We can experience let-down effects after a pressure-filled, results-driven project, even when things have gone pretty well. When they haven’t gone well at all, we can also feel disappointed, defeated, even despondent, professionally humiliated, and fearful for our jobs. The late NFL coach George Herbert Allen Sr., a veritable quote-machine, is credited as having said that losing the Super Bowl was “worse than death because you have to get up in the morning.”
There’s no two ways about it. Shaking off the lousy way we feel after we have invested our time, talent, and personal brand into a project that has, despite our best intentions, still spun a bit out of control, is tough. Maybe it was our fault that things went wrong, and maybe it wasn’t. Perhaps we were successful in getting things back on track, or maybe we couldn’t, but it was not for the lack of trying. We may have managed the issue to our best ability, or perhaps our own direct actions contributed to a result that could have been better. Coach Allen’s sardonic quote reflected the stinging agony of having coached Washington in its Super Bowl VII loss to Miami on January 14, 1973. But the loss hardly made him a loser. When Coach Allen retired from the NFL five years later, he owned the tenth-best record in League history, with a .705 winning percentage, and he was enshrined in the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2002.
I’ve never lost a Super Bowl, at least not on the field, so I can never fully comprehend the depth of Coach Allen’s disappointment. But, I have woken up many mornings after feeling defeated and dejected by far less than ideal results. Some I can laugh about now, and some still hurt to think about. But I’ve learned that the keenness of the sting subsides. We can’t go back and change anything we did, but we can own what happened, learn from it, share our learning with our teammates, and lessen the probability or the impact of a repeat occurrence. It seems trite to say: “Hey, stuff happens. Don’t be too hard on yourself,” and I can’t remember ever feeling better after hearing it. It is entirely natural to be unhappy with failure and to be disappointed with a poor result. Endure the sting and own it, but it’s what you do next that is essential, and that is to commit to being better prepared for next time. As Coach Allen also observed: “Winning is the science of being totally prepared. There is no detail too small.”
PROJECT POSTPARTUM AND POSTMORTEMS
Thankfully, things don’t always go wrong, and not all of us get sick or emotionally spent as our projects wind down. Many managers I have spoken with, however, share what I call “project postpartum.” There is a bit of melancholy that our endeavor has been completed, and it seems that the longer we have been working on it, the deeper we have invested ourselves, and the greater the level of pressure we endured, the greater the sense of wistfulness. Part of this response is due to the sudden reduction of the stress hormones that had been coursing through our circulatory system, and part is due to the absence of the stimuli that precipitated their release in the first place. Suddenly, there seem to be fewer unrelenting deadlines, and just a little more room to breathe. By all means, take that breath whether things went predominantly right or mostly wrong, but not for too long. The project is not really over until we address a new set of self-imposed deadlines—our “project postmortems.”
My former Radio City Music Hall boss, Barnett Lipton, hated that expression, and I understand why. Postmortem literally means “after death,” and refers to an investigation into the cause of someone’s demise. Once the project campaign is behind us, it’s time to candidly evaluate every aspect of our performance. Did we meet our objectives, and if our metrics for success didn’t measure up, why weren’t the results as good as we had hoped? Were our original goals and expectations reasonable? In which ways did we succeed, and in which ways did we fail? How can we improve the outcome in the future? What should we keep doing, what should we stop doing, and what should we do better?
The After-Action Report Process
I always try to write up my own perceptions in an after-action report within a few days of completion. Setting that goal for myself provides me with a deadline that channels the “project postpartum,” which I often experience after a major event, into a constructive continuation of the project.
My after-action report begins with reflections on whether our team accomplished the goals we set out to achieve. Most events I work on can be judged on relatively simple metrics—such as attendance, viewership, ticket revenue, and audience response—so I can evaluate our performance relatively quickly.
For businesses and projects that are judged on longer-term metrics—such as monthly revenue, customer satisfaction, or sales growth over time—an accurate assessment may require a more extended time period. Don’t put off starting your after-action report while waiting for the numbers. Get started right away on everything else your report should analyze, like answers to these questions:
• What went right, and what did we do that worked well?
• What went right, but could have been done better?
• What went wrong, and how could it have been avoided or its impact lessened?
• Was our response to what went wrong effective and adequate?
• What would we do differently in the future to influence a better outcome?
• How did our team perform and how did they contribute to the result?
• What should we keep doing in the future, and what should we stop doing?
Writing my after-action report right away helps me to recollect more of the details before they naturally disintegrate with the passage of time.
Decay Theory proposes several reasons why memories may fade over time, but regardless of the cause, the longer we take to recall what we have learned, the more details are lost. It seems that the very act of quickly articulating our experiences in writing, even just by jotting down a key word or two, will help us better retain the information in our long-term memory. Our recollections will also be more comprehensive because we have begun to develop a written record.
We as project leaders are not alone in having leaky memories, of course. The same holds true for our teammates, business partners, and customers. When we get a survey from a hotel or airline, it is usually sent within a day of our stay or flight, so we can more accurately recall the details without interference and confusion with other travel experiences. Although I often ask teammates, both verbally and in writing, to send me postmortem comments, most never do, unless they want to share something that went particularly wrong. There is, however, an enormous amount of information on less consequential details—things that could have gone better—that if remedied can contribute incrementally to a more positive outcome. We just have to offer a forum to tease them out.
Postmortem Meetings and Sessions
Although I would always opt for a meeting, in person or by teleconference, to discuss the successes and failures of any project, sometimes it is difficult to coordinate availabilities due to the demands on the participants’ time. Smaller, simpler projects can be evaluated with an internal survey or questionnaire, which can be answered at the respondent’s convenience.
For bigger, more complicated projects, a formal postmortemprocess is essential. For many years, I had scheduled larger meetings, for up to two hours with 12 to 20 or more people, with knowledgeable teammates representing each business area. Everyone was to come armed with their notes, experiences, challenges, suggestions, and comments. But unless there was something that went egregiously wrong, it turned out that I usually ended up doing most of the talking and discussing the things that I felt could be improved. Or, one or two people dominated the conversation. Most of remaining teammates either felt their details were not worth the attention of everyone else, or they just didn’t want to fall behind answering their e-mails during the meeting. It was simply impossible to engage everyone to share their points of view in a large, cross-organizational setting.
The year that everything seemed to go wrong at the Super Bowl, we knew there was an enormous amount of information and perspectives to collect. We decided to forg
o the large meeting and replace it with a series of smaller, more focused sessions, scheduled for 60 minutes each, specifically dedicated to coming away with a deeper understanding of the experiences of one, or, at the very most, two related business units at any one time. Not only did we get more intelligence and depth in the more intimate setting, we discovered more things that went wrong EVERY year, but had never risen to a level of importance that resulted in our teammates sharing them at the larger meeting. It took a lot longer to conduct eight smaller postmortems than a single large one, but the investment of time was unquestionably worth it. In retrospect, though, I am sure that at least some of my colleagues were still holding back a little bit. Perhaps they didn’t want to offend me or thought some of the issues they surfaced would be ignored and that it would be a waste of time to bring them up. There may have even been some distrust of me or of other teammates.
I hadn’t even considered the last point until after I left the NFL. Neither had I understood the value of occasionally having objective, third parties conduct postmortems until the Indianapolis Motor Speedway asked me to host a companywide study of how the organization could work together more productively to manage their biggest and most widely viewed event, the Indy 500. We scheduled four solid days of individual department postmortem meetings, 90 minutes each, to explore how each business unit worked with others across the organization to stage “The Greatest Spectacle in Racing.” I approached the assignment cautiously, with a list of prepared questions and conversation starters, and thought it would be daunting for participants to open up to a complete stranger. Instead, it seemed to be a liberating opportunity for the Indy team because they could share perspectives they had never articulated at other company meetings. One particularly memorable interchange vividly illustrated this for me:
“It is really difficult to work with that department,” one manager offered when I asked the group about the biggest challenges they faced each year. “All of a sudden, they need something to happen, but they just don’t understand how complicated it is to manage last-minute requests with everything else going on. This doesn’t happen just once in a while, but all the time.”
He was right, I agreed. Everything depends on everything else and one late change can have ripple effects that can impact many other things. “How do you think they feel about working with your department?” I asked.
“Hmmm . . . ,” he had to take a moment to think about it. “They probably think we’re really difficult to work with, too.” Then, he added thoughtfully: “I’m sure they are just responding to a request from one of their partners.”
Many more honest insights were gained during these department-focused postmortems in a setting populated with teammates who shared similar missions, concerns, and points of view. Most of the feedback was instructive and constructive, and helped to inform and sensitize management to the internal issues that were affecting the end product, interfering with progress and innovation, and impacting morale.
Schedule postmortems as soon as possible after the completion of a project. Whether conducting them yourself or through a third-party facilitator, be sure to craft and circulate a preliminary agenda ahead of time to give participants time to prepare thoughtful comments. When the time comes to meet, articulate your objectives and expectations for the meeting at the outset. Recognize the value of everyone’s contribution, and welcome candor and criticism. Express your commitment to fixing problems and considering the group’s recommendations. If there are specific things that went wrong, address them directly and encourage conversations on how to avoid them in the future. Add discussions that are relevant to that group’s mission and their role in the project, but also leave time for the group to discuss their broader observations on topics and issues that are not necessarily related to their specific role or mission. You may be surprised at the diversity of opinion, insight, and information they offer about other aspects of the project. They may just be grateful that you asked, and more invested in the overall outcome because you did.
It’s almost time to close the books on the last project, and to move on to the next one. We’re more experienced and more prepared. This time every detail is sure to go completely right. Or will they? No, probably not.
CONCLUSION
A BULLET DODGED. FOR NOW.
Whatever things went wrong for whatever reason, they are now history and irretrievably anchored in the past. We may have worked tirelessly and taken extraordinary measures to imagine the wide range of places we could possibly fail. We planned meticulously and developed multiple contingencies to address the most probable things that could interfere with our project’s success. We considered the complications of unintended consequences. We may have even pressure-tested our planning with a tabletop simulation of how we would respond should something fail anyway. It’s a good thing, too, because despite our best intentions, it still did fail.
At that moment, we endured the reflexive jolt of adrenaline entering our bloodstreams and managed to resist our primeval reaction of “flight or fight.” We and our empowered teammates confronted the problem, applying a broad diversity of expertise, experience, and perspectives to develop a methodical response in order to implement a reasoned solution. If the problem was not fixable within the time allowed to us, we sought to contain and manage its impact. We communicated quickly, clearly, and accurately with our customers, business partners, teammates, and the media, directly and on social platforms. Though the problem was solved or managed, it is usually not entirely behind us. A high degree of scrutiny may continue or even intensify within our organizations, in the court of public opinion, and in traditional and social media. Even if the problem was relatively minor and little noticed, from our own perspective we simply don’t want whatever went wrong to go wrong again. The consequences of a repeat performance could be more damaging to both our company and to ourselves. There are certain steps yet to undertake, progressing our longer-term response through a series of phases: recover, review, learn, and revise.
RECOVER
We may have responded to the problem, capably corrected what went wrong, successfully attenuated the aftershocks, and, at minimum, took responsibility for the failure. What we do now is as important as anything we did before, and maybe even more so. As Murphy’s First Corollary reminds us: “Left to themselves, things tend to go from bad to worse.” We’re not going to let that happen.
Our objective is now simple: whatever went wrong, we want it to never happen again. Our message to the outside world and our teammates is that we recognize the problem and regret the outcome. We are going to investigate what happened, fix what can be repaired, learn from our mistakes, and apply what we learn to do better in the future. There may be some unintended consequences still echoing from the original problem, and we will respond to those, too. We will continue to communicate and keep the appropriate parties apprised of our progress.
We continue to monitor and respond to negativity and dissatisfaction in the marketplace, and correct rumor and misinformation just as we did when the issue first surfaced. We gather data and customer sentiment proactively through direct conversations and social media. If we feel that the problem endangered the trust and business of customers and partners, we consider the use of surveys and focus groups to understand the extent of the reputational damage to the brand and to demonstrate our commitment to addressing the result.
Hopefully, what went wrong does not pose an existential challenge to the company, project, or to our own brands. Often, we can return to business-as-usual after we endure the ignominy of being the butt end of jokes around the water cooler, in the industry, on social media feeds, or even on late-night television. But when the problem is severe and the impact is serious, recovery can take a long time. Making things right with customers and partners can cost money, perhaps a great deal of it. It can affect sales and it can be uncomfortable as our brand works to restore its reputation and rebuild trust. It can, in extreme cases, be litigious, a process that i
tself can extend the reputational and financial ramifications for years.
During the recovery phase, the best message to get out to the organization, and if appropriate to the outside marketplace, is that the company is committed to performing better, emerging stronger, and being better prepared. What is essential is that this is more than just a message. It should be a mantra. We have to mean it, believe it, and act on it. First, of course, we must get to the bottom of what actually led to something going wrong and how we handled things once it did.
REVIEW
Our objective during the review phase is to gather all the information we need to fully understand what happened and why, and to honestly evaluate the effectiveness of our response. Only then can we make the necessary changes in our plans, procedures, and processes to avoid a recurrence, and improve the outcome if it does happen again anyway.
We begin the review process immediately by recording our own after-action notes, requesting observations from teammates, disseminating internal surveys, and scheduling postmortem meetings. We then distill what may be a copious amount of input and turn it into a framework for learning and acting. As postmortems often bring issues to the surface that may not be directly related to the things that we already knew went wrong, it is helpful to group insights, good and bad, into categories: operational, organizational, financial, experiential, and other classifications specific to your project and business.
In the meantime, we have already begun the root cause analysis to ensure that we are treating the sources, and not simply the symptoms, of our identified problems. Independent third-party investigations may concurrently be underway, the results of which often provide great additional data for the review process. We and our teammates may be asked for input and perspectives as outside parties conduct their own inquiries, which we should, of course, provide with accuracy.
What to Do When Things Go Wrong Page 26