CHAPTER 1 The Art of Strategic Failure

You probably won’t see American Movie Classics run a festival of “Great Project Management Movies” any time soon, but if they did, Ron Howard’s motion picture Apollo 13, based on the real-life story, would be a natural candidate. Faced with a potentially disastrous accident, project teams overcome one potentially fatal barrier after another to bring the crew safely back to the earth, guided by mission director Gene Kranz’ mantra, “Failure is not an option.”

But, of course, failure is an option. Sometimes, in fact, it looks like the most likely option of all. The odds in the actual Apollo 13 disaster were stacked against a happy outcome, and everyone—including Gene Kranz—had to be well aware of that fact. At the same time, letting the idea of failure into your mind can be a psychological trap that leads you to premature surrender.

Within the overall project “Get the astronauts home safely,” there are a number of subprojects, including:

Develop a power-up sequence that draws fewer than 20 amps.

Calculate a burn to get the reentry angle within tolerance using the earth in the capsule window as the sole reference point.

Design a way to fit the square command module CO2 scrubber filter into the round Lunar Excursion Module (LEM) filter socket.

That last subproject is vital, because the LEM’s CO2 scrubbers are meant to take care of the needs of two people for a day and a half, not three people for three days. And nobody ever imagined that the command module scrubbers would need to be used in the LEM, so they were not designed to be compatible. They’re square, and the necessary holes are round. Meanwhile, the CO2 levels have gone up past 8, and at 15 things become dangerous, and eventually deadly. Gene Kranz assigns a project team: “I suggest you gentlemen invent a way to put a square peg in a round hole—rapidly.”

As the engineers gather in a conference room, boxes of miscellaneous junk—everything that’s loose on board the spacecraft—are being dumped onto tables. The project engineer gestures at the stuff and says: “We have to make this [square filter] fit into the hole for this [cylindrical filter] using nothing but that [miscellaneous junk].” The engineers dive in with the right attitude, but for all they know, there isn’t even a solution present on the table. If they’re one 20￠ screw short of what they need, it might as well be a $20 million screw, because either way, they can’t have it.

We understand that a psychological commitment to success is a way to improve the likelihood of achieving it—giving up too easily increases the risk of failure—but that’s not quite enough. How else can we increase the odds of our success? Interestingly enough, when the stakes are high enough, there’s another way to look at “failure” and find an opportunity!