Wouldn’t you know it. The Farmer’s Almanac was right about Super Bowl XLVIII, which was held at Met-Life Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey (as we just discussed in Chapter 5). The northeast winter of 2013–2014 would turn out to be among the coldest, snowiest, and most challenging in memory. Nearly five feet of snow blanketed the New York City area that year, 260 percent above the normal seasonal total of 19 inches. Little did NFL owners know when they met in 2010 to award the first-ever outdoor Super Bowl to a cold-winter city that the term “polar vortex” would be introduced that year to the region’s common lexicon. For 28 days, daily high temperatures remained below freezing, seven of them were bitter cold days that never climbed above 10 degrees F. We expected tough weather conditions, and we rationalized that if surviving a deep-winter Green Bay Packers game at Lambeau Field is regarded as a bucket-list fan experience, so too could the first-ever Super Bowl played in extreme cold. Moreover, we postulated, New Yorkers consider themselves to be a rather tough bunch who could withstand just about anything.
Super Bowl Boulevard opened on Wednesday night in Manhattan, transforming 14 blocks of Broadway from Herald Square to Times Square into a free, three-quarter-mile-long football fan festival. The nighttime temperature dipped to 12 degrees as the Rockettes, the cast of Jersey Boys, and government dignitaries took to the stage—each taking their shivering, teeth-chattering turn for the official opening ceremony. We wondered if all those tough New Yorkers and resolute fans from Denver and Seattle would really brave the freezing temperatures as our event team huddled in the hollow shelter beneath the stage. We needn’t have worried. A little cold didn’t hold back the 1.5 million fans who jammed onto Super Bowl Boulevard as tightly as rush-hour subways for four days.
While warming ourselves beneath the stage, we were also monitoring the game-day forecast, which looked anything but good. Another snowstorm was heading our way and it could hit sometime on Sunday. That was really unwelcome news, but we were ready to roll out one or more of our contingency plans if it did.
Contingency planning is not about constructing our core project plan, or Plan A. No matter what we set out to achieve, it’s crucial that we articulate our goals and objectives, identify the strategy that defines how we will achieve them, and develop the tactics we will employ to bring the strategy to life. Regardless of your business, industry, or profession, any project you undertake should start with those three activities and in that order. This is what you do every day, and you may very well be an expert on how to pilot a project in your field from conception to completion.
Let’s assume you have forged a complete, robust, informed, and realistic Plan A for your business or project. Now reflect on all those potential challenges you imagined that could dull or destroy the effectiveness of your tactics, send your strategy off the guardrails, or push your goals even further away. Some might pose minor threats, some more major threats. Any number or combination are possible, so resist thinking that the planning process is over once you have your neat, new, and fully developed plan. It’s hard, I know. Contingency planning is a disquieting undertaking because it messes with all our exacting, expertly developed, detail-laden Plan A’s.
We all crave closure, the feeling that everything is ready and buttoned up, and as watertight as possible against threats. We want a perfectly crafted, infallible plan, but NFL coaching legend Vince Lombardi was speaking to us as leaders when he said: “Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection we can catch excellence.” Lombardi didn’t use one play or one plan to win football games. He and his coaching staff developed a playbook chock-full of plans and contingencies for whatever the opposing team, injuries to his roster, or Mother Nature might throw at the Green Bay Packers. He won championships thanks to his foresight on all the things that could go wrong at the line of scrimmage, in the backfield, or deep in enemy territory.
Developing contingency plans is joining Lombardi’s chase for perfection. When we consider all possibilities, we reduce the chances of failure, and as a consequence, we catch excellence more often. Our contingency plans may suggest undoing some of the great things we did when we made Plan A, and spending time, money, and energy developing Plans B, C, and D to deal with possibilities that will probably not go wrong the majority of the time.
Investing your finite resources in contingency planning is very much like buying insurance (which you should have too). When we spend money on insurance premiums, we hope we never have to file a claim, but if we suffer loss or damage, we are happy we had that safety net in place. Effective project leaders invest time and talent developing contingency plans that they truly hope, like an insurance policy, will turn out to be a colossal waste of time. But, having those plans can prove invaluable if something goes wrong and you need to work quickly to activate one or more of the plans.
Effective contingency planning is rooted in believing the possibilities of your dark imaginings and the pragmatism of your problem-solving capabilities. Understanding how many, for which, and what kinds of imagined adversities we should plan for always starts with the things that have the greatest potential to go wrong, and those with the greatest safety, financial, and reputational implications. Plans B, C, and D may address different issues and varying levels of severity. You may need a Plan B to deal with a two-week delay in a product’s launch date, a Plan C to address a three-month delay, a Plan D to identify expenses targeted for reduction when revenues are forecasted to fall short of expectations, and a Plan E to quickly reconfigure a marketing campaign threatened by the misbehavior of a hired spokesperson.
How many contingency plans should you develop? As many as you can afford to create, especially for circumstances that can significantly affect the success of your outcome. My advice, after you’ve considered every possibility, is to treat yourself to a beer or glass of wine. Then, get back to it, because you’ve only considered every possibility that you have imagined so far. How detailed and robust should those plans be? Those plans should be as detailed and robust as necessary to make them effective and actionable, because a contingency plan that does not address how severe a challenge can be is truly a wasted effort if that crisis strikes.
Contingency plans for Super Bowl XLV—held on February 6, 2011, at Cowboys Stadium (now AT&T Stadium), in Arlington, Texas—anticipated the possibility of snow and cold the way the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex usually experiences it. Frozen precipitation is certainly a possibility in February, but more often than not, whatever falls melts away within a day or two. If probabilities worked against us, it would choose to snow precisely on the morning of the event like it did the prior year, when more than 12 inches fell right before the NBA All-Star Game. But, for the preceding 24 years before 2010, no winter in Dallas saw a total as much as the 4.3 inches that blanketed the region the week of the Super Bowl. We were prepared for that, or so we thought.
Recognizing the possibility of wintry conditions descending during the hours and days leading up to the game, the North Texas Super Bowl Host Committee dedicated one of their key logistics experts to the task of developing a winter weather response plan. We did not need a plan that cleared frozen precipitation from the entire region, just the parking lots, major highways, and primary routes between key locations like the stadium, team hotels, practice facilities, media center, and headquarters hotels, shrinking the focus of snow-clearing activities to “just” 1,600 square miles.
Depots of snow melting materials and sawdust were established at strategic locations throughout the area and spreader trucks from other, more snow-susceptible cities in Texas were redeployed to the Dallas–Fort Worth area. A winter weather command center was established to coordinate clearing activities and detailed schedules were developed to prioritize which routes required the most urgent attention at any given hour on any given day.
For most of the month leading up to Super Bowl XLV, it looked like we and our host committee partners had invested time and talent on a wasted exercise. Then freezing rain, sleet, and snow began falling the Monday night of Super Bowl week. The winter weather command center was activated and began monitoring roadway conditions across the region. A fleet of trucks hit the roads to spread the stockpiled chemicals that were effective at temperatures above 20 degrees. Unfortunately, the mercury had plummeted overnight to the single digits and teens. By then, every asphalt surface was glazed with ice and nearly impassable, forcing the closure of schools and many businesses for a solid week.
I cautiously negotiated my car through a 19-mile labyrinth of stranded tractor-trailers and SUVs, their headlights pointing in every direction along Interstate 30. Tuesday was Super Bowl Media Day at Cowboys Stadium and, notwithstanding the hazards on the road, the two teams and the media had to likewise serpentine between the obstacles on the highways to the event. The media and the Green Bay Packers were staying in downtown Dallas; the Pittsburgh Steelers were lodged in downtown Fort Worth, 35 miles apart. With highways better suited to ice hockey than motor traffic, that proved to be a suboptimal strategy. Pittsburgh’s buses crept with glacial deliberateness into the stadium parking lot, led by a truck spreading a superfluous carpet of sand before them. Steelers owner Art Rooney, Jr., was the first to alight from the bus and only the first to remark that “this was a bad plan.”
We had a reasonably good contingency plan to deal with snow and ice as is occasionally experienced in North Texas, but not robust enough to cope with the sudden, unreasonably colder-than-normal temperatures we experienced for the week. Because of the materials we chose to deploy, our finely-detailed and expertly-crafted snow removal plan was essentially useless; our plan was an intricate and fully thought out half-measure in the unusually extreme conditions. We were confident in the plan that assembled an impressive fleet of spreaders and a massive quantity of materials. Not once did we ask ourselves “what if it’s even colder and for even longer?”
In the northeast, it is completely predictable that measurable snow will accumulate throughout the winter and if our plan for Super Bowl XLVIII had been to count on the sun to melt the ice, we could have been waiting until April. The Super Bowl had been staged in winter-weather cities before, but never in a stadium open to the elements. In Dallas, we only had to worry about how people would get to and around the city, but we were presented a whole new level of complexity at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey. The weather could affect every aspect of the game itself, from the field and sidelines to the grandstand and concourses, and safety was our number one concern.
New Yorkers may complain loudly and often, but other than transforming our airports into some of the world’s most hopeless and densely-populated dormitories, snow doesn’t usually stop us. It just slows us down. Since accumulating snow was predictable at some point over the winter, we had to plan as though the Farmer’s Almanac was even more right. What if a blizzard event actually did strike the region at the worst possible moment? Or, at a moment that was only a little better than the worst? If the storm smacked us on Super Bowl Sunday itself, crippled the region’s roads and railroads, and rendered the stadium unsafe for fans or players, how and when would we be able to play the game? Monday Night Football was not unheard of. Tuesday night was also an option. What if the snowfall was so prodigious and the wind was so powerful that essential infrastructure and services were severely crippled, and first responders and equipment had to be redirected from game-day operations to emergency management duties?
The New York City Marathon faced such a situation in the wake of Superstorm Sandy, two years prior during late October 2012. This powerful storm struck the New York metropolitan area a week before the race, after leaving a trail of devastation stretching from the Caribbean and all along the Eastern Seaboard. Millions in the tristate region remained without power or heat when Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced the city’s intention to host the race to give the region “something to cheer about.” Instead, the potential diversion of emergency resources to a sports event generated enormous controversy. “Many were offended by the notion that the city would put resources in the form of police presence, water and food supplies, and electric generators toward the race while communities remain without basic services,” wrote Meredith Melnick in The Huffington Post. “Some were so adamant that they created online campaigns to prevent the foot race.” A few days later, the mayor reversed the decision. Mayor Bloomberg and then New York Road Runners (NYRR) president Mary Wittenberg released a joint statement saying: “While holding the race would not require diverting resources from the recovery effort, it is clear that it has become the source of controversy and division.” The race was canceled for the first time in its 42-year history.
Canceling the Super Bowl was simply not an option. But, if we faced a similar scenario, could we play the game the following Sunday, or two Sundays after? We had contingency plans for those possibilities. Rescheduling the Super Bowl would be a task of gargantuan complexity, so it was better to think through how to do that well before the weather forecast suggested we must.
NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell had an even more interesting twist to add to the plan. If the forecast called for a blizzard on Sunday, he asked, could we possibly stage the game on Saturday night and return everyone safely home before the storm began? We would need to create a plan that ensured that stadium employees, police officers, traffic and safety officials, railroad engineers, bus drivers, and the thousands of others we needed to stage the game would also be rescheduled if we had to activate this option. We determined that we would need to make that call no later than Thursday at noon. Once an announcement to play Saturday was made publicly, it would be so newsworthy that few would be caught unaware. The issue, really, was confirming how many of the thousands of people we relied on to make game day happen we would be able to mobilize on Saturday and we would only have about 36 hours to get that figured out.
The real risk inherent in making that decision, of course, was whether we would know enough on Thursday about the track and severity of a potential storm on Sunday. We all know how inaccurate weather forecasts can be that far ahead. We could well have moved heaven and earth on a Thursday to play the game on Saturday and later wake up to a crisp, but beautifully sunny Sunday afternoon in New Jersey. Meanwhile, we would have forced the cancellation of all those Saturday night Super Bowl parties booked by sponsors, charities, media companies, and others. The reputational and financial risks of that outcome were certainly significant, but the risk of looking foolish would have been overridden by concerns for public and player safety. Luckily, we never had to make that call.
Because we had a good handle on our contingencies, we were prepared with options and action plans well ahead of time. The number of productive human-hours planning the response was massive. Although we experienced record cold temperatures all season long, it was Super Bowl IX—played at Tulane University in New Orleans on January 12, 1975—that retained its claim as the coldest kickoff on record for the event, at 46 degrees.
For Super Bowl XLVIII, MetLife Stadium was an unexpectedly balmy 49 degrees when the Denver Broncos received the opening kick. The Farmer’s Almanac forecast had missed by a hair. Snow began falling three hours after the time expired and by morning, enough fresh powder had dropped to cancel more than 45 percent of all the outbound flights on Monday.
Developing contingencies can inform the entire project management process and cause us to re-imagine Plan A while we still have time to do so. Focusing attention on contingency creation early in the planning process can help expose fatal flaws and potential weaknesses in our original plan, and encourage us to either fine-tune Plan A, or completely replace it with an entirely new strategy more likely to succeed. Provided that we have the time, we should not be shy about elevating a contingency idea to Plan A if we believe doing so can correct a deficiency in our preparations or improve our project’s performance.
While true for entirely new initiatives, it is perhaps even more important to not overlook the importance of contingency planning for endeavors that are repeated throughout the year, annually, or in different markets. Even subtle shifts in the business environment, customer sentiment, and other variables can significantly impact outcomes. Or perhaps an underlying lack of preparation that could address a potential problem has simply not yet been exposed because things have always gone right in the past. That is why it is essential to avoid falling into the trap of “dusting off plans that have always worked before” without considering contingencies for yet-unexperienced challenges.
The Super Bowl XLVIII halftime show at MetLife Stadium was the first one to be held in an outdoor winter environment. In the past, the show’s set-up and removal involved as many as 600 crew members who burst out of the tunnels at a literal run to set up the stage, sound equipment, and effects in the middle of the field in just eight minutes. Weighing as much as 10 tons, the stage is typically designed in 25 or more segments atop enormous wheels that are navigated from a huge tent in the parking lot and through the tunnels beneath the stadium onto the field. The pressure to set up the entire stage and all of its components within the time allotted, and its removal within seven minutes, is enormous and one of the great logistical spectacles that the television audience never sees. Unless, of course, something goes wrong.
We relied on speed and precision for the halftime setup, but safety is always the overriding concern. Our greatest fear was the possibility that one or more of the stage crew could slip on an icy field during those frantic, frenetic minutes, and possibly get caught under the truck-sized wheels. That prospect was unthinkable on so many levels that from the outset, we had to think about the annual halftime show very differently, as though ice or snow would surely glaze the field. We started doing just that almost three years before the game, long before anyone knew what the halftime show would actually be. Our stage designer, Bruce Rodgers, joined me for a chilly winter visit to MetLife Stadium to figure out what to do.
First, we considered building the stage in the stands so it would not have to be wheeled out at all, but there were a host of issues that made that option unattractive. For one, the stage would be a big empty platform most of the time. Getting the performers to it would mean walking them through the audience, certainly not ideal. And, we would need to remove somewhere between 200 and 500 seats, which would cost up to $750,000 in lost ticket revenue.
Bruce then explored the notion we ultimately embraced, building most of the halftime stage against the wall behind one of the team benches and leaving it there throughout the game. We decorated the front of the stage with the same banners that adorned the rest of the field-level walls, so the stage was essentially invisible until the teams left the benches after the first half. Bruce designed a retractable runway and two rolling arches of video screens, which could be wheeled over the player benches without touching any of the team’s equipment, supplies, heating units, or game-time communications gear. He found a way to safely convert what looked like a decorated false wall into an effects-laden stage that would eventually host spectacular performances by Bruno Mars and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, without having to move very much across a potentially frozen field.
Our contingency planning process entirely changed a 48-year old Plan A, moving tons of equipment across a potentially slippery field, to creating a different way to achieve the same spectacle without adding physical risks. We were able to achieve this because we began crafting contingencies early in the planning process, with sufficient time to plot a different course that would almost entirely avoid the impact of winter weather instead of having to activate a Plan B based on approaching weather, or worse, a potential injury.
The costs of developing contingency plans are most often expressed in human terms. That is, time and people are required to focus, imagine, and prepare for deviations from the standard procedure or the core plan. Often, time- and staff-constrained project leaders delegate some aspects of contingency planning to a third party, such as a security consultant, public relations agency, regulatory consultant, insurance broker, or even an event management company, depending on the size, scope, and nature of potential threats to success.
Planning contingencies, of course, often pales in comparison to actually executing those plans. Imagining that a snowstorm could greatly reduce the number of cars we could park at MetLife Stadium didn’t actually cost very much at all. The real costs would be encountered in renting more off-site property to accommodate the parking spaces we would have lost. We did just that because there was no less expensive solution available, and perhaps no solution at all if we didn’t act to acquire them months ahead of time. It was better for us to contract with land owners and set the real estate aside well in advance, while the leverage to strike a reasonable deal was still on our side and, frankly, having no solution to insufficient parking was not an option.
The best contingency plans, of course, require little expenditure of money until you need to act on them. Securing access to services and materials that might be required to mitigate the possibility of something going wrong can shrink your response time to an event, but not necessitate having to pay for those things unless you actually need them.
Good planners and budgeters always consider the unknown and include a contingency factor in their financial plans. Resist conflating the notion of a “miscellaneous” budget line and a “contingency.” Miscellaneous expenses is a catch-all category to aggregate small expenditures that don’t fit any specific expense line. A contingency factor is different. This is a set-aside amount for expenses that you simply didn’t plan for.
When possible, I try to reserve 10 percent to 15 percent of any cost estimate for the unforeseeable. The greater the unknowns, the higher the allocation toward contingencies should be. How, you might ask, can we oxymoronically know there is a greater number of unknowns? Any number of factors can increase the likelihood of encountering unplanned costs, including the following:
• If the product, activity, or content is entirely new
• If the product, activity, or content relies on new, emerging, or unproven technologies
• If the product, activity, or content is subject to uncertainty due to regulatory review
• If the product, activity, or content is dependent on a new staff, a new facility, or a new vendor relationship
If you ultimately don’t use the budget you set aside for contingencies, your profit and loss (P&L) statement will look better. If you need the contingency funds, but don’t have them, be sure that your 401(k) is fully vested. Would you prefer to bet your project or career on the hope that everything will turn out just fine?