Our contingency plan, in case no one listened to our entreaties, involved renting offsite parking and shuttle buses. We, along with our friends at NJT, also had a plan if more people than normal opted for the rails. NJT replaced its single-level passenger cars with double-deckers from other routes, increasing capacity by 40 percent, and added two more cars to each train. So, we were 100 percent prepared if 50 percent more people used the train than the savvy, well-informed locals. We were ready for 18,000 people, more than had ever ridden the trains before.
THE LAW OF UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES
On game day, we painfully learned about the “Law of Unintended Consequences” because we solved the parking problem too well. An estimated 28,000 passengers attempted to arrive by train, and after the game more than 32,000 tried riding back. The result was waits of two hours just to get onto the platform. The satellite parking lots? Deserted.
Is it possible to feel both really smart and really stupid at the same time? Yes, and “The Law of Unintended Consequences” will prove that to you. My old boss, NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman, used to love to talk about it, and I’m sure he still does. The words he used were: “Everything depends on everything else.” While I know Gary didn’t invent this concept—that distinction belongs to sociologist Robert Merton, who also coined the terms “role model” and “self-fulfilling prophecy”—I’ll give Gary all the credit in the world. You see, when your boss imparts something that is so profound, so true, and yet so simple in just one five-word sentence, it’s worth remembering. One season, I even co-opted it as that year’s Super Bowl mantra.
What Gary was really saying was this: “If you think you planned well enough for things to go flawlessly, you probably haven’t thought of everything that could still go wrong.” If you believe you are home-free after thinking through every possibility, you’re deluding yourself. This is especially true during the planning process, the time when we are all trying to grapple with the universe of things that can go wrong. That’s the reason that Gary gave us a year to think through all of the potential pitfalls of the crazy idea of playing a regular season NHL game in an outdoor stadium, an audacious notion brought to us by the Edmonton Oilers.
The success of this risky venture depended on making clear-and-objective decisions about whether NHL players could perform safely and at their very best outside in potentially subzero temperatures, and whether it would provide a great live and TV experience. We covered all those bases, and some years later, the highly successful NHL Winter Classic (first held on January 1, 2008, at Ralph Wilson Stadium in Orchard Park, NY) and the NHL Stadium Series (first held on January 25, 2014, at Dodger Stadium) was born.
But we also had to consider what we would do if it was 70 degrees in mid-November in Edmonton, as unlikely as that might have been. What would happen to the ice if it rained or sleeted? What if a blizzard raged at game time? As we have seen, having a plan for those things is something we could think about well in advance because it’s possible all along the probability curve. But the flip side of “everything depends on everything else” is when, despite all the meticulous planning, something bordering on the unlikely and improbable goes wrong, all of a sudden, and you are charged with fixing the problem quickly and definitively. Solving problems in real time is particularly perilous because you don’t get a year to figure it out. You may get a few minutes, or just seconds, to think through all the ramifications of your decisions. That’s when “The Law of Unintended Consequences” is most likely to kick-in full force.
Robert Merton, a Columbia University professor, explained how, in a complex system, a seemingly simple action could result in side effects that the original actors never, in their wildest dreams, considered. Even a sound strategy can create unexpected challenges.
Here’s a story that illustrates that concept at work. It’s a truly chilling tale of what might have been, and it honestly still haunts me. But for one small decision—made by someone who wasn’t me—it’s a story that would have been on the national news for a week. It’s about a guy named Kurt William Havelock and what he did—or didn’t do—just before Super Bowl XLII in Glendale, Arizona.
Havelock was 35 years old, had a girlfriend, a couple of kids, a dog, and an apartment. He had never been in trouble with the law. He had a regular guy’s dream: to open a bar in Tempe, a suburb of Phoenix. His marketing idea was to make it a horror-themed destination, “The Haunted Castle.” The neighbors on the street became concerned when they heard rumors that it might be called “Drunkensteins.”
He needed a liquor license. While Havelock went through that process, some of the neighboring businesses quietly expressed their concern about his plans to city officials, and his dream to open a bar was stopped dead in its tracks.
This is where the story turns chilling. Havelock went out and purchased an AR-15 rifle for $800, totally legally. He went to the local shooting range to learn how to better use the weapon. He bought a sizeable amount of ammunition—250 rounds—but nothing that would arouse suspicion. Again, legally. The day before Super Bowl XLII, Havelock wrote a “manifesto” of sorts, containing a series of terrifying threats. He sent the letters by Priority Mail to a list of news outlets, including the Associated Press and Los Angeles Times, planning that they’d be read the day after the Super Bowl.
“No one destroys my dream . . . I will not be bullied by the financial institutions and their puppet politicians . . . All this boils down to an econopolitical confrontation. I cannot outvote, outspend, outtax, or outincarcerate (sic) my enemies . . . but for a brief moment, I can outgun them . . . The Patriots versus the Giants . . . do you see an ironic parallel? How many dollars will you lose? And all because you took my right to work, to own a business, from me . . .”
Havelock figured out something that the NFL Security Director, the FBI, and the Secret Service had known, but that I had not fully appreciated, and since has become all too apparent at venues and events around the world. The Super Bowl is a National Security Special Event, on the same level as the State of the Union address or the presidential inauguration. The reason for that is simple. More people—lots more people—watch the Super Bowl than watch the State of the Union or a presidential inauguration. That is what makes the game, and the stadium where it’s played, what security experts call a target-rich environment.
With that in mind, we took security very seriously. We were concerned about someone bringing a weapon and explosive, or something equally dangerous, inside the building, and to prevent that, we installed airport-style security checkpoints all around the stadium. The Super Bowl had required more meticulous security since 2002, and all NFL stadiums use walk-through magnetometers (mags) today. Everyone walked through one.
Havelock, however, recognized that you don’t have to get through the security checkpoints to wreak havoc. By encouraging crowds to queue outside the security checkpoints prior to screening, we had inadvertently created a target-rich environment. It would take a very resourceful evil doer to breech these measures and enter the stadium with a weapon, but because we had inadvertently created a crowd-concentrated environment outside the checkpoint, Havelock put himself in a position to hurt a great many innocent people without having to get through a single security check. A suicide bomber at the exit from a pop concert in Manchester, England, in 2017, sadly, employed the same strategy.
On Super Bowl Sunday, an hour before game time, Havelock parked his car in a nearby lot, grabbed a duffle bag, and made his way toward the University of Phoenix Stadium in Glendale. He walked up a little hill, which gave him a perfect view of several security checkpoints and the people funneling toward them. He had a loaded rifle, hundreds of rounds of ammunition, and a clear vantage point outside the most widely watched single-day sporting event in the world.
Our nightmare was unfolding, even though we didn’t know it was happening, but on that day, we got lucky. Instead of picking up his gun, Havelock picked up his cell phone and called his girlfriend. She convinced him to r
eturn home. His family ultimately talked him into turning himself in at the local police station.
Ironically, the local police couldn’t find anything to charge Havelock with, given that he had bought his gun and ammunition legally and he didn’t actually fire the weapon. He was convicted on six counts of mailing threatening letters and sentenced to a year and a day in prison. After Havelock served his sentence, the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 9–2 to overturn his convictions. The judges reasoned that Havelock’s manifestos weren’t mailed to people but to corporations and were delivered after the Super Bowl. His menacing language didn’t constitute a threat, in their opinion, but were planned as posthumous explanations of actions he never took.
Since Havelock wasn’t detected or intercepted on the day of the event, I didn’t even hear about the incident until the following day. It’s no secret that among the many security measures on game day, teams of concealed snipers are positioned at key points around the stadium. I never before wanted the details and never asked, but I knew that they were there. The next day, I quizzed Bob Hast, a former FBI agent who was then our director of event security about what would have happened if Havelock picked up the gun and started firing.
He would have been dealt with, Bob assured me matter-of-factly. “But not before he took out about 30 people.” That would have been 30 people approaching a security checkpoint that we had installed the week before to protect them. The unintended consequence of installing necessary security checkpoints is the concentration of crowds waiting to be screened. The act of making the stadium more secure simply moved the area most vulnerable further away. To make that area more safe, other measures are required, like more robust surveillance.
ANTICIPATE THE RIPPLES
The good news is that most of the time, our decisions don’t have life or death implications and you won’t have to rely on a madman’s pang of conscience or an anxious girlfriend’s appeals to avert a disaster. But there are practical lessons from this chilling tale. Don’t get so focused on solving the problem right in front of you that you lose sight of how potential solutions can affect the big picture. We all love it when we can solve a problem cleanly and completely. Unfortunately, that doesn’t happen as often as we hope.
Over the last 30 years of managing big events, I’ve seen that when you think you’re solving a problem you’re often just moving the problem elsewhere. It might be, as in the Havelock case, shifting the problem from one place to another. At other times, it might be shifting it in time—kicking “the proverbial can” down the road. Does your proposed solution shift the responsibility from one person to another? That doesn’t really make the problem go away and probably won’t even take the problem off your shoulders entirely.
Your solution might seem relatively simple, but it could well affect a complex system. Anticipate the ripple effects. Doing that literally saved the Super Bowl during its darkest moment. Before the Baltimore Ravens and the San Francisco 49ers ever knew they would be playing against each other at Super Bowl XLVII at the New Orleans Superdome, the local energy utility recognized that power service into the stadium was less reliable than it had been 11 years before. It was the first Super Bowl in the city since Hurricane Katrina, and nothing stresses a power supply more than a Super Bowl. With that in mind, the energy utility upgraded the two main power cables serving the Superdome, ensuring that any degradation sustained during the hurricane would be thoroughly addressed. In the process of doing so, the energy utility also installed state-of-the-art relays. It was one of these relays, sensing a power surge after the half-time show, which acted like a giant circuit breaker and triggered a blackout. To the computer brain of these relays, the unusual pattern of power demands of the Super Bowl seemed like a malfunction.
As a later investigation determined, the relays were adjustable. Like many devices you might buy for yourself or your home, they were delivered and installed with the default factory setting. For the two months prior to Super Bowl XLVII, they worked perfectly and kept the lights on. On Super Bowl Sunday, as we will explore in more detail later, they also worked perfectly, shutting off the lights and almost ending the game.
The best time to think through whether decisions you make will generate unintended consequences, of course, is during the planning stage. If you have the time and resources to test new systems and processes early on, that’s when to do it.
The Olympics, for example, conducts full-on test events to make sure every venue, every piece of equipment, every traffic and crowd flow strategy, is sound and all systems perform well. It gives the organizers the chance to make the adjustments in order to mitigate any nasty side effects that may present themselves before the main events take place. It’s the event world’s answer to beta testing a product.
If we had done that for the new power infrastructure at the New Orleans Superdome before the Super Bowl, we would have had a better chance of finishing the game 34 minutes earlier. Less than a year later, we did just that. We put the electrical system at the entire Meadowlands Sports Complex through exhaustive and expensive testing simulations for Super Bowl XLVIII in East Rutherford, New Jersey.
New Jersey, however, was the place where things went wrong in real-time because of our insistence on pushing fans to use the train. Notwithstanding the changes made to the rail service on Super Bowl Sunday, we couldn’t test for the possibility that way more people would heed our advice than we thought. However, we could have planned for the possibility. Instead, we had considered only the opposite—that fewer people than normal would take the train. That we had a plan for.
How could we have prevented the crowding and delays? We could have explored whether tickets to the game day train could be sold in advance. That might have helped educate us on what to expect ahead of time. We might have had a contingency to send trains to the stadium earlier, when passengers first started arriving. At the end of the game, we could have had buses waiting in the MetLife Stadium parking lot as an alternative to relieve pressure on the train. (Ultimately, buses were moved to the stadium to help ease the crowds, but that was only after the crowds had collected and the problem was already in full bloom.) We assumed that our challenge was getting fans to take the train. We were so preoccupied with solving that problem that we didn’t adequately consider the other: the unintended consequence of an informational campaign that worked too well.
Unintended consequences are not necessarily a result of poor planning or insufficient information. Often, they arise as a product of good ideas and sound decision making. It is better, of course, to more fully consider the possible outcomes during the planning stage. But when something does go wrong in real time, try to resist the temptation to act too quickly, without regard to how your response may affect the outcome in other areas. That doesn’t mean don’t act fast. Just act fast enough to keep things from getting worse, but not so fast you end up making things worse. If you have to respond, remember to anticipate the interconnected consequences that can arise every time you make a decision. Do that consistently and you’ll make Gary Bettman proud. Or, at least impress your own boss.
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REAL-TIME MANAGEMENT
“Make the plan. Execute the plan.” I heard and repeated that expression quite a lot after I joined the special events department at Radio City Music Hall. It sounds obvious and straightforward, but we didn’t really believe it was of any prescriptive value even then. So our team added two more phrases to bring the motto closer to the truth as we experienced it: “Make the plan. Execute the plan. Change the plan. Execute the planner.”
There is a time to put the pencil down and get down to the business of executing. We have imagined our ideal outcomes and metrics for success, and all the dastardly things that could get in the way of achieving them. We have merged the processes of imagination and planning to develop contingencies that will prepare us for many of the most probable and damaging things that could go wrong. We have put a team in place that we will lead, manage, and empower. Then,
everything runs flawlessly, like clockwork, with smooth precision. Until it doesn’t.
Almost every project plan will require midcourse corrections, tweaks, and changes that will yield the results we are striving for. We have a Plan B if we see that something is not working the way we had intended, and Plans C, D, and E for the circumstances we can foresee. Sometimes, a challenge emerges for which we don’t have any predeveloped alternatives and must make decisions based on our assessments, experience, and expertise. NFL coaches and quarterbacks refer to this as “calling an audible.”
CALLING AUDIBLES
On the football field, audibles are not a fix for something that has already gone wrong. The ball hasn’t been snapped and nothing bad has happened quite yet. But the quarterback sees the opposing defense set in an unexpected formation, which is a very strong indication that the play that was planned will probably not work or may result in a very negative outcome.
Few players were better at calling audibles than retired quarterback Peyton Manning, who played for the Indianapolis Colts and the Denver Broncos. In the huddle, Manning relayed to his teammates what play they were expected to execute and how they were going to advance the ball. As his offensive squad took their positions, and with the pressure of the play clock ticking down, Manning surveyed the opposing team’s defense. If the position of the linebackers suggested a blitz or a formation that was likely to defeat the play he shared in the huddle, he shouted the word “O-MA-HA” to indicate a quick shift to Plan B. The entire process, from the time the previous play ended until the last possible moment the center snapped the ball for the next play, took less than 40 seconds. For the quarterback, that’s 40 seconds to dust yourself off, huddle up, communicate the next play, set your formation, read the defense, change the plan, communicate the new play, and snap the ball.
What to Do When Things Go Wrong Page 17