What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

Every so often you will run across a news story that makes you assume that either the reporter who wrote it has gone barking bad or you have; something so surreal that you find yourself looking for signs of Photoshop even when you know there won’t be any. Or, at least, that was my reaction when I saw the story headlined “Giant yellow duck explodes in Taiwan” at the head of an AP story featured on an Australian news site…

It turns out that the duck is the work of a Dutch artist named Florentijn Hofmann, and it’s a larger version of a 2007 piece (the original was 16.5 meters tall; the current duck is 18 meters tall) that made the news a few years ago when it got loose from its moorings and became stuck up against a large bridge in Europe, effectively blocking boat traffic along a river/canal system for several hours before it could be towed out of the way. Since then, the ducks have toured 13 cities around the world without significant incident, until a powerful earthquake in Taiwan knocked out the air pump filling the current duck, causing it to partially deflate. When power was restored and the exhibiters began re-filling the duck a combination of poor handling and unfortunate winds caused the duck’s rear to blow out and flatten the entire structure…

I have often heard people claim that all strategists are inherently pessimists, because of the time we spend trying to anticipate all of the things that could go wrong with any project we’re working on, and the effort involved in working out contingency plans for those events. People who have actually spent time developing or implementing strategy will tell you that they are realists, concerning themselves with what to do in the event that specific outcomes occur, rather than just assuming that something bad (or good) will happen because it can. We should probably admit that this does lend itself to spending a lot of time determining all of the things that can go wrong and working out responses to them, since it generally isn’t necessary to make contingency plans for coping with success. However, this doesn’t make the process any less important…

If we are working with any structure or installation that requires electrical power in order to function, including the electric air pumps needed to keep a giant duck construct inflated, then it isn’t unreasonable to take some time and consider what you should do in the event that the local electrical power grid goes down. This is especially important if the local grid is rendered less than 100% reliable because of faulty generating plants, government malfeasance, operational incompetence, or regular natural disasters (such as earthquakes) that interfere with power generation or power transmission. By the same token, we should probably consider what we will do if the water currents or prevailing winds are stronger than expected (or are going in an unexpected direction), what we will do in the event that the duck gets loose from its moorings, what we will do if the duck becomes stuck against a bridge or overpass, and how we will deal with the negative news stories, civil lawsuits, and public backlash against us and/or our duck…

Because the truth is that an 18-meter (60 foot) tall rubber duck construct is a wonderful and whimsical thing, and we should not permit minor challenges in operations or safety to interfere with the viewing public’s enjoyment of our duck. And while it isn’t strictly true that everything that possibly can go wrong does – sometimes there are multiple bad outcomes that are mutually exclusive, for example – it’s still our job to identify and plan for as many of those contingencies as possible...

Because if anything is certain in this world, it’s that there are more potential failures lurking behind the scenes than we have planned for so far…