Are your plans actionable for all you can foresee going wrong and not just plans that look good on paper? If you have committed to giving up on hope as a preparation strategy and you have begun developing the contingency plans that are most likely to be activated when things go wrong, it is time to start leveraging the essential tools that will inoculate you, your project, and your company when they do.
You and your team have been working around-the-clock, missing meals, and losing sleep over every detail of your core plan and everything you can imagine that could possibly go wrong. You have pored endlessly over the schedules, deadlines, processes, and formulas to move your project forward. You have identified potential weaknesses, flaws, delays, bottlenecks, and threats, and have developed contingencies that will guide your course of action should one or any combination of those things transpire. You believe you have plans that provide the framework for what you will do in case of a labor dispute, an engineering failure, a structural deficiency, a regulatory challenge, or the malfeasance of key staff members or spokespeople. But the work is far from over.
Do we have that covered? Do we really? It is certainly tempting to think so.
Perceiving potential threats to success and drafting the responses we believe to be most appropriate to deal with them provide only the blueprints for contingency planning. We have not yet gone far enough to define a complete and viable course of action.
When architects design a building, their drawings and blueprints convey how the new structure will meet the functional and aesthetic objectives of the developer. They illustrate what the edifice will look like, how it will accommodate the needs of its tenant-customers, and how it will incorporate the requirements of building codes that keep occupants and visitors safe.
However, what blueprints do not do by themselves is tell the engineering and construction teams how to build the building. They tell the contractor exactly where the massive air conditioning unit should be mounted on the rooftop, but don’t provide guidance on when, in the construction process, it should be installed, or how it will get up there.
Our project contingency plans are like that. We apply our training, intelligence, and skills to developing the right blueprint for handling various challenges. The preparation process, however, may not be complete until we have determined how we and our teams will put those plans into action. Until then, they may only look good on paper.
As the architects of our projects, we know how to develop plans that will define how our Plan A will be constructed. We are also the operations team that must analyze and evaluate the contingencies to make sure they will work when we need them. Chances are, our contingency plans will make intellectual sense. The question is, if they are the right ones, have we put enough thought into ensuring they are actionable? Allow me to illustrate.
The crowds of fans on the west side of Cowboys Stadium (now AT&T Stadium) were well in excess of what anyone expected. We had installed nearly 100 magnetometers, walk-through metal detectors, on the east side of the stadium, where all the major parking fields were located. Less than a third of that number were installed on the west side, where only NFL buses were expected to arrive.
The Super Bowl is designated as a National Special Security Event (NSSE) by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, requiring extraordinary measures to protect attendees against potential acts of terrorism and criminal activity. What that means at the Super Bowl is the establishment of a hardened perimeter of concrete barricades and fencing extending no less than 300 feet around the stadium. It is almost always a great deal more than that. The NFL Tailgate Party, a massive pregame extravaganza for 10,000 of the league’s closest friends and business partners, was most often located inside the perimeter, so the guests could be cleared through the magnetometers (mags) on their way to the pregame soiree and then head to their seats in the stadium without additional screening. Areas supporting operational compounds for broadcasting, law enforcement, and equipment storage are also enveloped by the barricades, increasing the amount of fencing to as much as 2 1/2 miles. It makes for a very large footprint.
Because parking permits at the Super Bowl can cost hundreds of dollars, they serve as a great revenue opportunity for the event and also a powerful incentive for fans to find parking somewhere else. As a result, hundreds of fans that year found spaces in cheaper lots west of the stadium, which were operated by pop-up entrepreneurs at fast-food joints, big-box stores, and in residential driveways. The entrance at the west gate was simply overwhelmed with many more people than we had ever expected to show up there. The queues grew to such a length that by the time the gates opened, waiting times for the earliest arrivals to get through security could be expressed in hours.
The notion that a set of gates could become overcrowded was totally foreseeable every year, and on paper, we had a plan for exactly WHAT we would do. We anticipated directing people away from overburdened gates to entries that were less crowded. When it came time to act, however, we quickly determined that we had no good plan for HOW we would accomplish that. As a result, we learned the hard way that it is essential to not only have a strategy (i.e., to move fans away from more crowded to less crowded gates), but also to have a fully thought out tactic (i.e., how we would move the fans to another gate).
Like Texas itself, Cowboys Stadium is a very big place and the security perimeter more than doubled its footprint. Even some of the streets surrounding the stadium were swallowed up by the perimeter, so any fan who wanted to walk from one side to the other would have to circumnavigate a very long, circuitous, unmarked route to get there.
We began instructing security guards along the queue to inform fans that the wait to enter was much shorter on the other side of the building. Unfortunately, there were no signs to follow or instructions to explain to the fans how they could get to the other side. Also, there was no staff to direct the fans along the way. So rather than abandon an endless, frustratingly slow queue to undertake a lengthy journey to an uncertain fate, fans stayed right where they were, simmering and rightfully unhappy.
Super Bowl XLV, held in 2011 in North Texas, unearthed a great many flaws in the way we planned, managed, and executed our events. We were reasonably skilled at identifying what contingencies we needed to consider, but it was equally important to visualize and develop a realistic plan that defined how we would execute them. Had we added the “how” tactic to our “what” strategy, we would have had a system to communicate wait times, signage to direct fans around the building from the west side to the east side, and staff assigned to assist them along the way. If we had better developed our “how” in this case, we would have also discovered that our blueprint that installed security gates only on two sides of the stadium was flawed and that the long and arduous route was far too long to be a reasonable alternative.
We feel better prepared when we have imagined a potential obstacle to our success and have developed a response to meet the challenge head on. It is certainly tempting at that point to “tick the box” and move on to the next challenge, but until you’ve fully thought through the course of action, the “how,” you may only have a strategy, and not the tactic that defines a viable contingency plan.
We now know that the first step in contingency planning, identifying the most likely things that could go wrong, and the second step, having a strategy to address the issue if one or more of them do go wrong, comprise an incomplete process without knowing exactly how you will realistically and reliably execute the strategy. But, can we, as counterintuitively as it sounds, develop strategies and tactics to also deal with the unforeseen and unpredictable? The answers are “yes” and “no.”
The more complex our project or plan and the more unpredictability we face, the more things that can go wrong. We cannot have a plan for absolutely everything, but we can get closer to the ideal of a better-prepared system for things we can control, the things we can’t, and even the things we will never see coming. What is unforeseeable to us can often be perceived by others who are not bogged down by the enormous investment of detail and planning that has consumed the core planning group. Fresh sets of experienced eyes, unbiased brain cells, and uninvested investigators can make our preparations stronger.
That is one of the reasons why we introduced a “tabletop” exercise into our Super Bowl planning. It wasn’t until later that we realized we could also use it to pressure-test and validate our “hows.” A tabletop exercise is essentially an operational rehearsal. We brought onboard a third-party facilitator about a month before the Super Bowl to review all of our plans that, by that point, had taken three years to create.
It’s human nature to resist changing things after investing so much time and effort. I’m sure that’s why many of our staff and contractors thought stadium security expert Dan Donovan was a pain in the ass. They had to press the pause button on the important work they were doing to provide him with time, documents, and answers to probing questions. What the staff perceived as a series of unproductive meetings, however, helped Dan understand the design of our plans, schedules, processes, and procedures, as well as our contingencies, our level of preparedness, and blind spots in our thinking.
About 10 days prior to the Super Bowl, Dan gathered everyone who would be located at NFL Control and most of the people in charge of various aspects of game day. Over the course of four hours, Dan would run through five or six crafted scenarios, all of which involved things that might not go well at the Super Bowl. He would set the scene in great detail and throw in something truly awful.
Ford Field—home of the Detroit Lions and the host of Super Bowl XL, held on February 5, 2006—is snuggled into a cozy corner at the intersection of two interstate highways. A few modest strips of parking and a garage are shoe-horned into the spaces between the stadium and the highways. The main entrance is directly across the street from Comerica Park, home of baseball’s Detroit Tigers. For most fans, there is one side from which to exit the building. At the end of the game, 65,000 ticket holders would flood out of the main doors, hang an immediate left, and head for Gratiot Avenue, where more than 100 buses waited to return about 5,000 fans to their downtown hotels. That was the plan, anyway.
“It’s the fourth quarter and there’s four minutes left on the game clock,” Dan began. “The score is 28–7. A fatal shooting has been reported on Brush Street, the main pedestrian access, just beyond the security gate, short of Gratiot Avenue. The police don’t know who he was, why he was there, what happened to him, or where the assailant has gone. They have cordoned off access from the area to preserve the crime scene and protect the public from further danger.”
Given the scenario and lopsided score, fans may have already been heading for the doors to beat the end-of-game rush. Commanders of the Detroit Police Department (DPD), who participated in our tabletop exercise, informed us that they were sealing off the security perimeter and closing the gates. Matters of public safety are always the jurisdiction of law enforcement. The Super Bowl security team, informed by DPD of the closure, began deploying guards to the stadium doors to keep fans from exiting the building. In the meantime, we wrote a scripted message for the public address announcer to inform the fans that they should remain in the stadium, and ideally in their seats, at the end of the game due to “a police investigation outside the stadium.” The announcement would be made at the first whistle stoppage in play. It was likely to create tremendous concern in the audience, but it was better to keep as many fans as possible in their seats than to have tens of thousands of them in the concourse trying to get out. It would be much easier to keep them informed while they were inside the seating areas. The tense fans would need to be kept informed during the closing minutes of the game to avoid the panic that might ensue in a vacuum of information.
Although Blackberry texting devices had already been in use by 2006, Twitter would not roll out until a month after the game, Facebook was just a baby, and iPhones had not yet been introduced. We were prepared for this tectonic shift in news gathering and dissemination by the time the lights went out in the New Orleans Superdome in 2013 at Super Bowl XLVII. If we had done the same exercise today, the complexities of managing messages and combating rumors swirling on social media would have been an important part of our contingency planning.
Because the announcement would likely rattle the teams and the players, the football operations group would pick up the phones on the sidelines to let the coaches know that the game should continue and that we would keep them informed as well. After the game was over, they would be told to stay in their locker rooms.
The broadcasting network, as well as other television stations, would likely start covering the incident as a news event, so the media relations department would keep the 3,000 media inside informed and connected with the police department, who would be tasked with providing authoritative facts. Our operations team discussed how we would approach the postgame period. We would repeat the message to the fans at least twice more before the end of the game and provide verified information periodically. The championship team would receive their trophy while the losing team would go to their locker room. But their buses could not leave until they were cleared by the police.
“There’s now a minute remaining on the clock,” Dan interjected. “The police have determined that the victim had actually been a criminal that threatened passersby with a knife and was “neutralized” by law enforcement. The police have determined there is no danger to letting fans leave the stadium, but that the route to the buses is sealed off as a crime scene.” The scenario had changed. We could now announce that fans would be able to safely leave the stadium, but how were we now going to keep 5,000 people who were looking for their buses from walking into the crime scene barricades like the parade band marching into the blind alley in Animal House? We determined there was no good way to get people to the buses, and we had no contingency for a back-up bus pick-up area if the primary location was inaccessible. It would be a good idea to have one. Good work, Dan.
In a later year’s exercise, Dan posed this scenario: “It is less than an hour before the game. Most of the fans have passed through security and are watching player warm-ups or enjoying refreshments at one of the stadium clubs. A tanker truck on the adjacent highway jackknifes and its cargo of ammonia appears to be leaking. The toxic gas may be drifting toward the stadium.” Before we set our sights on how we would react, I asked our security-and-law enforcement team whether there was a HAZMAT ban on the closest highways on Super Bowl Sunday. There was not then, but by game time there was. The exercise strengthened our plan by greatly reducing the probability of that issue.
Dan and I felt that one really important part of the plan had to involve an interruption of the “chain of command.” That is, what if one or more of the key decision makers tasked with managing the response was suddenly inaccessible or unable to perform. So, for one exercise, he took me out of the equation. I honestly don’t remember the scenario that needed solving, except that while setting up the details, Dan added that I had slumped to the floor unresponsive. The team worked together to identify the problem, isolate the issue, and set in motion a rational, actionable response. I was proud of them, but disappointed that no one thought to call an EMT to try to revive me. I hope that was unintentional.
Notwithstanding their intrusion into our business or school days, no one questions the importance of a fire drill, a rehearsal of an essential emergency response plan. A tabletop exercise simulating the rollout of your product launch, opening day, rebranding, or crisis plan is nothing less than a rehearsal of your operational response to potential threats. It is challenging to solve tough problems in a simulated environment, but I assure you it is much easier to do that than to try to solve them in a real-life, heat-of-the-moment atmosphere, when time is your enemy and every moment is precious. A tabletop exercise can acid test your plan, expose gaps, and if you act on the results, reduce the probability of things going wrong when it counts most. Over the course of nine years, we incorporated many tabletop learnings into our contingency-planning strategies. As important, it helped to guide better decision making when things really did go off the rails in the real world.
We didn’t know it when we first started this annual practice, but we discovered that our tabletop exercise helped us do far more than just explore how we would deal with specific issues. It established a team-oriented, problem-solving culture in which the collective group thought through solutions collaboratively in a time-constrained environment. Because the Super Bowl moved to a different city and stadium each year, there were always important new teammates joining the decision making structure, including the stadium’s management, local law enforcement, and recent hires. Conducting a dry run to give everyone an opportunity to become more familiar with those they would be working beside on a very busy, very long game day was an enormously valuable benefit. Every member of the group came away with a better understanding of who would assume responsibility over which elements of the response to something going wrong.
When you feel swamped with contingency scenarios, remember that you simply can’t anticipate every potential problem. You should plan for the most likely and predictable, but some things are neither likely nor predictable. So, your plan and decision making structure must ensure that you are ready not for everything, but for anything.
In the nine years that we staged these tabletop exercises, we never responded to a scenario involving a power failure. But, when the power did fail at the New Orleans Superdome, our senior team quickly swung into action as though we were faced with another tabletop exercise. Many who were at NFL Control that night agree that the tabletop simulation contributed significantly to our calm, collaborative, and systematic approach to managing that crisis.
When have you finished contingency planning? Never. It’s a continuous, iterative process. After you’ve identified potential threats and problems, develop a strategy to avoid them or mitigate their effects, and plan how you will implement those strategies. You will constantly refine the plan based on new information, new realities, and new insights (like the results of tabletop exercises). You may need to circulate your contingency plans to others for review or elevate them for approval. And while you do that, without question, you will discover additional threats and problems that need an entirely new set of contingency plans. But “planning for anything” can help you respond to something going wrong—after you have run out of time or resources—in order to develop more contingencies and a variety of strategies that can provide applicable options for responding to the unexpected.