What to Do When Things Go Wrong

by Frank Supovitz

  17

  TWO-MINUTE DRILL

  The most intense moments of a football game often unfold during the last two minutes. It is do-or-die time for the team that is behind, as they attempt to move the ball steadily toward the end zone without wasting a single precious second. The two-minute drill is a strategic, rapid-fire succession of techniques proven to work best when the pressure is at its highest, like these effective time-preserving execution strategies that I use to keep things going right while managing my projects.

  STAY NIMBLE

  “What do you actually do on game day?” asked Allen St. John, The New York Times best-selling author. I had to think about that, but the question shouldn’t have surprised me. He had already spent a year observing and interviewing members of the behind-the-scenes army responsible for overseeing some aspects of the game, broadcast, parties, and stadium for his book, The Billion Dollar Game: Behind the Scenes of the Greatest Day in American Sport—Super Bowl Sunday.

  “Well,” I told St. John, “I start the day pretty early in the morning, checking on final preparations around the stadium, the Fan Plaza, our hospitality venues, and the Tailgate Party.” I continued describing my final quality control checks for the biggest event of the year, taking notes, sending texts and e-mails, and asking lots of questions. That’s not really doing anything, I thought to myself. It’s checking on what everyone else is doing. That must not sound all that important.

  “Then,” I continued, “I park my Segway and move up to NFL Control, where I can monitor everything that is going on at and around the stadium, downtown, and everywhere in between.” I would be continually apprised of security issues, the admission count at the gates, crowd flow, traffic, and a host of other details. But monitoring is listening and not really affecting anything unless something needs to be addressed.

  “I keep the staff apprised of the pregame time clock leading up to the most time-critical elements, like when the teams need to come out of the locker rooms, when they need to be lined up at the field tunnel, when the ball needs to be kicked off.” I did a lot of the same things for the halftime show and postgame trophy ceremony.

  “So, what does the general manager of the Super Bowl actually do?” St. John ultimately wrote. “On game day, at least, as little as possible.”

  St. John wasn’t trying to be clever at my expense. Quite the opposite. What he revealed was the value of “management by doing nothing” in an environment in which dozens of things could be expected to go wrong among the millions of details that might go wrong. I was actually quite busy on every single game day, but I could never say with what ahead of time.

  “In general,” he quoted me as saying, “my job is to catch the passes as they come toward me. I try not to have a specific function at that point because my hands are tied to whatever the issues are, and my job is to deal with those issues as they come up, and they come up pretty fast.”

  If you are leading a project and are saddled with a great number of operational responsibilities, your ability to evaluate or detect developing challenges, make informed and timely decisions, and communicate desired actions can be significantly impacted. The play clock will always be ticking. Trying to balance too many critical operational priorities can seriously delay your response or force decisions without sufficient focus or time to think through the options or consider “the law of unintended consequences.” On Super Bowl Sunday, I had just two inviolate responsibilities:

  1. Ensure the ball was kicked off at 6:28:30 p.m.

  2. Avoid any halftime show-generated delay to the second half.

  Besides those two important mandates, I was open and prepared to handle any of those passes when I saw them coming toward me.

  PRACTICE PRIORITIZED DECISIVENESS

  Often, there wasn’t just one pass in the air. There were many of them coming all at once; this was another reason why it was so important to be relatively free of having too many direct operational responsibilities. This was true not only on game day, but every day for weeks leading up to the event. Although it was important to make decisions quickly to ensure issues did not pile up to an unmanageable number, it was also essential to make decisions that were both informed and definitive. That meant differentiating between the relative importance of making the fastest decision versus making the best decision.

  Super Bowl XLI, on February 4, 2007, between the Indianapolis Colts and the Chicago Bears, was the soggiest Super Bowl Sunday on record. A call came in to NFL Control that we had a problem at one of the gates at Dolphin Stadium in Miami. The tickets for a group of 125 very upset foreign fans were rejected by the barcode scanners as having been used earlier that day. According to their English-speaking leader, the group had had their tickets scanned to enter the stadium two hours before, and after deciding not to dine on overpriced hot dogs in the rain, had gotten back on their buses to enjoy a drier lunch in a nearby restaurant. Most of them were not conversant in English, the leader explained, so they did not understand or did not take notice of the large “No Readmission” signs. It was still more than an hour before kickoff, but members of the group were confused about being delayed, the rain from their clothes puddling on the checkpoint floor.

  “Let them in?” asked the gate supervisor, who wisely elevated the issue to NFL Control.

  “No,” I replied. We can’t just let in 125 people. “Have them wait just a bit.”

  I thought about the problem as I stickhandled through a few more issues, no doubt made more numerous by the lousy weather. Admitting dozens of people on rejected tickets was not something to do, especially at a National Security Special Event, until the story was checked out more thoroughly. I asked the chief of Security to inquire whether anyone on his team had observed what would have been very noticeable—more than a hundred people leaving through an exit at a time when no one should have been leaving. It took perhaps 10 minutes to get answers from all the checkpoints. No, no one had seen a large group depart the premises. I then asked the transportation director to find out if any buses had exited the bus parking lot over the past few hours. There would have been three or four of them. An answer came back a few minutes later. No buses had been seen leaving the bus lot. Bus parking permits were expensive, so it’s possible that the bus dropped them off somewhere else, like at the shopping plaza a few blocks away, and then returned to pick them up for their unscheduled lunchtime road trip.

  Problem solving is usually not linear, that is, managing one problem at a time before moving on to the next problem. A few other items of interest rose up to NFL Control as I wondered how we could verify whether the people had been dropped off at another location. In the meantime, another call came in from the gate. It had been 15 minutes since the group had been stopped, and they were reportedly getting testy. The gate supervisor was almost as exasperated. “These people are standing in the rain. Why aren’t we helping them out?”

  Pissing off fans who could have traveled a great distance to experience one of the world’s great sporting events was abhorrent to me. But, I also recognized the profound security implications of making a quick decision just to put it behind us. We needed to be completely sure that their story checked out before waving them through. Deciding to let the group in would have been final. Finding them again in a crowd of 74,000 might prove impossible if we later determined we had made a mistake.

  “Apologize again for the inconvenience,” I told the gate supervisor. “Gather up five random tickets from the group and bring them up to NFL Control.” We needed to make sure the tickets, printed with both obvious and undisclosed anti-counterfeit features, were authentic. Ten minutes later, it was my turn to call the gate supervisor.

  “Waiting on the tickets. Are they on their way up?” I asked.

  “No. They all left.” The “tourists” had vanished before relinquishing their tickets and did not materialize anywhere else to try to make their way into the stadium. We never saw them again and when the game began, there was no block of 125 empty s
eats in the stands.

  “Was this a remarkably well-planned and well-executed scheme to sneak into the Super Bowl, one that depended on the flurry of game-day activity—as well as the sheer scope and audacity of the plan—to overwhelm the NFL’s checks and balances?” St. John wondered in his book, The Billion Dollar Game. Probably, but to this day, I don’t honestly know for sure. What I do know is that a fast decision could have had a cascading effect on other things that could have gone wrong, possibly very wrong.

  “How do you make 125 wet, complaining foreign tourists disappear from the stadium on Super Bowl Sunday?” St. John mused. “You just ask for their tickets,” he concluded.

  TRUST YOUR GUT

  For just a fleeting moment, I thought I had arrived. “Sir Richard Branson is on the phone,” said Joan. Talking to the founder of the Virgin Group would be very cool. But I quickly reminded myself that I was not on speed dial for many billionaires beyond those who owned NFL teams.

  “Is it Sir Richard Branson or his assistant?”

  “It’s him.”

  I got over myself in a hurry. “No. No, it isn’t.”

  I didn’t really know for certain, but I picked up the phone and a very polite gentleman with a very proper British accent introduced himself. His girlfriend was in Miami, he told me, and he wanted to purchase four hard-to-come-by Super Bowl tickets for her and three friends. She would be able to stop by our office and pick them up and price was no object. It occurred to me that someone as influential as the world-renowned founder of the Virgin Group would have been able to call the Commissioner or any one of the team owners with whom he might have even dined or golfed. He would certainly have known their names before mine. Nevertheless, I had to be diplomatic, just in case.

  “I’m sure you can appreciate that you don’t know me, and I don’t know you.” I asked him if there was a way that he could verify he was who he said he was. Of course, he replied, and he launched into a list of personal achievements, passions, and possessions that would authenticate his identity. He was probably reading from the same website that I had already opened on my laptop.

  “Fax me over something on your letterhead,” I told him, “with your address and phone number.” We still used fax machines back then. He promised me he would, expressed his thanks, and finished the call. You can guess whether I ever received it.

  Ten minutes later our director in charge of premium ticket packages burst into the office. “You’ll never guess who I just got a phone call from. Sir Richard Branson!”

  “No, you didn’t,” Joan and I said in unison.

  Would something have gone horribly wrong if I had sold Super Bowl tickets to faux Branson’s girlfriend? Probably not, other than opening myself up for more requests from fake celebrities.

  What the story does illustrate, however, is the value of trusting your gut instincts. Call them intuitions, or red flags, alarm bells, or “spider sense,” if you’d prefer, but don’t discount them. Psychologists believe that gut instincts are subconscious connections between what we are experiencing now and what we have learned from past, similar encounters. Sometimes, those connections don’t surface up to our consciousness right away, which is why we seem to have epiphanies after “sleeping on things” or while in the shower. In the heat of the moment, we don’t have time to wait for those memories to reestablish themselves. So when we make decisions based on our gut and things go right because we did, it creates a positive feedback loop that encourages us to trust that feeling more often in the future.

  Yes, there really is a scientific reason why we trust our gut instincts more often as we advance in age, expertise, and experience. There was something about faux Branson’s call that just didn’t seem right, and probably because I had been conned a hundred times before, I could sense the fraudulence as it unfolded. I knew that busy Type A executives don’t make calls to people they don’t know personally. They let their assistants handle the calls. They don’t want to waste time leaving a message or waiting for the other party to come to the phone. Are our gut instincts infallible? No, of course not, and they don’t take the place of informed decision making. But, I will trust mine more often that I won’t.

  STAY AWARE OF THE OUTSIDE WORLD

  The rally at the State Capitol was the largest of the week. Union supporters were out in force, protesting the legislature’s bill that would make Indiana a “right-to-work” state. There had been rumblings all week of a potential truck blockade of Interstate 70, cutting off vehicular access to Lucas Oil Stadium—where Super Bowl XLVI would be held on February 5, 2012—and the entire downtown area. We were watching the developments all week long from our headquarters hotel just across the street.

  On the other side of the hotel, the NFL’s annual Super Bowl Kids Day program was getting ready to wrap up at the Indiana Convention Center. NFL Experience, the league’s massive interactive football festival, was opened that morning to local students with their classes. At the end of the session, a special guest performer entertained, and speakers including Indianapolis Colts players, the team owner, and the NFL Commissioner shared inspirational remarks before sending the kids home with a bag of goodies and lifetime memories.

  Indianapolis had dramatically changed how cities supported the Super Bowl. The host committee’s “Super Bowl Village” filled the downtown streets with football-themed activities that guided multitudes of fans into the NFL Experience, welcomed hundreds of the reporters at the adjoining Super Bowl Media Center, and treated everyone to free nightly concerts and fireworks after the NFL events had ended for the day. The toughest ticket in town was the Super Bowl Village zip line that allowed fans to glide high above the excited crowds and right past the entrance to the NFL Experience.

  I had passed along the committee’s invitation to the commissioner to experience and be photographed on the zip line, and we had agreed on having him soar over the crowd at the end of the Kids Day event. In the interim, the protest was heating to a boil. The legislature had approved sending the bill to Governor Mitch Daniels for signature on that very day—and at that exact time. The protestors erupted, loudly chanting “See you at the Super Bowl!” but they didn’t wait until Sunday to start mobilizing. The demonstrators began marching from the State Capitol to Super Bowl Village, just a few short blocks away. My phone rang as soon as the march began, and not long after, I chatted with the commissioner. We agreed that it was not a propitious time to be seen zip lining over a crowd filled with protestors. The march reached Super Bowl Village as Kids Day wrapped up just inside, and the protestors peacefully exercised their first amendment rights before dispersing into the crowd.

  Passage of state legislation is generally not an NFL, football, or sports issue. It was, however, a development that required some sensitivity on our part as well as some quick, responsive contingency planning for the truck blockade that, gratefully, never materialized. It is very easy to get so caught up in the intense details of our own urgent, time-sensitive projects that it completely consumes our attention around the clock. It is essential, however, to keep our antennae up for outside factors that can rapidly impact our plans—such as breaking news, political developments, and natural disasters, to name a few. Any one of these can instigate shifts in public sentiment and receptivity, swamp the environment with noise that can overtake our messages, or change a carefully crafted, cutting-edge campaign into an exercise in questionable taste and appropriateness.

  STAY FOCUSED

  Staying focused and on-task is not easy, not for us as leaders, and not for our teammates in the field. There are many reasons we get distracted, ranging from boredom and exhaustion to excitement and overstimulation. Dr. David Rock, Director of the NeuroLeadership Institute in New York City, explored the metabolic and mental processes behind distraction in a Psychology Today article discussing his fascinating book Your Brain at Work.

  Dr. Rock cited that: “Employees spend an average of 11 minutes on a project before being distracted. After an interruption it ta
kes them 25 minutes to return to the original task, if they do at all. People switch activities every three minutes, either making a call, speaking with someone in their cubicle, or working on a document.” It seems that being distracted is more “normal” than staying focused.

  Our mobile devices—the essential tools of communication and miracles of technology as they may be—can divert our attention in ways previously unimagined. We can be reached instantly by anyone just about anywhere, make contact with anyone else just as easily, and be tempted to post our latest experiences, opinions, whims, and wonders to our ravenous followers on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat. I’ve been known to tweet before and after an event, but after an infamous string of tweets posted between 8:53 p.m. and 9:04 p.m. Pacific Time on February 26, 2017, I’m less likely to post anything during an event ever again. That’s when a PriceWaterhouseCoopers accountant apparently uploaded photos of Emma Stone, congratulating her for winning an Oscar as the year’s Best Actress. During the same time frame, he handed Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway the wrong envelope for Best Picture.

  Maintaining our focus for more than 11 minutes is a difficult proposition. When possible, give yourself and others “brain breaks” to defer distractions and refreshment breaks to maintain your blood-sugar levels. Set and communicate clear ground rules on mobile device usage for non-mission-critical activities. It’s natural to be distracted, but it’s not okay when intense focus is required. That’s when things go wrong the most.

  YOUR MIC IS ALWAYS ON

  “Kids eat free on Tuesdays at Ruby Tuesday.” Nobody said anything afterwards, but I know everybody heard it. Maybe fans thought it was an advertisement and took little notice, but the real reason it echoed through the cavernous expanse of Radio City Music Hall during the NFL Draft was because the public address announcer had not shut off his microphone after revealing a late-round pick. Staying focused for 14 hours of the NFL Draft is a nearly impossible task, and we clearly didn’t accomplish that. We were bored and distracted by the endless hours of not much happening between the NFL Draft selections. So we passed some of that time talking about subjects of no particular importance, like where we took our kids to eat.