Managing Projects for Ministry

150 Manag i ng Pro j ec t s for Mi n i s t r y

Appendix 36 Skull Session William G. Pagonis

Another innovation which I have found absolutely invaluable is what I call the skull session. The best way to describe this tool is by means of the tried-and-true football analogy. The skull session, I tell my troops, is a way to do our Monday morning quarterbacking on Saturday night. In other words, rather than sit around for hours or days after a disaster berating ourselves, we try to anticipate and headoff the disaster. It works, too. Before implementing a particular plan, I usually try to bring together all of the involved parties for a collective dry run. The group includes representatives from all appropriate areas of the command, and the goal of the skull sessions is to identify and talk through all of the unknown elements of the situation. We explore all possible problems that could emerge, and then try to come up with concrete solutions to those prob- lems. Skull sessions reduce uncertainty, reinforce the interconnection of the different areas of specialization, encourage collaborative problem solving, and raise the level of awareness as to possible disconnects in the theater. They also teach soldiers to think differently — more expansively — in the long run. They are both near-term scenario-building exercises, and longer-term vision expanding exercises. One of the most common questions asked of me by journalists, both during and in the wake of Desert Storm, was, "What was your biggest surprise?" I took that question to mean, "What weren't you prepared for? I always frustrated the journalists on that score, since I could honestly say that there was nothing that surprised us, and nothing that we weren't prepared for. This is not to say that nothing went wrong. Lots of things went wrong. But the fact is, we never had a problem for which we had not already discussed potential solutions. This happened, among other reasons, because of the skull sessions. We were able to stay on top of events because very few were unanticipated.

~ William G. Pagonis. Moving Mountains: Lessons in Leadership and Logistics from the Gulf War . Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1992. p. 194.