I never had the opportunity to meet Captain Edward A. Murphy, but he was my kind of guy. He was the actual Murphy behind Murphy’s Law. There are many versions of the origins of his eponymous law that “anything that can go wrong will go wrong.” Like many famous attributions, it is questionable whether he was the first to say it, or whether he ever said it at all. After learning a little bit about Captain Murphy, it appeared to me that Murphy’s Law was not based on a sense of dark, foreboding pessimism, which spawned an industry of T-shirts, posters, and websites bursting with corollaries, extensions, and addenda applicable to a wide variety of subjects and disciplines. Murphy’s Law was based on an unflagging quest for perfection. Perfection was particularly important to Captain Murphy because of his work as a U.S. Air Force engineer; he was tasked with overseeing projects that tested the limits of human endurance under particularly stressful conditions.
In 1949, Captain Murphy was an engineer at Edwards Air Force Base, overseeing a project to determine how much sudden deceleration a human body could withstand and survive. The tests measured the effects of physical forces on the human body when a fast-moving vehicle abruptly stops moving, but the brain, internal organs, and skeleton wanted to keep going. A mistake could be awfully messy.
Murphy’s engineering team assembled a simulator, which was essentially a rocket sled on rails. A test pilot was to climb aboard, strap-in, and take a very fast but relatively short ride ending with a very sudden stop. It was part of a multiyear series of studies entitled “Effects of Deceleration Forces of High Magnitude on Man,” or Air Force Test MX981. So, if you are ever offered a friendly ride in a vehicle with that model number, I suggest you call an Uber. Understanding this test would require precision performance of the rocket sled, Murphy inspected the device and discovered that it was incorrectly wired by one of his subordinates. In his frustration, Murphy reportedly muttered: “If there is any way to do it wrong, he’ll find it.”
After Murphy’s team repaired the error, Dr. John Paul Stapp, an Air Force doctor, took a seat on the device and rode, or more appropriately, stopped into history, withstanding a bone-jarring horizontal force of 40 g. For the physics-challenged among us, a force of 40 g is 40 times the force of gravity. At the press conference held shortly after the test, Dr. Stapp credited the project’s safety record to the engineering team’s dedicated fight against “Murphy’s Law,” and before long, an entirely new treasure trove of sarcastic wisdom started oozing into the public consciousness. It is not known how many of the biting, popularly quoted observations that comprise the many variations of Murphy’s Law were ever written, spoken, or otherwise invoked by Captain Murphy himself. One account suggests that he considered the multitude of Murphy-isms “ridiculous, trivial, and erroneous.”
What was more important to Captain Murphy than crafting laws was the principle of defensive design—ensuring that plans, tests, and experiments are developed with contingencies that take all possibilities into account. Colonel Stapp himself is credited with Stapp’s Ironical Paradox, which observes: “The universal aptitude for ineptitude makes any human accomplishment an incredible miracle.” I’m not big on believing the worst in people, but Dr. Stapp had a point. People mess up all the time. We must be vigilant to make sure we don’t do that too often or in situations that can have profoundly serious impacts. One observation that Captain Murphy may have appreciated was put forward by Northrop’s project manager, George E. Nichols, who’s no-nonsense “Fourth Law” instructs us to: “Avoid any action with an unacceptable outcome.”
Thanks more to Captain Murphy’s vigilance than his sardonic wit, Dr. Stapp survived the test and beat his own record five years later, surviving a peak acceleration of 46.2 g. The greatest nonfatal g-force ever measured occurred more than a half-century later at the Texas Motor Speedway, after Kenny Bräck’s car made wheel-to-wheel contact with another vehicle. The contact caused him to lose control of his car and impact the fence at an estimated 214 g during the final race of the 2003 IndyCar Racing Series.
I arrived anonymously in Jacksonville, Florida, a week before Super Bowl XXXIX in 2005. Every row of seats on the shuttle bus from the airport was filled with the NFL staff who needed to be on-site for the last few remaining days, rather than the three or four weeks that the event team had been in town. The buzz onboard was a lesson in how much one can learn when you keep your ears open and your mouth shut, and no one knows who you are. My real orientation on all things Super Bowl began on that ride—as opinions, perspectives, and analysis on everything, everyone, and everywhere on the bus went around and around. I recognized that I was experiencing perhaps the only unfiltered fly-on-the-wall insights I would ever get on the job.
It was my first working NFL experience in 17 years. In 1988, I was Radio City Music Hall’s associate producer for the Super Bowl XXII halftime show in San Diego, California. The Super Bowl was big in 1988, but since then, it had taken Murphy’s rocket sled to growth, and didn’t appear to be likely to stop any time soon. The Super Bowl had grown into an event that invaded a city, occupied every available hotel, gobbled up every usable venue, and consumed every available resource.
Notwithstanding my having been involved with big events for many years, I felt the g-forces of a sudden zero-to-100 mph acceleration. From my hotel window, I could see the stadium and many of the sites around downtown Jacksonville, which had been activated for the Super Bowl. As the week went on, masses of Philadelphia Eagles and New England Patriots jerseys filled every café, restaurant, and public space in between. Although I wouldn’t characterize myself as growing anxious, I was definitely mindful that I would soon be leading the team responsible for pulling off the event. “It’s just so big,” I remember saying every night when I phoned my wife, Cathy.
I walked along the St. Johns Riverwalk the next morning with my boss, NFL COO Roger Goodell (currently commissioner of the NFL), heading to a meeting with Detroit Super Bowl XL Host Committee Chairman Roger Penske and Host Committee CEO Susan Sherer on Penske’s yacht. Super Bowl XL was going to be held the following year in the Motor City, and it was important to make a good impression on Roger Penske. My predecessor in the Special Events Department, Jim Steeg, who had overseen the Super Bowl’s remarkable expansion for more than two decades, was leaving the NFL for the San Diego Chargers, and I’m sure this was of great concern to him.
On the drizzly walk along the St. Johns riverbank, Goodell tried pumping up my confidence. “You are going to take the Super Bowl to an entirely new level,” he said. I felt the speeding rocket sled screech to a sudden halt. “What level is that, exactly?” I remember wondering. “The Super Bowl is already on its own level.”
There was no choice in the matter. The pressure was definitely on, and the expectations were stratospheric. I had to immediately start gathering the information and perspectives of league insiders, establishing the relationships, and understanding the playing field (literally and figuratively)—all the critical inputs I would need to start imagining how to ensure that Super Bowl XL would measure up to the expectations of an “entirely new level.” Oh, great. XL is not only “40” in Roman numerals. It also means “extra-large.” Any more pressure you want to put on me, guys?
Goodell and I walked up the gangway to the ship. It was not easy to push aside the thought of it being a walk off of a gangplank, even though the boat was in front of, and not behind, me. We both took off our shoes at the request of the steward before walking into the yacht’s commodious living room on the bare, stunningly perfect hardwood floor.
Up until then, there was absolutely nothing that wasn’t intimidating about my first day on the job. Until I noticed the fruit bowl on the credenza. It was a strikingly beautiful, brilliantly colored, thick-walled glass Swedish Kosta Boda bowl. It’s not that I’m an expert on Swedish bowls. It’s just that I used to buy one of these same vividly colored bowls on my way back from the annual National Hockey League (NHL) International Series preseason games in Sweden. I have four or five of them, and they cost me about $25 each from the duty-free shop. I’m pretty certain that Roger Penske didn’t personally buy his glass Kosta Boda bowl in a duty-free shop, or anywhere else, for that matter. Someone else probably bought it to decorate this magnificent boat. This one insignificant detail made me feel a whole lot less intimidated. I had the same bowl as Roger Penske!
Once I started working with this incredible, very real individual, I realized that Roger Penske would never have intended to intimidate me. Any such feeling would have been totally imagined by me, conjured up entirely by my perspective of his fame and prodigious accomplishments. He had an awesome yacht, and he earned every plank and brass fitting. It was a simple bowl, the same kind that was on my own coffee table, which connected me on some common level to the titan of industry before me. That is still probably where any similarity between Roger Penske and me ends, but I glanced at that bowl a few times during our meeting when I felt any creeping nervousness. Its familiarity equalized any anxiety.
The Merriam-Webster dictionary definition of intimidate is “to frighten into submission,” and “implies inducing fear or a sense of inferiority into another.” Roger Penske was not intimidating me, and neither was the Super Bowl. I was inducing fear and a sense of inferiority into myself by imagining that I might not be up to the task in front of me. Starting a daunting, challenging project like managing and organizing a Super Bowl and feeling intimidated by it, or by the people involved, would not have been a good foundation for sound planning or competent execution. If something went wrong along the way, I would already be halfway to panic. If I imagined being outclassed by the job, I discovered I could apply the same imagination to finding ways of equalizing the playing field. This ability would come in handy later on when I started attending meetings with NFL owners.
The Super Bowl was still “just so big,” but it didn’t own a glass Kosta Boda bowl to make me feel more its peer. Something else would present an opportunity to equalize the intimidation I imagined. The 2005 Super Bowl in Jacksonville was the only one I ever experienced from the sidelines. I picked up a walkie-talkie the morning of the game and never pressed the “talk” button. I just listened to the incessant buzz of radio traffic. What I heard helped me to understand that all of the issues faced by the staff during a Super Bowl were familiar to me. There were just a lot more issues in any given minute. Someone had the wrong credential and couldn’t get where he needed to go; a pipe burst in the locker room area; concessions were running out of food; queues were growing longer at the security checkpoints; traffic was tied up on the highway. There was nothing happening that I hadn’t heard before. I felt better knowing that problems were handled at the Super Bowl just like they were at NHL All-Star Games, or at any event for that matter. Someone identified the problem and rectified it or called someone else for help.
When you feel intimidated by a new project, task, job, or event, search for your great equalizers, things and situations that are common and familiar to you. The practice of visualizing your great equalizers will come in handy during every step of the project management process. They may not be as simple as a Kosta Boda bowl, but if you are facing something entirely new, remember that you’ve faced other things for the first time, and you handled them well. If you didn’t handle them well, you learned from when they went wrong. Imagining that something awful might happen? That’s great. That’s the time to imagine a plan to reduce or eliminate that possibility. Something went wrong anyway? Remember that things have gone wrong for you before and that you lived to tell about it. Or, if you prefer, remember some of the things that went wrong for others in this book. Feeling intimidated is a function of your own imagination. Repurpose that imagination by applying past experiences to conquer your anxiety.
It was time to forget about Penske’s Kosta Boda bowl and time to get to work imagining the “next level of Super Bowl.” During the week, I made sure to: experience every major event, attend every production meeting, and visit every venue—from the media center, team practice facilities, and major hotels to party and charity event sites, fan festivals, and of course, every square inch of Alltel Stadium (now TIAA Bank Field), the host stadium. I spent every night reading the meeting notes, production schedules, and bid documents, and I devoured the Game Operations Manual, the league’s go-to resource that lays out every detail, guideline, and regulation pertaining to staging an NFL game. I still kept a low profile, but in truth, it was not to eavesdrop like I did on the shuttle bus. I knew the pressures everyone was under and did not want to be a distraction. There was a flipside to anonymity, of course. I was nearly thrown out of the stadium by security during Paul McCartney’s halftime rehearsal because almost no one knew what I looked like.
As it turned out, having lots of event experience, but little familiarity with the Super Bowl beyond what America had seen on television, was not a disadvantage, but rather the best starting point of all. It was not a blank canvas, of course. There was something already stellar and very special about the Super Bowl, built on the hard work of hundreds of people at the League Office who had stewarded the event to prominence; the on-field greatness of Bart Starr, Joe Namath, Lynn Swann, and Roger Staubach; the innovative and insightful broadcasts of Dick Enberg, Pat Summerall, Curt Gowdy, and John Madden; and the passion, viewership, and support of the NFL’s fans and partners. It gave me the opportunity to experience America’s unofficial holiday with entirely new eyes, a fresh set of brain cells, and the imagination to enhance and add value to 39 years of the event’s greatness.
Was the event big? Yes, enormous. Spectacular? Peerless. At the pinnacle of its potential? As I would discover, not then, not later, and not even now. When the game ended, I waited for the presentation of the Vince Lombardi Trophy. Television went to commercial, the crew began setting up the stage, and fans flooded the exits. By the time NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue presented the trophy to New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, the stadium was nearly empty. The players, team personnel, and media on the field seemed to outnumber the fans in the stands. Having come from the NHL, where fans idolize the Stanley Cup and stay in the arena to experience its presentation—even to the opposing team—I thought it was incredibly strange that so few fans remained to witness the historic moment of what the winning team worked all season to achieve. I also thought back to how often I paid attention to the trophy ceremony when I watched the game on television. Not very often, I recalled.
I felt I had found perhaps the one thing that we could start to imagine differently. Something that elevated the Vince Lombardi Trophy presentation enough to get people to watch it, in the stadium and on television. What we developed for Super Bowl XL was a red-carpet entrance for a prominent football personality—fittingly, Super Bowl I and II MVP Bart Starr—carrying the trophy to the stage to a stirring, specially composed Vince Lombardi Trophy theme. Players lining the red carpet in future years spontaneously started reaching over to touch the trophy on its way to the stage, and a new tradition worth hanging out for was established.
Firing up your imagination before planning begins generates innovation. But as you will also see, it informs your planning process, and will even help you devise solutions when something goes wrong.
The real takeaway from my week in Jacksonville observing the Super Bowl was that there were thousands of details that needed to be developed from planning to management to execution. Because I was new to the organization, I was reliant on the team that was in place to help guide me through the process. What concerned me most was that Jim Steeg had been in his job for more than 20 years. Much of the growth of the Super Bowl into an American cultural experience happened under his watch. With that much experience and that long a tenure, Jim instinctively knew everything that needed to get done and how to go about doing it. He was far more familiar than I was with the intricacies of the game, the people, and the politics of the league, as well as the problems we should anticipate.
I knew a lot about managing major sports events, but little of those things. Nevertheless, I had to assume leadership over the NFL’s most important events and earn the confidence of the owners, the Commissioner, and the executive staff. I had to lead a team that was understandably loyal to Jim, had no experience working with me, and in some cases might have been annoyed that I was hired from another league. I was disappointed, but probably should have expected it when several team members resigned within days of my arrival; some of them resigned before I found the coffee machine, the men’s room, and my office on Park Avenue in New York.
As a result, I would not only have to immediately pick up the planning for Super Bowl XL in Detroit, but I would also have to hire and integrate new team members into what remained of the department. In fact, the first in a series of major planning meetings was only a few weeks away and we were already short on the institutional knowledge that the experienced staff took away with them. In the interim, our team would also have to manage the logistical details for the NFL Combine in Indianapolis, Indiana, and the NFL Annual Owner’s Meeting in Maui, Hawaii. Most pressing, I discovered, was the need to quickly find a home for the 2005 NFL Draft to be held in April, just two months away. Time was a scarce commodity, to say the least.
I knew that Jim Steeg had details in his head on what to do to make things go right, and how to respond when things did not, more than anything in the memos, schedules, or manuals I had read. Whether during planning or during the event, if people expected something to happen just because it always did, I needed to disabuse them of those notions, or something would slip between the cracks for sure.
I started the first Super Bowl production meeting with a slide that said: “Assume Nothing, Double Check Everything” and told them why. I wasn’t Jim. It was critical to our planning that everyone working on the Super Bowl, no matter how long they’d been working on it, imagined that none of the things that “just happened” and none of the things that were “just there” would happen or be there. This way, if something went wrong, it wasn’t because we failed to provide the resources or physical assets they assumed would be there. It wasn’t pushing potential blame for something that could go wrong from me to them. It was asking them to help ensure that when something did go wrong, it wasn’t for that reason; that is, the assumption that I was handling all the details that Jim managed for decades.
I reinforced the concept by repeating the phrase at all remaining quarterly Super Bowl production meetings and the daily staff meetings leading up to game day. “Assume Nothing, Double Check Everything” would become the first of a series of annual “mantras” with which we opened every meeting. Each mantra was designed to serve as a rallying cry for the year, one that in a few words would set expectations for, and of, everyone working on the event.
Looking back, this “mantra” could have been inspired by Captain Edward Murphy. In inspecting the rocket sled, he did not assume everything was wired correctly. I could be entirely wrong, but I’d like to think that he didn’t really know ahead of time that the technician who wired it had done it wrong. Rather, that he was systematically and scientifically double checking and not assuming that the vehicle Dr. Stapp was about to ride into history was not going to make him history. Captain Murphy imagined the worst or imagined that the worst was not impossible. He was all about taking action before things went wrong, and he didn’t think that Murphy’s Law was a joke. According to his son, he was annoyed that people didn’t take it more seriously. Murphy, Stapp, Nichols, and others were perfectionists. They had to be. People (including Stapp himself) could die if they weren’t. They had to imagine the worst outcomes in order to be a little shy pressing the “LAUNCH” button without checking on things just one more time.
I imagine the worst when doing my job, and so should you. Not because we are pessimists, but because, like Captain Murphy, we are committed to having things go right. If we imagine all the ways things can go awry, we start to understand where we, our brands, or our products might be exposed to risk. Often, we imagine these things and how we could have, or should have, dealt with them after they have already happened. Although that’s second best, it does sharpen our senses to be on guard for similar failures the next time around.
When the 1996 NHL All-Star Game was held in Boston, we could have hired the Boston Bruins’ eager and enthusiastic anthem singer, Rene Rancourt, to perform The Star-Spangled Banner and O Canada. We instead booked a nationally renowned, operatically talented television personality to deliver the traditional opening. One of our production team members had deep connections to the hard-to-reach celebrity community through his network of personal assistants. Rather than slog through the slow and labyrinthine bureaucracy of agencies and management companies, we connected with the actor’s personal assistant, and appealing to his sports-loving nature, secured his agreement to join us in Boston. So, we had only ourselves to blame.
We arranged for a first-class ticket for the actor on a flight from Miami that would arrive at Logan International Airport with plenty of time to get him to the arena for a sound check and rehearsal before the doors opened to fans. A production assistant waiting to meet the flight called us 45 minutes after the scheduled landing to let us know that there was no sign of our celebrity. He was on the manifest as a ticketed passenger, but he had not boarded in Miami. We thought that perhaps he missed the plane and there was another flight scheduled to take off soon, which would still give us room to get him to the arena in time for the performance, but not for a rehearsal. Rehearsing is always a good thing when a performer is going to step onto a thin rubber-backed carpet on a freshly minted sheet of ice.
Once the cabin door was closed, the airline could tell us whether he was on the flight or not. He wasn’t. At the risk of being humiliated, we asked the Bruins to call Rene Rancourt. Having the night off, Rene had planned to host a dinner party at his home. He could have been a jerk and enjoyed making us squirm, but, as I would come to appreciate, that wasn’t Rene. He grabbed his tuxedo, sped to the arena, belted out two goosebumps-worthy national anthems, finished them off with his iconic and enthusiastic fist pump, and then returned to his guests. He saved our lives just like he saved the life of another event organizer when Kate Smith canceled her anthem performance just before Game 6 of the 1975 World Series. What really happened to our celebrity friend? We actually worried that something awful had happened to him, but when we read nothing about it in the media, we stopped worrying.
After that night, I could vividly imagine an anthem singer not showing up. Or, having the flu. Or, being abducted by aliens hiding in his luggage. Okay, maybe not that, but I could imagine a lot of things. So, although our team kept booking celebrity anthem singers for the NHL All-Star Game, we also invited the host team’s favorite performer to be our guest at every game thereafter, with the understanding that he or she might be asked to leap into action at the last possible moment. Captain Murphy would have certified this plan as “defensive design,” the notion that contingencies are built into the system. I call it sleeping better the night before the game.
Having a plan that covers only what to do when things run smoothly does not constitute adequate planning. It is creating a road map, and that might be fine 80 percent, 90 percent, or even 99 percent of the time. But it’s that nasty issue that happens 20 percent, 10 percent, or 1 percent of the time that can sink your business, derail your project, or make an event memorable for all the wrong reasons. So, whatever you are planning, sit in a quiet space with your ears plugged and your eyes closed—if that’s what works for you—and imagine the worst. Sales dry up. The warehouse floods. The lobby of your office building is suddenly a taped-off crime scene. Your freight elevator stops working. How do people get to work? How will your customers and clients be served?
You can’t make up every solution on the spot and be successful. Using your dark imaginings to tease out contingencies should inform your overall planning strategy so that you can then incorporate potential solutions into your defensive design. Otherwise, you may not be able to overcome challenges that expose weaknesses in your plan or project as quickly.
If your imagination is vivid enough, you’ll uncover a great number of things that can potentially go wrong, from the annoying to the simply inconvenient and cataclysmically catastrophic. The good news is there is no limit to your imagination. There is only a limit to your time, your team’s expertise, and your money. You won’t think of absolutely every potential issue. But, if you identify, prioritize, and account for the right contingencies in your planning, you are well on your way to deferring Murphy’s Law to another day.
You will naturally prioritize based on the least improbable things that could go wrong and those that could do the most damage to your project, brand, or company. Why did I purposely use a double negative? Because if it is probable that something is going to go wrong, you should reassess the project, product, or event. I’m betting you’ve already gotten your project to the point where the odds of something going wrong is already reduced to the relatively improbable. But things that are the least improbable are, alas, still possible.
Applying our imaginations to building multiple contingency plans that reduce the risk of failure is truly a pain in the neck. Extra planning you may never put into action can take a lot of time and threaten deadlines. Resist your natural impulse to mentally, but not actually, diminish the probability of things going wrong because they would be expensive, time-consuming, complicated, or otherwise inconvenient to the planning process. It is also very easy to imagine your boss, best client, or some other exceedingly important stakeholder introducing a new variable that you hadn’t planned on—for example, a new product feature, a different launch strategy, or an accelerated set of deadlines. That seems to happen all the time, so be sure to leave yourself enough time to calculate the impact and redraft your plans.