Homeruns. Getting it right the first time.
Jul 29th, 2010 by David Svet
I used to skydive. If you haven’t tried it, I recommend it. It’s fun. So when my son told me he and his friends were going skydiving I was O.K. with it. I checked out the airport and club behind his back just to make sure it was fine. After all I am his dad. He chose a good group and it’s just a static line jump. There’s really not much that can go wrong with that. Or so I thought. Then I got a call from him, “Hey Dad, you know those scuba diving stories we’re not supposed to tell Mom? Well, now I have a skydiving story.” Groan, given that he was telling me this over the phone I knew it couldn’t have been too bad, “What did you do wrong?” To which he replied to my utter surprise, “Nothing. My chute wouldn’t open.” I was stunned. How does a skydiving business have such a serious problem on a customer’s first jump?
Everyone wants the first project with a new customer to be a homerun. We are no different at Spur. It’s exciting to start something new. It’s exciting to want to show your expertise. It’s exciting to help someone else succeed. Not to mention that you really want them to come back and continue to be a customer. So it stands to reason that it stinks big time when things go wrong.
I’m sitting here writing this with knots in my back, a headache and churning gut because it was my turn to blow it today. I’m not talking about my letting my son go skydiving. We can talk more about that in a moment. Today we had a string of calamities with a campaign launch for a new client. We tripped over everything! So it got me thinking. What is it about trying to hit a homerun the first time out with a new customer that sometimes fails so badly?
My son’s skydiving group certainly had plenty of incentive to get it right. Skydiving mistakes are pretty unforgiving. So, what happened? The same thing that happened to them happened to us today. We were both victims of our own experience. We’ve done the same procedure so many times that it’s now done unconsciously. In my son’s case, a highly experienced professional packed his parachute. But he made a very small error that nearly had fatal consequences. It was a simple oversight that breached protocol. We did the same thing. In an effort to please we ignored the protocol. It started a chain reaction of events that ended in a near fiasco. We’re lucky and were able to fix the situation in a few hours. When we mess up, no one really gets hurt.
Homeruns happen when everything goes right. It’s a process. To make it repeatable you need to develop and follow the process. Distractions can be fatal. You can take your eye off the ball, zone out, or get flustered and the result is the same — a swing and a miss. It’s the same way at work. Following the protocol in the heat of the moment is the only way to hit it out of the park. Whether it’s the first time and you’re excited, something changed and you’re flustered, or it’s the hundredth time and you’re on autopilot, you need to be relentlessly thorough — every time.
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Very wise words David. I think the devotion to certain protocol is particularly challenging to maintain when your process is slow and results come much later.
All that aside - what about the kid’s parachute??? I know nothing about sky-diving, so how does one survive a non-opening parachute?
Thanks Mary! Yep, it pays to be meticulous.
His parachute suffered what’s called bag lock. The chute is folded, placed in a bag and stuffed in a pack. The static line pulls the chute out of the bag and air inflates the chute to push the bag off. Unless it’s folded wrong and the bag locks. Ordinarily it just doesn’t open. In my son’s case a minor miracle occurred and it opened. Good thing. He had no idea this was going on and didn’t find out until he was safely on the ground.