“Making it work” : Lessons from the real world of “do or die.”
Sometimes, even the best laid plans just go awry.
Call them cliche, but those sayings about finding the silver lining and making lemonade when life hands you lemons, they aren’t just hot air.
When I was in the French Fusiliers Marins, the unspoken motto, the underlying mission imperative was always “make it work.”
The intelligence is wrong? It doesn’t matter. Make it work.
The insertion routes are compromised? It doesn’t matter. Make it work.
You got dropped 15 miles off target? It doesn’t matter. Make it work.
Nobody ever had to say it. Nobody ever had to bark the order. From day one of training, it was pounded into us:
Make it work.
Make it happen.
Find a way.
(If you don’t, people will die.)
The first officer I served under, 1st Lieutenant Rannou, had a saying: “There are no problems. Only solutions.”
He was right.
Sometimes, everything just clicks and works perfectly the first time. You don’t have to do a thing. You might as well be on autopilot: From start to finish, your project, your law suit, your surgery, your product launch, your hostage rescue mission, your ad campaign, your theater production, it all goes well. The planets are aligned. The cosmos is on your side. Everything goes so smoothly that you wonder if you aren’t dreaming.
Most of the time though, things don’t go your way. The unexpected happens. Gremlins. Ghosts in the machine. Flies in the soup. Whatever. The cosmos has a way of throwing obstacles your way at the most inopportune times.
That’s just a given.
A butterfly beats its wings in Buenos Aires, and a week later, your stamp machines in Taiwan are down for a month.
A health crisis in East Africa forces the cargo ship carrying the first shipment of your brand new product to spend three extra weeks at sea.
Your new boss is an self-serving imbecile.
Or in the case of teammate Jay Hewitt (photo above), you lay your bike down going 30mph at mile 51 of a Half-Ironman distance triathlon.
What do you do?
No… really. What do you do?
Murphy’s law isn’t an anecdote. It’s an engine of predictability. Use it.
Let me take a quick break from the full list of mishaps and just say that – in case you hadn’t guessed – skin + gritty pavement + speed don’t feel great.
Imagine getting thrown out of a car moving at 30mph, wearing nothing but your underwear.
Not fun.
Now imagine brushing yourself off, getting back on your bike, finishing the ride as fast as you can, switching out the cartridge in your insulin pump, and then completing a very fast half marathon.
Why? Because no matter what happens, there’s still a finish line to cross. A reputation to preserve. A project to complete. A movie to finish shooting. A new product to launch. An essential part to manufacture.
It doesn’t matter if you’re a military officer, a product manager, a movie director, a chef, a fashion designer, a newspaper editor or a CMO. This is something you can be absolutely certain of: Though sometimes, everything will click and flow smoothly as if by divine intervention, most of the time, obstacle after obstacle will get between you and your goal.
Call it Murphy’s Law. Call it whatever you want. It’s just life.
And in real life, shit happens. No matter what you do, something almost always goes wrong.
The more complicated or ambitious your endeavor, the more likely it is that obstacles will find a way to get between you and that golden finish line. Expect that. Plan for it. Train for it.
Heck, embrace it.
You might as well.
Still, I notice that most people freak out when their plan goes awry. They panic. They lose their cool. They suddenly find themselves feeling… lost. They make everything come to a grinding halt while they regroup.
Why?
Poor planning. Lack of training. They didn’t take the time to plan for failure. They didn’t think to come up with contingency plans.
Most of the time though, it just comes down to one simple thing: Lack of experience.
So for those of you who don’t quite know how to manage cool, crazy, ambitious projects, here’s a little bit of advice:
The Ten Basic Rules of Project Management
Rule #1: Never expect things to work right the first time. (If they do, great. Just don’t expect them to.)
Rule #2: Expect everything to take at least twice as long as you know they should.
Rule #3: Expect the unexpected.
Rule #4: When everything is going well, worry. (You probably missed something.)
Rule #5: Find out what doesn’t work before your customers do. (That’s what prototypes are for.)
Rule #6: You learn more from how and why a product fails than how and why it works the way you expect it to. (So push your prototypes to failure as often and in as many different ways as possible.)
Rule #7: “Design By Committee” never works.
Rule #8: Trust your instincts.
Rule #9: Listen to the people who will use your product. Their opinion matters more than anyone else’s.
Rule #10: Have fun.
Why experience matters: A simple list.
Back to Jay: Jay has crashed in races before. Jay knows how broken bones feel. Jay knows that even with no skin on his shoulder, he can keep racing. He’s been there. He’s done that. He has already faced and concquered pretty-much every obstacle in the book when it comes to endurance racing. As a result, when problems happen, his resolution time is almost instantaneous. He doesn’t have to spend thirty minutes wondering if he’s badly hurt or just in pain. He doesn’t have to seek professional advice. He doesn’t have to weigh the pros and cons of anything. Knowing where he stands allows him to make the right decision in the blink of an eye: Keep going.
Experience builds confidence. Experience breeds forethought and insight. Experience takes doubt, uncertainty, and fear out of the equation. Jay knows that if he crashes, he can probably still finish the race. He knows how to fix a flat. He knows how to repair a broken chain. He knows a dozen ways to fix problems on his bike or with his body, and the ones he doesn’t know how to fix, he can probably improvise if need be.
There are no problems. Only solutions.
Simple enough.
More often than not, projects that appear to have gone smoothly from the outside didn’t go smoothly at all. Every day brought a new hurdle. Hundreds of fires had to be put out. Thousands of split-second decisions had to be made. Course adjustments. Quick fixes. A folder-full of improvised solutions. Personel changes. Vendor replacements. Timeline adjustments. Budget attrition. Whatever. The list never stops growing.
That’s how it really works.
Perfect illustration: Below is Jay at the finish. From the right side, he looks fine. His injuries are out of sight. He looks like a guy who just breezed through a Half Ironman the way most of us breeze through a Taco bell drivethrough.
To an outsider, a bystander, he had a flawless, fun race.
To someone with inside knowledge, he finished despite a horrible bike accident that could have cost him a whole lot more than another medal.
He crashed. He got up. He quickly assessed the situation. He got back on his bike. He finished the race. He added the experience to his knowledge bank.
He made it happen.
If that doesn’t perfectly illustrate the way a project is driven forward, I don’t know what does.
Project manager. Triathlete. Adventure Racer. Creative Director. Platoon Leader. Customer Service Rep. Design Engineer. Toolmaker. Sous-Chef. Football Coach. It’s all the same.
Project/Program Managers are wired differently. Hire and promote with that in mind.
Great project managers aren’t just natural multi-taskers. They’re also natural strategic masterminds. Improvisation kings (and queens). Crisis jugglers. Fearless creative acrobats. Their job (their nature) is to constantly find and implement solutions to problems, foreseen and not. Their job is to embrace hurdles and obstacles, because each one brings them one step closer to their goal. They thrive on making things happen. The more untraveled the road, the better. The more complex the gameboard, the better.
It takes a special kind of person to be able to a) do that kind of work well, and b) love every minute of it.
It isn’t for everybody.
Excuses and blame don’t exist in our little world. Neither does bullshit. At the end of the day, there’s only what you did and what you didn’t do.
Sometimes, even the best laid plans just go awry.
For most people, that’s not a good thing…
…and for some of us, that’s when the real fun begins. (And we do like our fun.)
Have a great weekend, everyone. 
(Hat tip to Tamsen McMahon/@tamadear at Sametz Blackstone for pointing out that this should be a manifesto and not a primer)
I really enjoyed this post Olivier. It’s definitely a tough concept for many people to make their own. It’s tough to face failure when you only expect success. Optimism is great but it sometimes makes us naive to the issues that we’ll inevitably face. It’s better to be aware that you will face issue and be optimistic about overcoming them than to hope to not face any issues.
Thanks for some very sound advice.
@DavidSpinks
We learn the hard way (which is always the best way).
Olivier – Helluva contribution to my psyche and worldview, this post. Thanks, for all of it — the passion and the wisdom, the talent to express it, and the very tangible value created by the act of sharing it. Oh…and thanks, too, to Jay, for providing so much suitably impressive road rash that so many of us among your readers might hold their manhood cheap…
Thanks! Jay and I take turns with the road rash thing. I’m definitely due.
Oliver,
This post is so true. I hope many young people are reading this and taking to heart. After 30+ years in this business I’ve learned that, particularly in a crisis, the ‘plan’ rarely survives the call tree on the first page and sometimes that doesn’t even get done right. Heck, that’s true in many projects.
The key, as you point out so well, is a mindset that says failure is not an option, and that you must learn from each situation you face in order to deal with what you’re going to face in the future. And, while failure is not an option it does happen. You still have to learn from it and get back in the fight if you want to be successful.
A really good piece as usual. Thanks.
Rick (@RTRViews)
Thanks, Rick.
There are two types of failure: The first is the bad one. The ultimate failure. The failure that happens when you fall short and don’t meet your objective(s). The second is the good failure. The one you build into your process as a learning mechanism. The one that comes as a series of tests to teach you how products and programs can fail. Prototyping is a failure-to-success process. Fail often and as fast as possible to succeed faster (something product design think-tank IDEO completely embraces). The second type is fun and invaluable. The first can be avoided by embracing the second.
It’s all about mindset in the end.
Oliver,
Hadn’t really broken failure down into those categories. Prototyping, to me, is part of the process and not every idea works, but I do see how you’re viewing it and agree with your thoughts on it. Definitely agree with the idea that sometimes failing often and fast is the path to progress.
I’ve always told people working for me that as long as your giving it your absolute best effort I’ll stand behind mistakes and even failures as long as we learn from them. I hope others are doing the same so younger people can gain the experience to become leaders.
I certainly learned from a few ultimate failures. Sometimes it happens regardless of your determination. (Boy do I hate to admit that.)
But you’re very right about the mindset and giving it your absolute best efforts. Those do minimize ‘ultimate’ failures.
Again, thanks for another great blog post and conversation.
Rick
Yeah, I’ve learned from a few ultimate failures as well.
Very nice, motivating post. Thanks!
It’s easy to place blame and rationalize why something didn’t get done. It’s much harder to accept some responsibility for the problem and the subsequent solution. Great post for why it’s OK to fail but not OK to use it as an excuse to not succeed.
Bingo: “it’s OK to fail but not OK to use it as an excuse to not succeed”
I’m not an army kind of guy, but this reminds me of my favorite bit of military wisdom: no plan survives contact with the enemy.
Yep. That’s exactly it: Same principle.
My contribution based on my experience and several sessions organized on this very topic with PMI France-Sud, I wrote the attached post:
7 attributes of leadership for Project Managers
In English: http://dantotsupm.wordpress.com/2009/09/06/7-attributes-of-leadership-for-the-project-manager/