Costa Concordia: A “Titanic” Mess
This is the third in a series of articles this week (here and here) on project management lessons we can derive from the cruise ship disaster.
I want to start by quoting cruise-liner historian John Maxtone-Graham in Salon:
It will live on in infamy, and for these reasons: Utter command stupidity, horrendous behavior on the part of the captain, sloppy evacuation, and the vessel settling there and becoming an in-your-face icon of what can go wrong. And, the problem of transient crews with little experience in emergencies. (italics added)
The items in italics have direct, explicit project-management analogs:
- Command stupidity = project manager stupidity… or to be a bit more charitable, project manager willful ignorance.
- Horrendous behavior = bad management/leadership: autocratic or waffling, avoidance of responsibility, panic or freezing when things go wrong, and so on.
- Little experience = project teams that have experience and strengths in their specific areas of expertise but no experience working on projects as projects (rather than as cases, matters, etc.).
The other images might apply as well, I guess. Some projects do indeed feature sloppy evacuation, people running away from the project team when things get tough, though usually it’s bad project management they’re really fleeing. Other projects remain etched in memory as icons, even if the hulk isn’t literally lying awash on a reef.
He also points out that this mess occurred almost exactly 100 years after the Titanic (one day short of 99 years and nine months, to be precise). I’m surprised more snarky headline writers haven’t tried to sneak in “titanic” as an adjective!
The Titanic disaster also saw utter command stupidity and sloppy evacuation, despite more experienced crew that should have handled the evacuation better than they did.
Both the Titanic and the Costa Concordia sailed off course, into dangerous waters, with the captain aware that he was making a dangerous move.1
About 30 years ago, the captain of the San Juan Islands ferry Elwha also pulled a move like this. (The Elwha, by the way, is almost half the length of the Costa Concordia; it’s not a little boat.) He decided to show a passenger what her home looked like from the water and steered the vessel into a rock. The ferry was damaged, albeit not severely,2 but no one was hurt. Again, titanic (sorry) stupidity.
Why do captains do that?
More to the point, why do project managers sometimes do the equivalent? Why would they run a well functioning project onto the rocks3 because, say, they want to vary their routine?
Note that I say well-functioning project. If your project is in trouble from whatever cause, you do whatever you can, even if making changes adds risk in other areas. There are few enough well functioning projects; if you’re lucky enough to become attached to one, or smart enough to pilot your own, keep it moving through well understood waters.
Like a ship, you can move at high speed through well understood channels, or you can creep dead slow ahead among the reefs. The opposite course of action is the wrong approach in either case.
And that’s probably enough on the Costa Concordia as metaphor.
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1We’ll have to wait for the inquest to truly learn the Costa Concordia captain’s levels of knowledge and awareness. That said, if lacked the marine experience and knowledge to know the danger and know what he didn’t know, then why was he in charge of this large vessel and 4400 lives? It is still possible that the ship’s autopilot system malfunctioned and steered the ship onto the rocks, but so far no one has even suggested that as a possibility. Even if that did happen, the reef is more than a few hundred yards out of the shipping channel; someone should have noticed that the ship was off course.
2The Elwha seems cursed. She’s grounded twice (both times because captains took her intentionally off course, leading to their firing) and rammed both the Anacortes and Orcas docks (mechanical and computer failures). Amazingly, all four incidents happened in clear weather. I’ve been aboard when she’s been pounded by heavy waves (as in “everybody please move away from the windows even though you’re 30 feet above the waterline” heavy waves), and she’s ridden them out without problems. Still, anytime sailors are on a boat, they know that there is only some fallible metal or fiberglass between them and a watery grave. By the way, some stories mention what’s now called Elwha Rock as previously uncharted, but not so. Unnamed, yes; uncharted, no. The rock is visible (!!) at low tides.
3The subject of my next book. But more on that later. I’m still just getting started promoting the current one, The Off Switch. Have you bought your copy yet?
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