How to Accomplish an Impossible Project

In my upcoming book Project: Impossible, part of Multi-Media's Lessons from History series, I lay out a methodology for dealing with a project that appears to be operationally impossible (that is, it can’t be accomplished within the initial boundaries of time, cost, and performance).

Other questions matter, too:

1. What are the consequences of failure to meet the original requirements?
2. Are there unacceptable negative consequences if we succeed?
3. Could trying make things worse?
4. How much risk should we be willing to take in achieving our goals?
5. What are all the things that have to happen to allow us to call it success?
6. How can we prepare our organization or team to be ready when the impossible project appears?

Except for number 6, the other questions can’t effectively be asked until you have the project (or hot potato as the case may be). And as we’ve seen time and time again on our historical journey, it’s what you do beforehand that often spells the difference between success and failure.

To do the impossible, it helps to be prepared. Preparation starts long before the impossible project swims into your field of view. Whether you and your organization will be able to rise to the challenge often depends on the strength and quality of your preparation.

In the television (and movie) series Mission: Impossible, the Impossible Missions Force (IMF, not to be confused with the International Monetary Fund) takes on challenges far beyond the capability of lesser organizations. How does it do that? First, it selects highly skilled people and provides training in the specifics of espionage. Second, it promotes a high degree of morale and esprit de corps. Members of the IMF see themselves as the best of the best.

Third, and possibly most important, the IMF enjoys a high degree of political support and cover for its operations — at least in the television series. In the case of the movies, it’s more often the case that the problem lies in their own management, and as a result, the movie plots normally involve the IMF team acting without the support of its covering organization. This makes the situation far more perilous, and if it weren’t for the magic of the motion picture experience, those projects more likely would turn out to be actually impossible.

Sometimes a project is impossible for a good reason. In other cases, the project isn’t what it seems. Practice looking at the situation through someone else’s eyes. Play the “what if” game. Look around you. Question the constraints.

And always accept that you don’t know everything.

Crisis in Outer Space! (The True Story of Apollo 13)

My 26th book will be Project: Impossible, an exploration of how people achieved goals any reasonable person would have thought impossible. This week, the true story of the the Apollo 13 mission, continuing last week’s brief history of rocketry and spaceflight. 


Thirteen

Although the United States officially “won” the space race with Apollo 11 on July 20, 1969, there would be five more missions to the Moon, during four of which astronauts walked on the lunar surface. The exception was Apollo 13, the seventh manned mission in the program.

Gordon Cooper and Donn Eisele, originally scheduled for Apollo 13, were passed over by NASA management. The flight crew operations chief selected Alan Shepard, the first American in space, to replace Cooper, but management turned him down because of recent surgery. As a result, NASA selected the backup crew for Apollo 11, who were scheduled for Apollo 14, for this mission. Jim Lovell, who had flown on two Gemini missions and one previous Apollo mission, was to be the mission commander. Fred Haise, a research test pilot, had been on two previous backup crews but had never flown in space. The command module pilot, who would stay in orbit while the other two crew members went down to the lunar surface, was Ken Mattingly. It would also be his first time in space.

Seven days before launch, Mattingly was exposed to measles (as it turned out, he didn’t get them), and was replaced by Jack Swigert from the backup team. It would also be Swigert’s first time in space.

The lead flight director, in overall command, was Gene Kranz.

Crisis in Outer Space

Liftoff for the Apollo 13 mission came on April 11, 1970, at 13:13 Central Standard Time. There was a small hiccup during the launch: the center engine in the second stage had to be shut down early because of a malfunction known as “pogo oscillation.” It had been seen in previous missions, but never so seriously. Automatic cut-offs stopped the problem before it could tear the ship apart; later missions had technical modifications to prevent a reoccurrence. In any event, the remaining engines burned longer, and the vehicle continued to a successful orbit.

Such a problem was hardly unusual. Given the complexity and inherent risk of any space mission, it would have been far more notable had the flight gone off without a hitch. Solving problems was all in a day’s work for NASA’s talented and experienced people.

But what happened next tested their capabilities to the maximum.

About 56 hours after takeoff, with Apollo 13 much closer to the Moon than to the Earth, Mission Control radioed Jack Swigert and asked him to turn on the stirring fans for the hydrogen and oxygen tanks. About a minute and a half later, there was a loud bang. The crew’s first thought was that the lunar module had been struck by a meteoroid.

What had happened was actually much worse. Number 2 oxygen tank had exploded. Later analysis would reveal damaged insulation on the wires to the stirring fan, allowing a short circuit. A large aluminum skin panel on the outside of the ship blew off, damaging an antenna and momentarily interrupting communication with Mission Control. The shock of the explosion caused a break in the number 1 oxygen tank as well. Over the next two hours, the entire oxygen supply of the service module was lost. Complicating matters even more, the fuel cells needed oxygen and hydrogen to generate electricity. The command module was left with backup battery power only.

The damaged Apollo 13 spacecraft

Landing on the Moon was no longer an option. The crew hastily shut down the command module to save its limited power and moved into the lunar module. The new project was how to get the crew back safely to Earth.

What saved the Apollo 13 mission?

The Kranz Dictum

It’s only in the movie version of Apollo 13 that Gene Kranz says the phrase, “Failure is not an option.” The real message came after the 1967 Apollo 1 disaster, in which astronauts Virgin “Gus” Grissom, Edward H. White, and Roger B. Chaffee lost their lives, Gene Krantz addressed his flight control team, establishing what would become known as “The Kranz Dictum.”

Spaceflight will never tolerate carelessness, incapacity, and neglect. Somewhere, somehow, we screwed up. It could have been in design, build, or test. Whatever it was, we should have caught it. 

We were too gung ho about the schedule and we locked out all of the problems we saw each day in our work. Every element of the program was in trouble and so were we. The simulators were not working, Mission Control was behind in virtually every area, and the flight and test procedures changed daily. Nothing we did had any shelf life. Not one of us stood up and said, “Dammit, stop!”
I don't know what Thompson's committee will find as the cause, but I know what I find. We are the cause! We were not ready! We did not do our job. We were rolling the dice, hoping that things would come together by launch day, when in our hearts we knew it would take a miracle. We were pushing the schedule and betting that the Cape would slip before we did. 
 

From this day forward, Flight Control will be known by two words: “Tough and Competent.” Tough means we are forever accountable for what we do or what we fail to do. We will never again compromise our responsibilities. Every time we walk into Mission Control we will know what we stand for. 

Competent means we will never take anything for granted. We will never be found short in our knowledge and in our skills. Mission Control will be perfect. 
 

When you leave this meeting today you will go to your office and the first thing you will do there is to write “Tough and Competent” on your blackboards. It will never be erased. Each day when you enter the room these words will remind you of the price paid by Grissom, White, and Chaffee. These words are the price of admission to the ranks of Mission Control.

The Apollo flight teams had prepared for disaster time and time again. Exercises, simulations, and extensive training all went into achieving the goal of “tough and competent.” This is an essential ingredient in effective crisis management. By preparing for different eventualities and maintaining a high level of readiness, you and your team are in the best possible position to handle a crisis.

However, no matter how good you are, failure is always an option.

Timeline of the events in the Apollo 13 crisis

Working the Problems

Crises differ from more general projects in several ways. First, they are often imposed on the project team with little or no notice. Apollo 13 was going well until suddenly it wasn’t. Crises normally have extreme constraints in time and resources. The clock was ticking with Apollo 13. If problems could not be solved in very short order, the consequences would take hold at once — with fatal results.

While NASA had an extensive supply of spare parts, machine shops, and trained engineers who could have fixed the ship easily, those resources were on Earth, and the problem was more than a hundred thousand miles away.

Evacuating and shutting down the command module was the first order of business, but there were many obstacles yet to be overcome before the crew of Apollo 13 would once again see home. There were plans for aborting an Apollo mission, but some of them were ruled out by the exigencies of the situation. The quickest way home required jettisoning the lunar module, but that was serving as the lifeboat for the crew. The service module integrity was in doubt, so they didn’t want to fire its engine except as a last resort.

That left a circumlunar option, using the Moon’s gravity as a slingshot to send the crippled ship back toward earth. To do that, they needed to make a minor course correction, but debris from the explosion made it impossible to use the onboard sextant device, requiring Jim Lovell to fly the spacecraft using the sun in the cockpit window as an alignment star.

The problems mounted. While there was plenty of oxygen in the lunar module, carbon dioxide removal required the use of lithium hydroxide canisters. While there were enough of them available, the square command module canisters wouldn’t fit in the round LM openings. An engineering team created a kludged-together system using plastic bags, cardboard, and tape, working on an extremely limited time span.

(As an aside, the duct tape and other supplies that made this possible were also part of planning for crisis management: there was a kit containing some basic utility items available for use. One can only imagine the planning that went into deciding exactly what would be part of that kit.)

Power supplies were limited. The LM was rated for two people for a day and a half, and now it would need to accommodate three people for four days. All nonessential power was shut down. Water and food were limited. The crew became dehydrated. Lovell lost 14 pounds.

The team managed to overcome one problem after another, but the toughest technical challenge came at the end of the mission. There had never been a case where the command module had to be powered up after a long sleep, and the flight controllers had to test and write new procedures to accomplish it. (In the movie, that’s the suspenseful scene in which Ken Mattingly, played by Gary Sinise, tries to find a start-up sequence that draws less than 20 watts.) The normal time for a project like that was three months; the team had three days.

By the time the Apollo 13 team reentered the command module, condensation had covered the interior with fine droplets of water. Water was inside the circuit panels as well, and the chance of a short circuit was all too real. Fortunately, the tragedy of Apollo 1 had led to various safeguards against short circuits; there was no problem.

Four hours before landing, the crew jettisoned the service module, and one hour before landing they jettisoned the LM that had served as their lifeboat. As they entered the atmosphere, the heat of reentry created rain inside the command module.

But that was the final hazard.

On April 17, 1970, Apollo 13 splashed down safely near American Samoa.

Apollo 13 Mission Control right after splashdown

Crisis Management and the Impossible Project

What distinguishes a crisis from other kinds of projects is the way it tightens the constraints. Time pressure is normally high, and the nature of the situation normally limits resources that would otherwise be available to the team. These revised constraints are normally established by the situation, not by the will or desire of the project team. In the case of Apollo 13, a procedure that would normally take three months had to be developed in three days, for the simple reason that three days was all they had. Modifying the carbon dioxide removal system would have been trivial on Earth; it was a nail-biting project in space, with only the resources available on the ship able to be used for the job.

Had the mission control team not been well prepared — had Gene Kranz not insisted on “tough and competent” — had simulations by the hundreds not taken place, it’s almost certain that the Apollo 13 mission would have ended in failure.

But that’s the point. To prepare for crisis, prepare early.

By the time the crisis occurs, it’s usually too late.

A Brief History of Rocketry and Spaceflight

Robert Goddard and his rocket

My 26th book will be Project: Impossible, an exploration of how people achieved goals any reasonable person would have thought impossible. This week, a brief history of rocketry and spaceflight.

Mercury astronaut John Glenn, asked how he felt during his three-orbit flight, is reputed to have replied, “As I hurtled through space, one thought kept crossing my mind: Every part of this capsule was supplied by the lowest bidder.”

The history of rocketry and spaceflight is also a history of risk-taking and risk management. New technology is inherently unstable, a product of its newness, and when you are using that technology to propel people into previously unexplored conditions, disaster is never more than a small step away.

To China…and Beyond!

The history of rocketry traces back to ancient China. Gunpowder, a Chinese invention of the 9th century CE, was a byproduct of the alchemical search for the elixir of life, and as is the case with so many discoveries, its accidental secondary uses turned out to be far more important than the original inventor’s intent.

Rockets were first used in fireworks displays, and only entered the battlefield in 1232 CE against the Mongol invasion. The Chinese even invented multi-stage rocketry by the mid 14th century, by which time the technology had spread to India, the Middle East and eventually to Europe. The "rockets’ red glare" appear in American history during the War of 1812 and in the US national anthem "The Star-Spangled Banner."

According to legend, during the Ming Dynasty, a minor court official named 萬虎 (Wan Hu) attempted to become an astronaut by flying a chair with 47 rockets attached. He was never seen again.

In 1633, again according to legend, Lagâri Hasan Çelebi of the Ottoman Empire made a successful rocket flight to a height of 300 meters. His words before takeoff were, “O my sultan! Be blessed, I am going to talk to Jesus!” Upon landing, he told the sultan, “Jesus sends his regards to you.”

Somewhat better sourced are the achievements of car designer Fritz von Opel, who in the 1920s built a series of rocket-powered cars and a rocket-powered glider. One of his cars reached a speed of 254 km/h (157 mph). The rocket-powered glider was less successful: it exploded on its second test flight.

Modern rocketry owes its start to high school mathematics teacher Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky, who worked in the final years of the 19th century and the first years of the 20th. Inspired by Jules Verne, Tsiolkovsky developed a philosophy of space travel as a means for perfecting the human race, and in the process worked out most of the formulas at the heart of modern rocketry, including the famous Tsiolkovsky rocket equation.

Beginning in 1912, the American Robert Goddard established that a rocket would work in a vacuum and proposed sending a solid-fuel rocket to the moon, an idea ridiculed by the New York Times in an editorial. Goddard launched the first liquid-fueled rocket in 1926.

A young member of the Verein für Raumschiffahrt (German Rocket Society) named Werner von Braun developed long-range military rockets for the Wehrmacht, including the V-1 and the V-2. The Messerschmitt Me 163 Komet, was the war’s only operational rocket-powered fighter plane, though it was of little practical significance.

Following World War II, von Braun, along with 500 of his top scientists, surrendered to the Americans and established a new facility in Huntsville, Alabama, to build even more advanced rockets. Other German rocket scientists went to the Soviet Union — not all by choice.

Both in the United States and in the Soviet Union, the primary focus of rocketry continued to be military applications, particularly missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads.

But the rocket designers themselves had other ambitions.

“Before This Decade Is Out”

On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched Cпутник-1 (Sputnik 1), the first artificial satellite to orbit the Earth, and in the process initiated the Space Race between the Soviet Union and the United States. In the US, Sputnik was seen as a national humiliation. President Dwight D. Eisenhower ordered an acceleration of Project Vanguard, the US satellite launch program, but the first attempt ended in disaster when the rocket exploded on the launchpad on national television.

By the time the US managed to get a satellite in orbit, the Soviets already had two.

In 1961, the Soviets won another distinction when cosmonaut Ю́рий Гага́рин (Yuri Gagarin) became the first human in space. Three weeks later, American astronaut Alan Shepard completed a suborbital flight in the first Mercury mission.

In between Gagarin and Shepard, President John F. Kennedy asked his vice-president, Lyndon Johnson, to explore opportunities for the US to catch up in space, and Johnson recommended a piloted moon landing. Kennedy concurred, giving his blessing to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) Apollo program and establishing its goal in a speech before a joint session of Congress: “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.”

Meanwhile, the Soviet Union continued to set records, including the first dual-piloted flight and the first woman (and first civilian) in space. At the time, the Soviet program was shrouded in secrecy, so much so that the name of the head of their space program was classified — a mysterious figure known only as the “Chief Designer.” His real name, Серге́й Королёв (Sergei Korolev), would only be revealed publicly well after his death. Photographs of the Soviet launch complex, Байқоңыр ғарыш айлағы (Baikonur Cosmodrome), now located in Kazakhstan, were highly classified, but no more. (Here's a picture.)

Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan

The US Mercury program gave way to Gemini, a series of two-person missions. It was during Gemini that the US first crept ahead of the Soviet Union, setting records for length of flight, docking of spacecraft in orbit, and human extra-vehicular activity — better known as spacewalks.

Danger in Space!

By the middle of the 1960s, both nations were in a neck-and-neck race. The Soviet Union, under the leadership of the Chief Designer, planned a series of manned lunar flyby missions followed by a manned lunar landing planned for September 1968. In the United States, Gemini gave way to Apollo.

Both the Soviet and American programs experienced their share of disasters. In the Soviet Nedelin catastrophe, an exploding rocket at Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan killed between 78 and 150 top Soviet personnel. Cosmonaut Валентин Бондаренко (Valentin Bondarenko) died in a training accident; the government erased his existence from their records to avoid embarrassment.

On the US side, almost everyone thinks that only three astronauts died in racing to the moon: Mercury and Gemini astronaut Virgil “Gus” Grissom, Gemini astronaut Edward White, and Roger Chaffee, who died in a cabin fire during a rehearsal of the launch sequence of Apollo 1. There were more: Theodore Freemann, Elliot See, Charles Bassett, and Clifton “C.C.” Williams all died in training accidents involving T-38 jet fighter trainers. Robert Lawrence, who would have been the first African-American astronaut, died in an F-104 Starfighter crash. Although their names were not erased from the history books, they have sadly been almost completely forgotten.

There were numerous near disasters. The Vostok 1 service module didn’t detach from the reentry module in time, sending the spacecraft into a spin. Grissom’s Mercury capsule hatch malfunctioned at splashdown, nearly drowning him. Voshkod 2, Gemini 8, Soyuz 5, and Apollo 12 all had failures or near disasters during their mission.

Even Apollo 11, in which US astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon, had a failure of the navigation and guidance computer during the lunar descent. Armstrong landed the lunar module (LM) manually. Aldrin accidently broke the circuit breaker for the main liftoff engine, which might have stranded the astronauts on the lunar surface, but the astronauts were able to flip the switch using a felt-tip pen. On the return flight, the Guam tracking station failed, jeopardizing communication during the final stages of the return flight.

Thirteen

Although the United States officially “won” the space race with Apollo 11 on July 20, 1969, there would be five more missions to the Moon, during four of which astronauts walked on the lunar surface. The exception was Apollo 13, the seventh manned mission in the program.

About Apollo 13, more next week…

Project: Impossible — The Savior of Mothers

Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis

My 26th book will be Project: Impossible, an exploration of how people achieved goals any reasonable person would have thought impossible. This week, the story of the Doctor's Plague.

Childbed Fever

The advent of hospitals and the establishment of obstetrics as a medical discipline had an unanticipated side effect: a dramatic increase in cases of puerperal fever, commonly known as childbed fever.

It was a horrific disease. Death rates for all women giving birth in hospitals ranged from 20-25%. From time to time, there were epidemics of the disease, with death rates approaching 100%. Famous victims included the mother and two wives of Henry VIII and famous feminist and mother of the author of Frankenstein, Mary Wollstonecraft. (Today, puerperal fever is known to be a collection of several different diseases, including endometriosis, routinely treated with antibiotics, though it still occasionally results in death.)

The advent of pathological anatomy as a medical practice correlated strongly with the increase in cases of puerperal fever, though this link did not become clear until much later.

Childbed fever deaths spiked at the Vienna hospital, where pathological anatomy was performed, but not at the Dublin hospital, which did not practice it.

Paging Dr. Semmelweis

As the 19th century opened, the crown jewel, the largest hospital in the world, the center of medical practice in 18th Century Europe was the Allgemeines Krankenhaus der Stadt Wien, the Vienna General Hospital. Ignaz Semmelweis, newly admitted to the practice of obstetrics, spurred by the recent death of his mother, became obsessed with childbed fever.

The obstetrics department had two clinics: the First Clinic, staffed by doctors, and the Second Clinic, staffed by midwives.  Women often pleaded to be admitted to the Second Clinic rather than submit themselves to the care of doctors. Their fear was well founded, as there was a dramatic difference in mortality rates between the two clinics.

The First Clinic, staffed by doctors, had a death rate from childbed fever as high as 16%, but the Second Clinic, staffed by midwives, had a corresponding rate as low as 2%.

The most common theory was that the disease was simply a general miasma, just one of those things. It was nobody’s fault. Especially not the doctors.

An unhappy accident pointed Semmelweis to the answer, when his friend and mentor Professor Jakob Kolletschka died suddenly. The symptoms and progress of his disease were identical to childbed fever. It turned out that Kolletschka’s finger had been nicked by a student with the same knife that was being used in the autopsy. Somehow, contact with the corpse during the autopsy had led to the disease.

And it was in the performance of autopsies that the doctors of the First Clinic differed from the midwives of the Second Clinic.

Cadaver Particles

Ignorant of microscopes, microbes, and the germ theory of disease, Semmelweis could only observe one fact: that there was a connection of some sort between the cadaver and the death of Kolletschka, and by extension, between the cadavers used in pathology to the deaths of the childbed fever victims. What the agency of infection was, Semmelweis did not know and had at the time no way of finding out. He referred to them as “cadaver particles,” although he could not see them, measure them, or learn much about them directly.

But that didn’t mean he couldn’t come up with a treatment. What distinguished cadavers was the putrid smell, and what got rid of the putrid smell was a solution of chloride. In May 1847, Semmelweis embarked on a clinical experiment by placing a dilute concentration of chlorine at the entrance to the obstetrics ward and insisting that everyone who would touch a patient washed in it.

Today, of course, cleanliness for physicians is a matter of routine, but at the time, this was a radical break with traditional practice. Most Europeans at the time felt that a few baths a year were sufficient, and doctors were no exception. In fact, the blood-stained frock was a sign that a physician was hard working and professional. If doctors scrubbed themselves, who would know how hard they worked?

Against the criticism, however, the statistics spoke loudly and clearly. Semmelweis began his handwashing process in May, and by June the drop in puerperal fever was dramatic. First Clinic death rates fell to Second Clinic levels.

Change in death rates from childbed fever following the introduction of handwashing.

You’d expect that to be conclusive, but that turned out not to be the case.

The Semmelweis Reflex

Elsewhere in this blog, I’ve written about the Semmelweis Reflex, originally defined as “the automatic rejection of the obvious, without thought, inspection, or experiment.” As I've argued, what triggers the Semmelweis Reflex, however, isn't new knowledge per se,  but the implied criticism of previous behavior that results.

To accept the Semmelweis approach, doctors had to also accept the idea that they themselves had been responsible for the deaths of thousands of women. Who wants to think of himself or herself as a killer, however inadvertent? It’s not surprising that there is a human tendency to reject or challenge scientific or other factual information that portrays us in a negative light.

You don’t have to look far to find contemporary illustrations, from tobacco executives aghast someone dared accuse them of making a deadly product to the notorious Ford Motor Company indifference to safety in designing the Ford Pinto. The people involved weren’t trying to be unethical or immoral; they were in the grips of denial triggered by the Semmelweis Reflex. This denial was strong enough to make them ignore or trivialize evidence that in retrospect appears conclusive.

There was a dramatic reaction against Semmelweis and his theory by the medical establishment, both in Vienna and elsewhere. Puerperal fever is now known as the “Doctor’s Plague,” because it was a case in which medical treatment made things worse — a lot worse. Semmelweis himself was terribly shocked and depressed to realize that it was his own actions that had resulted in the deaths of many women. And if Semmelweis was shocked, one can only imagine the reaction of other healers to being told that they were in practice, if not in intent, killers.

 Semmelweis continued to make things worse by attacking those who criticized his work. He accused his fellow physicians of murder and worse, and his own behavior became increasingly erratic. Showing increasing signs of mental illness and breakdown, his wife committed him to an asylum in 1857, where he died under mysterious circumstances.

Rembrandt, The Anatomy Lesson

Managing the Impossible Project: Inertia and Friction

Semmelweis succeeded in his “impossible project” to determine the basic cause and treatment of childbed fever, but failed to win widespread support for his ideas at the time. It would not be until the latter part of the 19th Century that the germ theory of disease became widely accepted.

If we consider Semmelweis’s project to be identifying the cause and treatment of childbed fever, he was a remarkable success. As noted, he was much less effective in gaining widespread acceptance for his ideas.

The natural human resistance to new ideas and the role of persuasion and influence management in achieving change are a constant source of frustration — and sometimes despair — for leaders of all stripes. It may help to extend our scientific metaphor and describe the obstacles in light of physics: people and organization, no less than other objects in the real world, are subject to inertia and friction.

Whatever the etiology of the Semmelweis Reflex, the idea of resistance to change is well established in management literature, and it’s just inertia under another name. A body at rest tends to stay at rest until acted upon by an outside force. The good news is that if you can just get the motion started, inertia changes from your enemy to your friend and helps sustain the motion.

Friction, of course, is one of those “outside forces” that hamper inertia. Moving parts have friction, and friction results in the degradation of useful energy. In the human sphere, we’ve all witnessed the results of friction in every human encounter. In mechanics, one way to lessen the effects of friction is through lubrication. The discipline of emotional intelligence, good manners, politeness, and office politics all work to lessen the friction in organizational interaction. It’s just as much a part of the job as the technical work, and leaders ignore it at their peril.

Project: Impossible — Lindbergh Wins the Orteig Prize

My 26th book will be Project: Impossible, an exploration of how people achieved goals any reasonable person would have thought impossible. Here’s a summary of some of the cases covered in the book.

Charles Lindbergh's Flight

What’s impossible about Lindbergh’s famous flight is not that he made it from New York to Paris. That was going to happen within a few weeks anyway. No, what’s impossible is that the underfunded and unknown Lindbergh jumped ahead of highly qualified and lavishly funded competitors.

The Orteig Prize

Crossing the Atlantic by air wasn’t new. The Curtiss NC-4 flying boat did it in 19 days back in 1919, hopping in 50-mile jumps between pre-positioned ships. The following month, British aviators Alcock and Brown flew nonstop from Newfoundland to Ireland. A month after that, the British airship R-34, carrying a crew of 31, made the first lighter-than-air round-trip crossing.

In 1919, French-born New York hotelier Raymond Orteig decided to offer a $25,000 prize the first aviators to fly non-stop from New York to Paris, in either direction.

The first serious attempt at the prize came in 1926, when Frenchman René Fonck crashed on takeoff, killing two. Admiral Richard E. Byrd, famous polar explorer, announced his entry in late 1926. Clarence Chamberlin, practicing for the attempt, set a world endurance record by circling New York City for over 50 hours. From the other side of the Atlantic, Nungesser and Coli readied their Levasseur biplane L'Oiseau Blanc (The White Bird).

By early May 1927, the Chamberlain and Byrd groups were ensconced at adjoining airfields on Long Island, and Nungesser and Coli were getting ready in Paris.

Anyone who thought they’d come in and beat that field was surely a fool.

The Flying Fool

Charles Lindbergh had many nicknames, but the one he despised was given him by the New York Sun: “The Flying Fool.”

He responded, “I take no foolish risks and study out everything I do in the air. I don’t think I am a flying fool.” It is, however, not difficult to understand how the Sun — and others — could have reached that conclusion. Most entries were multi-engine aircraft; Lindbergh flew a single-engine. All the other entrants planned for a crew of at least two to handle the 30+ hour flight. Lindbergh was the only solo entry. Finally, all the other entrants did extensive test flying. Total test flying time for the Spirit of St. Louis amounted to a paltry five and a half hours!

Then there was his safety record. He had only been a pilot for four years, and was famous for only one thing — the most emergency parachute bailouts. In 1924, he collided in mid-air with another Army flying cadet. In his first job post-graduation, he bailed out a second time while serving as test pilot. As an airmail pilot on the St. Louis-Chicago route in 1926, Lindbergh bailed out of not one but two DH-4s when he became lost in storms and ran out of fuel.

The Spirit of Charles Lindbergh

It took ego to enter the race. “Why shouldn’t I fly from New York to Paris?” he wrote in his autobiography. He raised funds from the St. Louis Chamber of Commerce, but had trouble finding a plane. Finally, a small San Diego company, Ryan, offered to build one for him. The Ryan NYP (New York to Paris) had no radio, no parachute, no gas gauges, and no navigation lights. Lindbergh even replaced the leather pilot’s seat with a wicker chair. It was built in record time, only two months.

Two days before Lindbergh was scheduled to leave San Diego for New York, Nungesser and Coli took off from Paris. All the other competitors stopped and waited to see if the Frenchmen would succeed — except for Lindbergh, who set off immediately for New York, setting a speed record en route.

When he reached New York, he learned for the first time that L'Oiseau Blanc had vanished. Charles Lindbergh was back in the race.

The Spirit of Long Island

A lawsuit delayed the Chamberlin group, and Byrd’s America crashed during a practice flight. All the teams were hampered by bad weather, which began to clear on May 19, a few days after Lindbergh finally arrived in New York. Unfortunately, paved runways weren’t yet common in aviation. The field was muddy — too muddy to allow a heavily-laden plane to take off.

But on the morning of May 20, 1927, at 7:52 AM, Charles Lindbergh loaded his plane with four sandwiches, two canteens of water, and 451 gallons of gasoline, and took off. The Spirit of St. Louis barely managed to clear the telephone wires at the end of the runway.

Thirty-three and a half hours later, Charles Lindbergh and the Spirit of St. Louis landed safely in Paris.

Managing the Impossible Project: The Role of Risk

The difference between a possible project and an impossible project is the constraints, the factors that restrict the options available to the leader and team. If the constraints are different, the options are different.

All the teams competing for the Orteig Prize consisted of talented, experienced aviators, engineers, and designers. What distinguishes Lindbergh is the nature and level of risk he was willing to assume.

The technical equation for risk is R = P x I; that is, the price of a risk is the probability of it happening times the impact if it does happen. If there’s a ten percent chance of a $1,000 negative event, the value of the risk is $100, meaning that if you can get rid of the risk for less than $100, it’s a good investment.

What if it costs more than $100 to get rid of the risk? Well, it may still be a good investment depending on other factors. What’s the value of getting into the history books? What’s the value of being acclaimed the world’s best pilot? The price of a risk and the value of a risk aren't necessarily the same thing.

Accepting an elevated level of risk doesn’t automatically make you a “flying fool.” Sometimes it’s exactly what allows you and your team to achieve the impossible.

Project: Impossible — Easter Island

Moai

 My 26th book will be Project: Impossible, an exploration of how people achieved goals any reasonable person would have thought impossible. This week, the strange statues of Easter Island.

The European Discovery

On Easter Sunday 1722, a Dutch West India Company commanded by Jacob Roggeveen, seventeen days out of Chile, sighted a low, flat island, which he named after the day of his discovery: Easter Island.

Easter Island a windy place, flat and treeless. At the time of Roggeveen’s visit, he judged the population to be between 2,000 and 3,000 people. The poverty and barrenness of the island stood in remarkable contrast to what makes Easter Island famous: the monolithic rock carvings known as moai, the giant head-statues that dominate the landscape. The tallest of the moai towers a remarkable 33 feet in height; the heaviest weighs 86 tons.

About half the statues that have been discovered are still in the main quarry where they were all created. Many are only partially completed, as if the workers suddenly left their jobs, never to return. One thing, however, was abundantly clear: the sculpting, transporting, and installing of these statues was a remarkable feat — and clearly, one utterly beyond the capabilities and resources of the poor islanders.

Theories

Of the various theories on the creation, transportation, and erection of the moai of Easter Island, the most fanciful was advanced by Erich von Däniken, that they were designed and built by extraterrestrial visitors. Von Däniken was not alone in marveling about the Easter Island statues. Tribal folklore on Easter Island itself claimed that mana, or divine power, allowed the moai to walk from the quarry to their assigned locations.

A more serious theory was advanced by explorer Thor Heyerdahl, who actually moved a 10-ton moai using a sledge drawn by 180 islanders. Scaling up, it would have required approximately 1,500 people to move the largest moai. Anthropologist William Mulloy developed a complex engineering technique using huge trees for support, but later studies suggested that the necks of the moai couldn’t absorb the excessive stress the method would create.  Czechoslovakian scholar Pavel Pavel and Wyoming archeologist Charles Love attempted to move moai in a semi-upright position, but caused noticeable damage.

Moving the moai was difficult enough, but then came the problem of setting them upright on their ahu platforms. In 1994, archeologist Claudio Cristino could barely re-erect an 88-ton moai using a modern crane!

Of course, ancient civilizations (most famously the Egyptians) moved massive stones — all you need is lots of thick long ropes (traditionally made from tree bark in Polynesia) and lots of large trees. You also need a large labor force, and that also requires a generous amount of surplus food.

But on Easter Island, there are hardly any trees worthy of the name. Worse, the island is unable to support a large population.

Well, today, in any event.

A display of Easter Island moai atop an ahu platform. The ahu are an engineering feat in themselves.

How It Was Done (and Why It Shouldn't Have Been)

Although today Easter Island is relatively barren, botanical surveys have revealed that at the time of human settlement the island was heavily forested, with the dominant tree similar to the Chilean wine palm.
Chilean wine palms are prized for their nuts, for a sweet sap that can be fermented into wine or turned into honey, for fronds capable of being turned into a variety of useful products, and, of course, for the wood of their immense trunks. The trees were extremely important to human civilization on the island — and, of course, they were essential to the transport of the moai.

The imposing and majestic moai were built at the unwitting cost of the civilization that created them, triggering an ecological disaster. By the arrival of famous British explorer Captain James Cook in 1774, the islanders were, in his words, “small, lean, timid, and miserable.” The destruction was so complete that in the end, the people of Easter Island turned to the largest remaining source of protein — each other.

Map of Easter Island Showing Location of Moai

Managing the Impossible Project: The Consequences of Success

Every leader has to face the consequences of potential failure, but it’s important not to overlook the consequences of success as well. Too much focus on getting today’s job done can compromise — sometimes fatally — your future capabilities as well.

Even if you can do the impossible, it’s not necessarily always a good idea.

Project: Impossible — Julius Caesar at the Siege of Alesia, 52 BCE

Gaius Julius Caesar

My 26th book will be Project: Impossible, an exploration of how people achieved goals any reasonable person would have thought impossible. Here’s a summary of some of the cases covered in the book.

The Rise of Vercengetorix

Until the rise of Vercengetorix, Gaius Julius Caesar had been able to fight the tribes of Gaul one at a time. But in 52 BCE, they united under a single leader: Vercingetorix, chieftain of the Arverni tribe.

Caesar’s military and political situation at the time was deteriorating badly. Caesar’s political enemies, known as the boni, threatened him in Rome, and this new uprising compromised his plans for Gaul.

Vercingetorix conducted one of the first known uses of a scorched earth policy, destroying crops to keep them from falling into the hands of the Romans. He also dopted a hit and run strategy. In addition, he raised an army many times larger than the Romans who opposed him — by some counts, as large as 500,000.

Caesar, distracted with events in Rome, was in the settled Roman province of Cisalpine Gaul when Vercingetorix opened his campaign, but quickly crossed the Alps with eight understrength legions to find the scorched earth policy beginning to bite. Although Vercingetorix had burned twenty settlements, he had spared one, the fortress town of Avaricum, thought to be impregnable. In a 27-day siege, plagued by poor supplies and surrounded by hostile Gauls, Caesar took the town — and the food.

Vercingetorix, in response, captured a food convoy bound for Caesar. Still determined to avoid a decisive battle until the odds favored him, he retreated his cavalry into the fortress town of Alesia.

Vercingetorix had every reason to believe that his situation was still advantageous. His forces outnumbered Caesar’s. He had the advantage of high ground. Most importantly, the defending forces inside Alesia were only a small part of the Gallic forces. Soon, Caesar would not only have to contend with the forces inside Alesia, but also the remainder of the army of united Gaul — a relief army of between 125,000 and 250,000. Caesar would shortly find himself trapped in a doughnut, with enemies both inside and outside.

Caesar’s response was to launch one of the most ambitious and astounding feats in the history of military engineering.

The Impossible Project

First, Caesar’s men built a circumvallation, an eleven-mile long fortification of earth piled thirteen feet high, enclosing the entire town. Behind the earthen rampart his soldiers dug two ditches, each about fifteen feet wide. If that wasn’t enough, Caesar’s men built 23 fortlets, one every 80 feet, along the entire route — and did it in only three weeks!

Of course, Caesar also had the Gallic relief forces to worry about, so now he had to do it all over again. The Roman forces built a contravallation, an external set of defenses similar to the circumvallation, but this one extending for thirteen miles!

This immense engineering feat took thirty days, slowed by the need for Caesar’s men to collect supplies to feed the army. But it was all done before the huge relief army arrived.

A reconstruction of Caesar's fortifications around Alesia

The Battle of Alesia

After skirmishing and small battles, the main attack began at midnight, with Vercingetorix’s men crossing the treacherous fortifications Caesar’s soldiers had built. Caesar’s legates Marc Antony and Gaius Trebonius (later one of Caesar’s assassins) were able to repulse the attacks from both sides.

Meanwhile, the leaders of the relief army scouted Caesar’s fortifications and found a weak spot, a Roman camp to the northwest that had not been included in the contravallation because of the hilly terrain. Two legions (around 8,000 soldiers) occupied the camp, and the Gauls sent an attacking force of nearly 60,000 against it, starting with diversionary attacks before the major assault began. Vercingetorix, seeing some of the preparations, launched an attack on the inner lines.

Vercingetorix Surrenders to Caesar

Caesar himself waded into the thick of the battle, and the Romans carried the day. The next day, Vercingetorix surrendered. His men were sold into slavery.

Managing the Impossible Project: Maximizing Resource Quality

The performance of the Roman legionary is legendary, and it’s not surprising that 30,000 Romans could defeat a force arguably ten times as large. But even a cursory reading of Roman military history will make it abundantly clear that not all Roman generals enjoyed equal success.

Of course, Caesar’s military and engineering genius had a lot to do with his success, but it’s the superior performance of his legions, even by already high Roman standards, that is the key to understanding Alesia. The staggering magnitude of the earth-moving alone is a testament to backbreaking, unromantic work. It’s one thing to convince soldiers to fight; it’s another thing to convince them to dig.

If there is a mismatch between what you want people to do and what they actually are doing, you can either modify the process or modify the people. Modifying the process may mean improving the tools and equipment, or it may involve changing methodologies. Modifying the people can involve motivation, or changing the rewards and punishments for performance.

When people are well trained, motivated, and led effectively, they can achieve results that would otherwise be impossible.

The Ol' Yeller Maneuver (Managing Impossible Projects, Part 6 of 6)

The following series is adapted from a keynote I delivered at the Washington, DC, chapter of the Project Management Institute back in August. Parts also come from my book Creative Project Management (with Ted Leemann), published by McGraw-Hill. 

If You Build It, Will They Come?

Earlier, we discussed the story of the infamous automated baggage handling system at Denver International Airport (DIA), which burned through $250 million before being abandoned as unworkable.

There’s nothing inherently impossible about the concept of an automated baggage handling system, though obviously the implementation is tougher than it appears. No, this is the kind of project in which impossibility is situational: a function of the constraints. While we’ve focused on the Triple Constraints because of their universal application in project management, individual projects have other constraints as well.

The airlines themselves, oddly, had little initial involvement in the airport planning. This gave them substantial leverage later in the process. “If you build it, they will come” often carries a hefty price tag. In order to keep its costs down, United Airlines needed the baggage transfer system to take no longer than 45 minutes to route luggage among its flights.

In 1992, the automated baggage handling system was shoehorned into existing construction in what amounted to a “Hail Mary” play. In terms of project scope, the engineering involved amounted to a great leap forward from third-generation to sixth-generation technology.

Performance, obviously, was the project driver, with budget unavoidably the weak constraint. Significant cost and schedule overruns were guaranteed, and to a large extent acceptable — as long as performance goals were achieved.

So far, we have a very challenging project, but there’s no reason for a project manager to propose killing it. It’s not operationally impossible, and the value of closing the gap justifies a very high level of effort.

The Second Frog

The BAE project team officially recognized these key risks:

• Very large scale of the project. 
• Enormous complexity. 
• Newness of the technology. 
• Large number of entities to be served by the system. 
• The high degree of technical and project definition uncertainty. 

The most important risk, however, was not mentioned: the complex stakeholder environment. The initial project was simply to serve United. DIA management expanded the contract to cover all terminals. DIA rejected the BAE proposal to build a 50,000 square foot prototype. Scheduling issues with other construction activities caused huge conflict.

There’s the old joke about the two frogs who fell into pots of water. One pot had hot water, and the frog immediately jumped in. The other pot was warming slowly, so the other frog felt no urgency about escaping until it was too late.

BAE was the second frog.

Politically Impossible

Because the project was not impossible from an engineering perspective, the fact that it became operationally impossible because of the constraints of the stakeholder environment tended to escape notice until it’s too late.

On the other hand, political problems aren’t exactly unheard of. Project managers are supposed to perform a stakeholder analysis. This isn’t just about figuring out your customers — it’s about analyzing the political landscape.

The earlier we identify a risk or problem, the more options are available. If you accompany the sales team when bidding on a job, don’t confine yourself to a study of the technical issues. As project manager, you’re going to have to spend your days dealing with the people, and you can’t tell the players without a scorecard. If you detect political dangers, they need to be part of your risk analysis for the job. This need to affect pricing and schedule, not just for your sake as project manager, but for the sake of the entire job.

If you get into the job and find that these issues are getting out of control, you likely don’t have the power to get out of the problem by yourself. You need allies, and you need them to figure out the problem for themselves. Most project managers see reporting (no matter how necessary) as something that takes time away from doing the work. Reporting, however, is a strategic tool to lay the information groundwork with your stakeholder community to bring them toward the correct understanding of the real situation.

The Ol' Yeller Maneuver

The best way to kill a project is to help the key stakeholders and decision makers reach the conclusion on their own, rather than you telling them. Remember that “operationally impossible” means you can’t figure out an answer. Leave open the possibility that someone else might have an answer you’ve missed. Sometimes they do have an answer for you. And if they don’t, they’re more likely to agree with your assessment.

Sometimes canceling a project is peaceful, sometimes bloody. This one ended with mutual lawsuits. That’s a powerful argument for acting early when the project is likely to be operationally impossible.

So let’s wrap up. A project is operationally impossible if you can’t do it within the stated constraints. There might be too little time, insufficient or wrong resources, or unrealistic or wrong performance criteria.

Sometimes the constraints can be changed, be made more flexible, or in some cases ignored altogether. If the constraints can’t be changed, perhaps you can work around them or accomplish the project in spite of its barriers. 

If the project’s still impossible — well, earlier I mentioned the idea of an American Movie Classics film festival of great project management movies. Apollo 13 is one candidate…but another is Ol’ Yeller. Sometimes a project manager’s job is to kill his own dog.

If the dog won’t hunt, and can’t be killed, the last solution is self-preservation. While captains are supposed to go down with their ships, we project managers are better off living to fight another day. 

The Three Envelopes

There’s the old joke about the outgoing project manager who left three numbered envelopes in a drawer, and told his successor that those envelopes contained the answers to the next three crises the project would face.

Inside the first envelope was a note that read, “Blame your predecessor.” The new person often has flexibility denied to the person previously holding the bag. You may have better luck challenging project assumptions and constraints.

Inside the second envelope, the note read, “Reorganize the department,” because — let’s face it — shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic is a long, noble tradition.

And in the third envelope, the note read, “Prepare three envelopes.” If in the final analysis the project really is impossible, it’s time to get while the getting is still good.

And that’s how to manage an impossible project.

The End.

Getting Around the Constraints (Managing Impossible Projects, Part 5)

The following series is adapted from a keynote I delivered at the Washington, DC, chapter of the Project Management Institute back in August. Parts also come from my book Creative Project Management (with Ted Leemann), published by McGraw-Hill. (Art by Baker and Hill Graphic Design.)



Managing Constraints

Constraints, operationally, are what stand between you and the completion of a successful project. If you think a given project may be impossible, it’s a function of the constraints you perceive. If the constraints (defined as the borders of the perceived box) can be modified, or if parts of it are optical illusions, then you may have new options available. The game has changed.

How can we change the envelope defined by our constraints?  Logic suggests two possibilities. If the constraints are real and have flexibility, you can modify them. If the constraints are imaginary, or have elements in them that are not real, you can get around them.  Multiple strategies exist for attacking each area, but they basically boil down to two: change the constraints or get around them.

(There is no "try.")

Change the Constraints

Analysis. Why is it your preferred option best (or sometimes least worst) for the organization? Does your preferred option cause collateral damage elsewhere in the project’s environment?  How much of this is political? How do other people view this concern? You have to understand the complete picture to see all the options, and just as importantly, to see all the dangers. 

Negotiation. Some constraints are subject to negotiation. If you’re bidding on a contract, there’s a price at which you can’t afford the business. On the other hand, sometimes our organization makes the choice on our behalf. “We’ve already got the contract, this is the scope of work, and this is how much we can spend to get it done.” Probe the constraints to see which are negotiable and which are fixed by circumstances.  

Internally, negotiation is the process of making the business case. If you have force majeure to settle the argument, it’s not really negotiation. In negotiation, forcing is not an option. You can only win if you are able to help other people recognize and accept a victory of their own. 

Problem solving. Sometimes constraints are decided, other times they simply are. When an organization prepares a budget, they necessarily make decisions among desirable objectives. They could give you more (or less) money; they choose not to. But sometimes the money isn’t there. They would choose to give you more money; they can’t. You can argue with decisions; you can’t argue (though many try) with facts. That’s a problem. Some problems can be solved. In the Apollo 13 case we discussed earlier, they needed a particular resource (a filter cover), but there was nothing at hand to do the job. Then someone remembered the astronauts wore socks. 

Requirements management.  There is an unfortunate sense in which written requirements too easily turn into holy writ. The purpose of requirements is to define operationally and specifically what the customer wants and wishes to pay for.  There’s always a delicate balance between imposing the detail necessary for control and allowing the flexibility necessary for exceptional achievement. 

Watch out for requirements that have outlived their usefulness, or had even become unproductive to the mission. A small change in a requirement may be of little consequence to the project’s quality, and still spell the difference between success and failure.

Get Around the Constraints

Creativity.  Here is where positive brainstorming rejoins the flow. Systematic creativity – inspiration on time, on budget, and on spec – seems like a contradiction in terms, but professionals in many areas do it as a matter of course. The secret goes back to Thomas Edison’s famous ratio of one percent inspiration and 99% perspiration: creativity is something you can work at. Artists do rough sketches; writers do rough drafts; lightbulb inventors test filament after filament. It’s a process of discovery. As the old joke goes, Michelangelo created David by taking a big block of marble and chipping away all the pieces that didn’t look like David. 

Exploiting holes.  One of the tricks of structured creativity is understanding that some places are more likely to contain insights than others, and look there first. The flexibility of the weak constraint is one good source of insight. So is available slack or float on non-critical tasks. Weaknesses and cracks in the structure of constraints may be exploitable. 

Different approaches. Insanity, Ross Perot famously observed, is doing the same thing over and over again and keep expecting different results. Is there a way around your current obstacle if you switch approaches? 

Rethink assumptions.  Assumptions can err on the side of optimism or pessimism. Conduct a sensitivity analysis of your assumptions: if it turns out to be true or false, how much impact will it have on your project? Investigate the assumptions with the most potential.

But sometimes a project really needs to die, and the project manager is often the one dispatched to do the dirty deed. There’s a skill to this, as well.


Next Week: The Ol' Yeller Maneuver

Orange Ropes (Managing Impossible Projects, Part 4)

The following series is adapted from a keynote I delivered at the Washington, DC, chapter of the Project Management Institute back in August. Parts also come from my book Creative Project Management (with Ted Leemann), published by McGraw-Hill. 




Sometimes in organizations there is a form of relentless optimism, the corporate cheerleader equivalent of “failure is not an option.” I appreciate the motivational value of positive thinking, but there’s a huge brainstorming value that’s often overlooked in negative thinking. You can’t figure out which constraints may be illusions until you make a list of constraints in the first place.

When people perceive the job they have been given is impossible, or the conditions under which they must labor are unfair or insufficient, it’s usually not a good idea to push optimism down their throats — too often, it backfires and makes the situation worse. It’s no use telling people not to think of negative things, it’s like me telling you not to think about the color orange or about an elephant.

(Are you thinking about an orange elephant now?)

Orange Ropes 

Speaking of orange elephants, I don’t know how many of you have ever trained an elephant, but if you want to train an elephant you start with a baby elephant and an orange rope. The color is very important.

You tie the orange rope around the leg of the baby elephant, and fasten that to a stake in the ground. The baby elephant tries to get away, but he can’t break that orange rope.

Over the years, the baby elephant grows to full size, but he’s learned his lesson: you can’t break an orange rope. Now, you can take some flimsy, rotten rope, spray paint it orange, and the elephant will treat it as unbreakable. But if the elephant ever figures it out…he’s free.

Some constraints are fake, and others are real…but they change. Experience can be a wise teacher, or it can blind you to a new and different reality. That’s why I believe that negative brainstorming is a hugely overlooked tool for managing difficult or impossible projects.

Negative Brainstorming

A negative brainstorming process works just like a conventional brainstorming session. Participants offer potential ideas on a specific topic with no criticism or evaluation of ideas or suggestions allowed. The major difference in negative brainstorming is that the specific topic —and the focus of ideas — is negative.

In conventional brainstorming, the focus is on finding creative ways to solve the problem. In negative brainstorming, the focus is on finding all the obstacles, barriers, and events, including internal, external and self imposed, that could prevent completing the project as currently defined.

Here’s a list of good questions to get a negative brainstorming session started.

• Why is this project impossible?
• What are all the things we can’t possibly do?
• What are all the things others can do that will prevent us from accomplishing this project?
• What ideas can we think of that absolutely are not worth trying?
• What’s the worst possible decision we could make right now?
• What could we do to turn this project into a complete catastrophe?
• Why are we doomed to fail?

In asking a negative question, I don’t mean to imply that the questions are necessarily accurate descriptors of reality. They don’t have to be. What the questions have to do is to correspond to the cognitive biases that keep us from finding a solution.

Doomed, But Hopeful

We may not in fact be “doomed to fail,” but a negative brainstorming exercise on “Why are we doomed to fail?” is a powerful way to bring the most serious risks and issues to the surface where our team can deal with them.

Negative questions like these can be utilized with all sorts of brainstorming processes, or techniques. Some approaches include having the participants respond in a round-robin style. Another approach is a simple free-for-all where participants offer ideas randomly. The leader can set a time limit or a target total number of ideas before concluding the process. The important thing is to concentrate on finding all the negative possibilities, rather than stop and try to solve the barriers as they are identified during the brainstorming phase of the process.

In negative brainstorming, it’s vitally important to encourage participants to offer even the most outrageous possibilities that could negatively impact the project. Our goal is to elevate concerns from the subconscious background into the conscious spotlight of project management, and we can only do that if we recognize what they are in the first place. If people feel criticized for stupid suggestions, the total number of suggestions will go down, including the not-stupid ones. That’s why, as in all brainstorming processes the initial phase is to gather ideas — not solve problems or criticize specific contributions.

After completing the negative brainstorming session, the evaluation process begins by taking each negative idea in turn and determining (1) if you can overcome the obstacle, (2) if so, how, and (3) if not, what then?

At least some (perhaps most) of the constraints, barriers, and issues you identify will turn out to be both real and solid. That’s completely normal. You are looking for the exceptions. In positive brainstorming, most ideas turn out to be of limited utility, but if you get one winner it can be a game changer.

In negative brainstorming, if most constraints turn out to be solid, but there are exceptions, the project can go from impossible to possible — occasionally even easy — in the blink of an eye.

The CHAOS Report (Managing Impossible Projects, Part 3)

Photo: Baggage system, Denver International Airport


The following series is adapted from a keynote I delivered at the Washington, DC, chapter of the Project Management Institute back in August. Parts also come from my book Creative Project Management (with Ted Leemann), published by McGraw-Hill. 



The annual Standish Group’s CHAOS Report, which tracks software project performance reported these abysmal numbers for 2009:

• 32% on time, on budget, to spec
• 44% finished late, over budget, or partially completed
• 24% failed, cancelled, or abandoned

Why do so many projects fail, either in part or in whole?

Certainly, there are badly managed projects — even some headed by PMPs. But it’s hard to blame a 68% defect rate on poor practitioners alone.

Sometimes the problem is the definition of success. By the logic of project management, the Leaning Tower of Pisa was an abysmal failure: late, over budget, and…well, aren’t buildings supposed to be straight? The Standish Group would clearly label the tower as a failed project, yet if the tower didn’t lean, who today would bother to visit?

The third reason, of course, is that the project was problematic to begin with — arguably or actually impossible. This can happen for a variety of reasons. In the case of Apollo 13, the constraints of time, resources, and performance were established by the situation, not by the will or desire of the project managers or owners. They were what they were — whether they were achievable was a separate issue.

In the Battle of the Bulge, the German Ardennes offensive had already begun. We would be able to get troops to the front to relieve the pressure on beleaguered First Army units, or we wouldn’t. Neither project managers nor project owners necessarily control the constraints that drive their projects.

Sometimes we’re just making a guess when we establish a project’s constraints. The original budget for Denver International Airport was $1.2 billion, and the original deadline was October 1993. The final price came in at $4.8 billion and the actual opening date was February 1995. (The infamous automated baggage system, budgeted at $186 million, wasn’t cancelled until 2005, by which time its construction costs were increasing at a staggering $1 million a day!)

Denver wasn’t an example of engineering or technical failure — no, not even the baggage system. The failure was driven by political considerations, including a nonstop war among several key stakeholders. When customer conflict generates mutually exclusive requirements, “impossible” becomes just another word for nothing left to lose.

In any event, we project managers are hired hands. Sometimes we may do double duty as customers or sponsors of our own projects, but when we put on our PMP hats, we’re here not to decide, but to execute. We are bound by the decisions and choices of others, and sometimes we start the project on the precipice of failure. After all, how many of you get to decide your own timelines, set your own budgets, and establish your own performance requirement?

I didn’t think so.

Still, you don’t want to be too quick to pull the trigger. Let’s imagine that you have a project and your experience tells you it can’t be done. Isn’t delaying the inevitable bad news just going to make the problem worse?

That depends on what you do in between receiving the assignment and giving the answer. Even if your project’s impossible, or at least compromised, there’s still a customer problem needing to be solved. Telling people what they can do and what they can have tends to get a better reception than telling people what they can’t do and what they can’t have.

That’s why the first step in managing a potentially impossible project is analysis. When you analyze an apparently impossible or potentially impossible project, you may learn different things.

1. You confirm that the project is in fact impossible, and can provide evidence to the customer. You and the customer can begin to figure out what alternatives may exist or how to deal with the consequences of an unsuccessful project.
2. You confirm that the project as originally proposed is in fact impossible, but are able to find potential changes that will make the project possible, which you can present to the customer.
3. You confirm that the project as stated is in fact impossible, but are able to offer alternatives and compromises that might satisfy at least some of the customer’s requirements and needs, or close part of the gap.
4. You can’t confirm that the project is in fact impossible, but you can identify at least some of the risks and challenges you face, which you and the customer can then assess.
5. You find a creative way around the barrier that made the project impossible, and achieve the original goal.

Even if your analysis leads to the first outcome (it’s just flat impossible), however, your situation is still improved by your ability to give a thoughtful reply with supporting evidence, and your attitude in making a good-faith attempt to solve the problem.

Partial successes (outcomes two, three, and four) are a marked improvement. Even if the project is impossible — or highly risky — as stated, the customer may be able to get a significant portion of what he or she wants. Plus, it’s well known that the first approximation of available constraints may not be the final word. There may be more to draw on. And again, people tend to react better to hearing what they can have, and less well to hearing what they can’t have.

We renovated our house last summer, and the project was on time, exceeded our expectations — and cost about twice as much as we’d planned. We still call it a rousing success, because we never really expected to meet the budget anyway. It was a hope, not a realistic assessment. The Standish Group would call it a failure, but we don’t — and the customer is always right.

The fifth outcome (solve the problem with creativity) is ideal, but often challenging and not always successful.  The best direction to find the creative answer is, paradoxically, to focus on the barriers in the first place.

Next Week: The Power of Negative Thinking!