Scream

“Scream” Gerry insisted.  She is always giving me orders. “Sit in the bloody corner and scream!”

This time, I decided to take her advice.  No, I hadn’t joined a trendy re-birthing class and normally I might have questioned her frantic instructions.  However, to be perfectly honest, screaming was just what I felt like doing.

We were on our own on a forty-foot sailboat in the middle of the Atlantic, two unfit, middle-aged, wannabe adventurers. One of whom who had just crushed his hand between two blocks of metal in the boat’s self-steering system.  So, for once, I did as told: slid along the soaked teak bench, cradled my throbbing fingers against my oilskin, and let rip.  It helped; really, it did.

This was no time for bandages and sympathy. The wind had picked up from a frustrating 5 knots to an alarming forty knots, and more. The wind-speed indicator peaked at fifty-five knots then dropped back to zero, its sensor broken.

The spray was horizontal, visibility six feet, noise deafening.  Gerry grabbed the helm, while I cranked away the jib, despite my damaged hand.

Bang!  A reefing line snapped, and the main sail began flapping wildly. Gerry had started the engine and was struggling to keep the boat heading into the wind.

Sitting there, I remembered a conversation with an elderly sailor just a few weeks before.  He was shocked when I claimed to love the sea.  “I used to work on oil tankers,” he said. “There were times in the Southern Ocean when the waves were broke over our bridge, sixty-five feet in the air.  There is only one word to for the sea, and that is ‘treacherous’.  You mustn’t love it.”

Treacherous is a good word to describe a storm that blows up in seconds.  Just then, the rigging started to glow blue as sparks ran up and down the wires that hold up the mast.

As our minds began to work again, Gerry barked out orders from behind the wheel. The rain was so heavy that she could not see the wind instruments just eight feet away. So I yelled out the wind direction to her: “left, left” or “right, right”. Then Gerry had an inspiration, “I don’t know what is going on here, we seem to be turning in circles.  Go below and fire up the radar; see if you can find any way out of this.”

I waited impatiently for the elderly display to warm up. Finally the fluorescent green image appeared and I could she was right, we were going around and around in this squall.

I shouted through the open companionway that the storm was not very big, to turn ninety degrees and see if she could get us out of this mess. Putting the engine into high speed, she turned the wheel hard to the left.  The sail flogged furiously but within minutes calm was restored. We collapsed side by side in the cockpit, shaken and speechless from the experience.

You learn the most from the bad days and that narrow escape taught us plenty. 

This was not like any other squall that we had ever experienced. The wind was incredibly hot and seemed to be blasting straight down onto us. It had happened at nightfall when we were in the process of preparing the boat for worsening weather. 

We thought we had done the right thing… reduced the sail area, put on safety harnesses, and renewed a chafed line. This is all good practice.  Nevertheless, we had still been surprised by a weather phenomenon unknown to us.  We had sailed into a “micro-burst”, a rare meteorological incident credited with downing aircraft and sinking ships – unpredictable and potentially lethal.

What saved us? Working together to identify problems, using technology to gain a 360-degree view of our situation.  Understanding the bigger picture helped us to see that the area of instability was very small and that we had choices.  Yes, turning risked being knocked down but doing nothing would only prolong the ordeal.

Rubber ducks

It was the afternoon of the second day and the group was becoming raucous. Laughter and cheers were coming from the open door behind me.

“You want what!” my secretary asked in amazement.

“Rubber ducks.  Yellow ones.  The kind children have in their bathtubs. At least half a dozen.  And, oh yes, more donuts, lots more donuts.”

“Why do they need rubber ducks?”

“To show that they’ve got their ducks lined up, of course.”

A meeting that started badly was rapidly turning into a high-spirited party.

It was 1986, and the Government of New South Wales had asked me to help sort out some problems with a project to create a Museum on the site of an old Power House in Sydney.

The project had been underway for five years and was the centrepiece of celebrations of the Bi-Centennial of Captain Cook’s first landing in Australia. However, it had gained a bad press due to the public acrimony between the project manager responsible for the Museum’s content and the architect responsible for the building. With only two years left to the anniversary both said that, judging from the other’s progress, the project would be late.

I asked four people from the Museum team and four from the Construction team to meet together for three days to plan the remainder of the work. The atmosphere was tense. The Museum’s project manager brought all his functional heads plus the curators of all the collections, more than twenty people. Not to be outdone, the architect sent for his managers and supervisor. Soon there were forty people. I couldn’t find a big enough room, so we pushed tables aside and sat in a big circle gazing at each other’s knees, project manager and architect scowling at each other.

I improvised, asking everyone to introduce himself or herself by analogy with an animal or car. “Hi, I’m Helen”, said one of the Museum people, “I’m the curator of the Communications Exhibit and I like to think of myself as a seagull, flying around at a dizzy height, shitting on people down below”. Jim, a member of the Construction team, said he felt like a taxi, because he spent his life moving people from one place to another and back again. This gave everyone a chance to speak, and the light touch made them smile.

I told everyone that they had a lot in common: they all cared deeply about the success of the project and all were, in different ways, highly creative individuals. Together they could almost certainly overcome any problems that they now faced.

With little help from me, they began to list and prioritize issues, and brainstorm solutions.

It was clear that there were key places  – “interfaces”, no less – where coordination between Museum and Construction teams was essential. For example, a Catalina Flying Boat had to be hung from the rafters of the old turbine hall before the roof was completed. Elsewhere, a steam locomotive had to be rolled into place before the walls were built. And there were more complex interfaces: the Museum wanted to be able to run their collection of steam engines and Construction had to install the boilers and air-conditioning to make this possible.

A fundamental difference in philosophy emerged. The architect had designed a bright and spacious building in colors that “echoed the changing light of the Australian day”.  However, the Hong KongScienceMuseum, a concrete monolith whose exhibits are spot lit dramatically in darkened rooms, had influenced the Museum’s ideas on display. It had hired the same US designer to oversee its work. The architect saw this as an affront to the Sydney creative community and wholly inappropriate for a prestigious Australian project.

Once the Museum agreed to drop their American consultant, the participants began to explore the idea of exhibits and spaces that harmonized rather than contrasted, and they became more and more excited about the possibilities. People grew in mutual respect and understanding.

The Museum people were mostly female, academic certainly but charming nevertheless, and often single. While the Construction crew were all male, fit and tanned from outdoor work.  They had found a wonderfully Australian solution: all parties would meet bi-weekly for an onsite barbeque… and to review progress.

Impatient to get on with the job, the meeting broke up early; they had produced no central plan, but made new relationships and begun to form close friendships.

The SydneyPowerHouseMuseum opened on time.  It attracted 1.7 million visitors in its first year and remains one of the finest museums in the world.

Yet many such conflicts are not resolved, as demonstrated by the British Millennium Dome.  This project, marred by increasingly public discord, was a showcase like the PowerHouseMuseum, except that it cost ten times as much, failed to attract a million visitors and closed after one year.

The success of the PowerHouseMuseum is a reminder that we have the capacity to solve many of our problems ourselves, if we can find a way to hear and understand the messages that surround us.

While many companies have employee suggestion boxes, hold staff meetings and conduct quality circles, these are not “sexy” activities.  As individuals, we try to keep things simple, dwell on success, stick to routines and avoid trouble.  We would rather see ourselves as strategists than fire fighters. However, diverse groups, focused on specific problems, find it easier than individuals do acting alone to heed early warnings, contain crises and mitigate consequences.

Coping with Surprise

Few people foresaw the Global Economic Crisis. Many have still to appreciate its full impact on their business or community.

Coping with surprise isn’t easy for it demands far greater collective mindfulness.

But the Yala, a web-based tool, can greatly improve organizations’ abilities to detect the unexpected earlier, understand its potential, and remove, contain or rebound from its effects.

Improving dialogue wherever people have to work together is the key.  What do you do when people can’t all fit in one room or meet up every fortnight? The internet is proving a potent medium for collaboration.

Seven years ago, with such experiences in mind, I set out to develop an Internet solution that combined the best features of A.T. Kearney’s Build-Quality-In Toolbox, EDS’s Service Excellence Dashboard and BP’s “Better Relationships, Better Performance” extranet.  Subsequent advances in technology have far exceeded my expectations and the Yala is now a much more powerful tool than any of those.

Superhero time

This unfolding economic crisis gives everyone the opportunity to reshape their world.  This is the moment when the contributions of every single person matter greatly.

So dust off those blue Lycra suits, don the red wellie boots and cape, put your underpants over your trousers, and prepare to take your place in the gallery of superheroes. 

What you need now is your very own super power (and I do not mean Russia, America, China or even Chimerica) and web-based collaborative technology combined with far greater collective mindfulness – the Yala – is just that: the hope for the future of humanity.

With great power comes great responsibility.