Shouting Fire in a Crowded Conference Room

Some call it a grenade, some call it a fire drill, some call it a short fuse, which I guess, when you think about it, is really just a particular aspect of a grenade or other hand-propelled exploding projectile. Whatever you call it, unexpected, quick turnaround projects that typically involve higher than average investments in time and effort are a sad feature of many corporate jobs and consulting is certainly no different. You know what they say about best laid plans right (if you don’t, they say they they often go awry). Well actually the original quote is “The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men,  Gang aft agley…seriously, it’s Scottish apparently)

Now I know what you may be thinking (other than how crazy was that wedding on last week’s Game of Thrones, am I right?). You’re consultants, aren’t you supposed to be experts at work planning? Isn’t managing process one of your core capabilities? Aren’t these type of “flare-ups” one of the very things you work to prevent? All true and valid points. But we’re also in the client service business, which not only means that we want to respond immediately when our clients make an ask of us, but perhaps more importantly, we want to try and anticipate their needs and provide them with perspectives, answers, and solutions that they may not have known to directly ask for. Therefore any change in the competitive landscape, the supplier base, customer purchasing habits, you name it, is an opportunity to do what we do best, add value to our clients. And these “inflection” events could come from anywhere. Seriously. We once worked on an industry that would remake itself every time Dr. Oz recommended a new supplement (raspberry ketones practically brought it to its knees!)

My project team recently went through one such experience and it was indeed no walk in the park. The hours were long, the work was complex, and we were creating multiple revisions every day. Perhaps the most challenging (and, ok, I’ll say it, irritating) part was that some of the inputs and assumptions that we were using would change literally by the hour, I mean you could press F9 in Excel, go to lunch, come back and your model was now out of date. Additionally this work occurred right around a three day holiday weekend meaning that some folks had previously planned vacations which we as a team refused to alter. However this decision required all of us to have familiarity with each other’s work and be able to pick up where others left off.

Based on the above, you can probably surmise that we did not always do our best to live up to the goals we set for ourselves as a team. Yes there were moments where we were frustrated and undoubtedly there were times when we probably could have planned out efforts to be more efficient. In fact I’m actually looking forward to having a postmortem (postmortem just being a discussion of what went well and what didn’t go well when a particular effort has concluded…perhaps we should try and find a name that isn’t related to somebody dying) so that we can give each other some direct feedback and brainstorm new team norms to prevent some of the issues we faced from happening again.

But all that said there are some real positives that come from experiences like these. I always want to be very careful about using war metaphors (because honestly, what we do couldn’t possibly be farther from the realities that our men and women in uniform face), but broadly, I do think challenging experiences can help bind people together. To use what I hope is a more benign example, my high school football started every season with “Hell Week” (somewhere my ACs are laughing given how often they’ve heard me talk about high school football). Anyway “Hell Week” was exactly what you think it is, 6 hours of conditioning, outside, in late August heat. In fact, I don’t even know if we touched the ball all week, it was all running, crawling, jumping, diving, and then when we got our pads on, you could add hitting to the mix. Now obviously one of the goals of the week was to help all of us get in playing shape (check) and for the upperclassmen to teach the freshmen how things are done. But invariably, we’d always leave that week is a tightly bonded unit. We had all just been through this incredibly challenging experience together and made it out the other side. Even if a day earlier we were yelling at each other (and seriously, if you were the guy who didn’t sprint the whole way and we all had to run more because of it, you were getting yelled at), “Hell Week” helped turned the many into capital-O One.

In a similar way I think our own “Hell Week” helped to bring our case team together. In retrospect, I can truly appreciate the dedication, the commitment, the abilities, and the raw horsepower of the members of my team.  We’ve been through the grenade fire together and as team, I think we’ll be better for it. Now make no mistake, all things being equal, I hope we don’t have another “Hell Week” (or, gulp, weeks), but if we do, I’m thankful for the people that I’ll have by my side.