setting that goal for myself provides me with a deadline that channels the “project postpartum,” which I often experience after a major event, into a constructive continuation of the project.
My after-action report begins with reflections on whether our team accomplished the goals we set out to achieve. Most events I work on can be judged on relatively simple metrics—such as attendance, viewership, ticket revenue, and audience response—so I can evaluate our performance relatively quickly.
For businesses and projects that are judged on longer-term metrics—such as monthly revenue, customer satisfaction, or sales growth over time—an accurate assessment may require a more extended time period. Don’t put off starting your after-action report while waiting for the numbers. Get started right away on everything else your report should analyze, like answers to these questions:
• What went right, and what did we do that worked well?
• What went right, but could have been done better?
• What went wrong, and how could it have been avoided or its impact lessened?
• Was our response to what went wrong effective and adequate?
• What would we do differently in the future to influence a better outcome?
• How did our team perform and how did they contribute to the result?
• What should we keep doing in the future, and what should we stop doing?
Writing my after-action report right away helps me to recollect more of the details before they naturally disintegrate with the passage of time.
Decay Theory proposes several reasons why memories may fade over time, but regardless of the cause, the longer we take to recall what we have learned, the more details are lost. It seems that the very act of quickly articulating our experiences in writing, even just by jotting down a key word or two, will help us better retain the information in our long-term memory. Our recollections will also be more comprehensive because we have begun to develop a written record.
We as project leaders are not alone in having leaky memories, of course. The same holds true for our teammates, business partners, and customers. When we get a survey from a hotel or airline, it is usually sent within a day of our stay or flight, so we can more accurately recall the details without interference and confusion with other travel experiences. Although I often ask teammates, both verbally and in writing, to send me postmortem comments, most never do, unless they want to share something that went particularly wrong. There is, however, an enormous amount of information on less consequential details—things that could have gone better—that if remedied can contribute incrementally to a more positive outcome. We just have to offer a forum to tease them out.
Although I would always opt for a meeting, in person or by teleconference, to discuss the successes and failures of any project, sometimes it is difficult to coordinate availabilities due to the demands on the participants’ time. Smaller, simpler projects can be evaluated with an internal survey or questionnaire, which can be answered at the respondent’s convenience.
For bigger, more complicated projects, a formal postmortemprocess is essential. For many years, I had scheduled larger meetings, for up to two hours with 12 to 20 or more people, with knowledgeable teammates representing each business area. Everyone was to come armed with their notes, experiences, challenges, suggestions, and comments. But unless there was something that went egregiously wrong, it turned out that I usually ended up doing most of the talking and discussing the things that I felt could be improved. Or, one or two people dominated the conversation. Most of remaining teammates either felt their details were not worth the attention of everyone else, or they just didn’t want to fall behind answering their e-mails during the meeting. It was simply impossible to engage everyone to share their points of view in a large, cross-organizational setting.
The year that everything seemed to go wrong at the Super Bowl, we knew there was an enormous amount of information and perspectives to collect. We decided to forgo the large meeting and replace it with a series of smaller, more focused sessions, scheduled for 60 minutes each, specifically dedicated to coming away with a deeper understanding of the experiences of one, or, at the very most, two related business units at any one time. Not only did we get more intelligence and depth in the more intimate setting, we discovered more things that went wrong EVERY year, but had never risen to a level of importance that resulted in our teammates sharing them at the larger meeting. It took a lot longer to conduct eight smaller postmortems than a single large one, but the investment of time was unquestionably worth it. In retrospect, though, I am sure that at least some of my colleagues were still holding back a little bit. Perhaps they didn’t want to offend me or thought some of the issues they surfaced would be ignored and that it would be a waste of time to bring them up. There may have even been some distrust of me or of other teammates.
I hadn’t even considered the last point until after I left the NFL. Neither had I understood the value of occasionally having objective, third parties conduct postmortems until the Indianapolis Motor Speedway asked me to host a companywide study of how the organization could work together more productively to manage their biggest and most widely viewed event, the Indy 500. We scheduled four solid days of individual department postmortem meetings, 90 minutes each, to explore how each business unit worked with others across the organization to stage “The Greatest Spectacle in Racing.” I approached the assignment cautiously, with a list of prepared questions and conversation starters, and thought it would be daunting for participants to open up to a complete stranger. Instead, it seemed to be a liberating opportunity for the Indy team because they could share perspectives they had never articulated at other company meetings. One particularly memorable interchange vividly illustrated this for me:
“It is really difficult to work with that department,” one manager offered when I asked the group about the biggest challenges they faced each year. “All of a sudden, they need something to happen, but they just don’t understand how complicated it is to manage last-minute requests with everything else going on. This doesn’t happen just once in a while, but all the time.”
He was right, I agreed. Everything depends on everything else and one late change can have ripple effects that can impact many other things. “How do you think they feel about working with your department?” I asked.
“Hmmm . . . ,” he had to take a moment to think about it. “They probably think we’re really difficult to work with, too.” Then, he added thoughtfully: “I’m sure they are just responding to a request from one of their partners.”
Many more honest insights were gained during these department-focused postmortems in a setting populated with teammates who shared similar missions, concerns, and points of view. Most of the feedback was instructive and constructive, and helped to inform and sensitize management to the internal issues that were affecting the end product, interfering with progress and innovation, and impacting morale.
Schedule postmortems as soon as possible after the completion of a project. Whether conducting them yourself or through a third-party facilitator, be sure to craft and circulate a preliminary agenda ahead of time to give participants time to prepare thoughtful comments. When the time comes to meet, articulate your objectives and expectations for the meeting at the outset. Recognize the value of everyone’s contribution, and welcome candor and criticism. Express your commitment to fixing problems and considering the group’s recommendations. If there are specific things that went wrong, address them directly and encourage conversations on how to avoid them in the future. Add discussions that are relevant to that group’s mission and their role in the project, but also leave time for the group to discuss their broader observations on topics and issues that are not necessarily related to their specific role or mission. You may be surprised at the diversity of opinion, insight, and information they offer about other aspects of the project. They may just be grateful that you asked, and more invested in the overall outcome because you did.
It’s almost time to close the books on the last project, and to move on to the next one. We’re more experienced and more prepared. This time every detail is sure to go completely right. Or will they? No, probably not.