But What If Earthquake?

A lesson about thinking through outlier outcomes, learned the hard way a long, long time ago.

Folks: one more from the archive as I get myself back into writing shape. This was the first essay I wrote for the channel, but it’s relevant(ish) now to tee up an upcoming series on my experience with process management on creative teams. If you haven’t already seen it, check it out! Thanks! —ABB

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It’s impossible to plan for every possible contingency, and is a waste of time and effort to try. However, intelligently considering real disaster scenarios can help build a deeper understanding of the parameters of a given endeavor, and ensure capturing the greatest value. Getting mired in what-ifs is foolish and bad — blithely ignoring their possibility is foolisher and worse.

My first job, if you don’t count the paper route I had in middle school, was working at a public library. The work was pretty far removed from managing creative teams, and a lot has changed about the world (and me!) over the years, but bear with me here. I’ve got something in mind.

Consider the basement stacks reorganization project.

Now, this was nearly 35 years ago at the time of this writing, but I can still date the project pretty precisely: it took a few weeks at the end of the summer of 1989, finally wrapping up in the second week of October. How can I pinpoint it that clearly? Well, this was in the SF Bay Area, and you may know that at 5:01PM on October 17, 1989 the largest earthquake in generations shook the hell out of the region. 

If you had just spent the last few weeks of your working life lugging tens of thousands of pounds of books, magazines, newspapers, and microfiche from one part of a dark, dank storage basement to another part of that dark, dank storage basement, only to have the entire thing, shelves and all, completely collapse, you’d remember it too.

I wasn’t actually at work the day of the quake, and luckily no one was in the basement when it hit. If they had been, it would likely have been very difficult to escape without serious injury. The building stood, but everything inside crashed violently down. It was quite terrifying to see it afterwards, to realize I had just spent so much time deep in the bowels of that building. If the quake had happened a week earlier, I surely would have been down there. 

And then the terror kind of melted into frustration and existential ennui about the waste of work (hey, I was seventeen). Why did we even bother? Every single one of the carefully moved, re-ordered, re-shelved books — thousands of them— now were in great heaping random piles. What a waste!

I had to remind myself: look, sixty one people died that day. All I had to do was pick some books up off the floor. Even if the work really had been wasted…dude, have a little perspective. And how could we have been expected to plan for a massive natural disaster anyway? It was a complete surprise!

But yet, on that last point…over time I started to reconsider. Maybe taking into account the chance of an earthquake when your facility is situated on a major fault would have been within the realm of good planning. Would it have meant that the project never went forward because at some point in the future it all might fall down? Of course not! But it might have added a step to the process: seismically securing the shelves before moving every single volume. 

That ended up having to happen anyway. Before it was all put back together, seismically stable shelving was installed. Better than never doing it but, still, kind of the wrong order of operations. I wasn’t involved in the planning (I just lugged the books). But as far as I know there was no particular time pressure beyond the fact that storage was tight and it was long overdue. It could have been done two months later, say, after having anchored the shelves correctly.

(As a side note, a decade later the whole building was torn down and another built in its place, so we’re all just dust in the wind anyway, or something.)

In the Bay Area, earthquakes are a constant low-level background concern. An earthquake on any particular day and date isn’t very likely, but the overall chances are actually pretty high. And obviously they can be quite devastating. 

Maybe because of this early experience, I’ve always thought there is value in working through possible negative outcomes and consequences, catastrophes, or disasters in any project. The importance of the risk manifests not in how likely it is to happen at any given moment, but in how bad it would be if it did.

This lesson has echoed around in my head throughout my career. What if the project gets canceled before it’s done? Always a possibility! If that means the company closes its doors and everyone is fired, well, not much we can do about that. (Of course, if that seems like a realistic scenario, maybe polishing up your LinkedIn is a better use of time than this essay.) 

But what if the project gets canceled and everyone is reassigned around the team? In that outcome, what have we done along the way to capture learnings? To have meaningful artifacts of the work done so far? Did we think through that possibility and put into place structures to ensure we reaped as much value from the work as possible? 

What if the launch date is moved up by a month? Have we prioritized smartly to have the most important work done? What if it’s delayed by a month? Do we have a way to suspend work and then come back to it effectively? 

Did we seismically reinforce the shelves before we moved the books? 

However! Some kinds of management advice suggest that planning for contingencies is actually a bad thing.

One argument goes, it makes you focus on the negative. This assertion is along the lines of the ski instructor who says “don’t look down, because you’re going to go where you’re looking, and if you’re looking down you’re going to fall.” In other words, visualizing failure creates failure, so just visualize success and it shall be yours! 

Another argument against contingency planning is that energy and resources spent imagining failure states is energy and resources that could be put toward ensuring success. Once you’ve gloriously succeeded, you’ll look back on all that time wasted preparing for a failure that never happened. Won’t you feel you’d been foolish and cowardly then? Won’t you wish you’d had those resources for final polish?

Still another suggests that considering how to productively manage potential catastrophe is somehow self-defeating. If you’ve sufficiently planned contingencies, this thinking goes, it’s as if you’ve drawn yourself a roadmap and given yourself permission to fail, and so you will. Instead, I guess, you just plow forward and chant, “failure is not an option! There is no Plan B!” Will yourself to succeed, nerd!

But that’s all nonsense. Catastrophe is always a possibility, and often is not within our control. Sometimes calamity runs a red light. Sometimes disaster is a seven course meal of humiliation, haughtily served by the waiter of circumstance…okay, okay. Sometimes it is a damn earthquake knocking down all your shelves. 

But look: of course it’s possible to over-plan. Of course it’s possible to kill enthusiasm and morale by dwelling on all the things that could go wrong. Of course it’s possible to “de-risk” to the point of timidity. So don’t do that! As with all powerful tools, this one can be wielded unsafely. Learn to do it right!

(Also, please: you cannot “jinx” a project by talking about what might go wrong. I have literally heard this in a professional setting. That’s not a thing! Don’t fall for it! Refusing to discuss risks won’t protect you from them any more than taking the batteries out of your smoke detector will protect your house from burning down. C’mon, people.) 

Here’s a scenario I’ll bet is familiar to anyone reading this: you suddenly realize one person on the team has become too singularly important, too mission-critical. Only one designer knows how to use that esoteric internal publishing tool, or there’s that producer who has the only 1:1 relationship with the big client. How likely is that person to quit, become ill, or have to take emergency leave to attend to family matters? Who cares! It doesn’t matter how likely it is, it would be devastating. Enact contingency protocols as soon as the risk is identified! 

But also, might we have been able to see that coming and have put in place common sense guardrails against it? I don’t mean becoming paralyzed by contingency planning. I mean training two people on the software, adding a second person to the calls. To me it seems prudent and logical, not overly cautious, to “de-risk” these situations with lightweight, low-friction measures (which, truthfully are probably best-practice anyway). It means being proactive, not reactive.

It doesn’t feel bold and brave and audacious to see a scenario like that and say screw it, it’ll probably be fine. I’m going to throw on my blindfold and skip out into traffic. It feels silly and reckless.

It is simply impossible to guess what all potential catastrophes might be and develop contingencies for all of them. And trying to do so would be meaningless and deeply counter-productive anyway. That is not the goal. In fact, that approach is precisely what does lead to over-cautiousness, risk-aversion, bloated process, and inefficiency. 

But thinking through a few choice scenarios can work wonders. The old saw that plans are useless even while planning is invaluable has a point. The desired artifact of considering these scenarios is not a set of detailed contingency plans. Instead, it is the deep understanding of all the forces at play. The more comprehensive your insight into all the dimensions of the work, the better prepared you’ll be to handle adversity. And adversity, let’s be honest, will come.

And look, even if no action results from the assessment, it’s worth doing. If you’re going to roll the dice on something risky, isn’t it worth knowing how big your bet really is? The analysis needn’t be paralyzing, but if you’re unwilling to take the bet when you actually understand the stakes, what does that say about your willingness to take it without understanding stakes. What does it say about a reluctance to understand?

As with so many things, smartly assessing and constraining risk is difficult, though doing so is essential to effectively running a team in an environment of innovation and fast-moving change, especially one made up of smart, ambitious, boundary-pushers. Yet it is dangerous and ineffectual if done poorly. So do it well!

None of us will get it right all the time, but I really do think it’s healthy to be just as skeptical of “damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead,” as it is to be wary of too much caution. 

Just bolt the damn shelves to the floor and get on with it.