Finally, there is a bucket of lessons that all deal in some way with group dynamics. The fact that emotional intelligence is often a better predictor of a person’s effectiveness than IQ is something most of us confront early in our working lives. As brilliant as Harald may have been in many respects, he appeared to have suffered from a staggering deficit of so-called EQ—the ability to read, process, and manage351 the emotions of the people around you (as well as your own). Harald’s tendency to bristle when the divers raised concerns about his plan, and to stress his own rank in the org chart, made matters much worse.
Then there’s the seductive appeal of the outsider352—or more broadly, the consultant—which helps explain why the contractor, construction manager, designer, and tunnel owner were all eager to turn to Harald and Norwesco to solve their problem rather than relying on their own collective brainpower. These weary and wary players put a higher value on Harald’s “fresh eyes” and can-do attitude than on their own common sense and intimate knowledge of the project. Turning to an outsider also afforded them more distance from the true risks associated with the mission. This helps explain why corporate executives looking to downsize their workforce will often call in high-priced management consultants, seeking a report that comes to the same conclusion. It also explains how sports apparel companies, by outsourcing the assembly of their sneakers to third-world subcontractors, can insulate themselves from any mistreatment of those workers353. The farther managers are from the actual decision making, the greater their tolerance for risk.
But distance can be overrated. In the end, the brilliant “steel straw” plan was hatched and refined by people who’d been toiling on the tunnel job for years, the same guys who had apparently exhausted all their original ideas prior to Harald’s arrival. As it turned out, the fresh eyes they needed were staring right at them. Agency chief Doug MacDonald used his status as a nonengineer to ask a basic question, which got the engineers to look at the problem from a new angle. They were then able to devise a solution themselves.
Why did it take the tragedy of Billy and Tim’s deaths for them to find their creative spark? Part of the answer was that the battling parties had become so fixed in their positions that they could no longer trust the intentions of the other side. That’s how the designer and construction manager could have refused to give serious consideration to Kiewit’s promising proposal to yank out the plugs just before removing the bag line, install a temporary dam, and then institute a policy of evacuating all workers from the tunnel whenever a major storm was forecast. Once the main players realized that they had become incapable of settling on a solution themselves and began canvassing for outside help, they fell prey to something called the availability bias. They based their decisions on what was most available to them—in this case, the dazzling plan that Harald presented—which was itself an extension of the only other dive plan that Kiewit had considered, the one Tap had submitted and that Kiewit had asked Harald to review. The “steel straw” solution wasn’t considered because it wasn’t yet available. It didn’t become an option until, in desperation after the deaths, everyone stepped back, took financial concerns off the table, and explored the problem with genuinely open minds.
In the face of all the mounting warning signs—the blazing red flags that the divers had waved in front of Harald and others about how the breathing system was failing on that Monday and Tuesday—why in the world had the divers been sent back into the tunnel on Wednesday and made to rely on that same failing system? The significance of those red flags appears to have been masked by more powerful crosscurrents: The financial pressures that the contractor felt, fueled by enormous cost overruns. The schedule pressures that the owner felt, fueled by the ticking clock of a court-ordered deadline. The client-relation pressures that Norwesco and Black Dog felt, in trying to please Kiewit, their most important, rainmaking customer. The reputational pressure that Harald presumably felt, to live up to his own inflated billing and preserve his standing as the ultimate fixer. All these forces combined to create an overwhelming pressure to carry on.
Like stepping on the gas when running late for an appointment, only to create a bigger delay by getting pulled over, the act of giving in to all those pressures had backfired in every conceivable way. While the original Norwesco bid that Harald submitted for the job came in at just under $600,000, the cost of making things right after everything had gone so wrong turned out to be fifty to sixty times that sum.
Financially, the toll354 for just the “steel straw” solution and the civil settlement with the divers and their families approached $25 million. Add to that another $5 million to $10 million in estimated costs associated with legal fees, insurance and administrative matters, and lost time. The rush to meet the court-ordered deadlines had ended up adding a full year to the tunnel schedule. The relationships that Norwesco and Black Dog and Harald personally had with Kiewit were shattered, as all three companies became embroiled in litigation over who should shoulder the blame for the diver deaths. The Deer Island project even held lessons for the general public. After all, the tunnel job showed how measures that are often popular with taxpayers when it comes to major public works projects—things like low-bid contracts, staggered payments, and late-fee penalties for missed deadlines—can work against their interests by incentivizing risky behavior that can ultimately cost those same taxpayers dearly.
The tunnel ended up altering the way many of the players behind it approached future projects. The most lasting lesson that both Kiewit boss Ken Stinson and Doug MacDonald took away was that when problems arise on a megaproject, as they inevitably do, the priority has to be on solving them. Figuring out who’s to blame and who’s going to pay can wait. Otherwise the project suffers, and the problem gets a lot harder and more expensive to fix. “Once relationships get poisoned,” Stinson told me, “it’s very hard to unpoison them.”
In recent years, the trend in the tunneling industry has been toward using a new contract structure that aims to reduce the kind of toxic antagonism that stymied the Deer Island job. Under this “design-build” approach, the project designer functions as a subcontractor to the main contractor. Although the approach355 can introduce its own complications, and the enormous unknowns of doing work underground always inject great risk into a project, design-build can significantly reduce the amount of finger-pointing while streamlining areas of responsibility. That, in turn, encourages the contractor and owner to focus on keeping their relationship strong. As Stinson put it to me, “There are no good stories that come out of jobs that have bad relationships with the owner.” The shame of the Deer Island project, he says, was that it was “a terrific story of engineering success.” But because of the tragic deaths, “no one came out of this feeling like a winner.”
351 (Epilogue, note 5)
the ability to read, process, and manage: For more on EQ, see Daniel Goleman,
352 (Epilogue, note 6)
the seductive appeal of the outsider: On this point, I benefited from the insights of Don Gibson, Larry Palinkas, and Tom Botts, among others.
353 (Epilogue, note 7)
insulate themselves from any mistreatment of those workers: Benjamin Powell and David Skarbeck, “Sweatshops and Third World Living Standards: Are the Jobs Worth the Sweat?” Independent Institute Working Paper 53, Department of Economics, San Jose State University, 2004; Michael Clancy, “Sweating the Swoosh: Nike, the Globalization of Sneakers, and the Question of Sweatshop Labor,” Institute for the Study of Diplomacy, School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University, 2000, 5.
354 (Epilogue, note 8)
Financially, the tolclass="underline" The $30 to $35 million estimate takes documented dollar figures for such items as the design and construction costs for the vent solution and the legal settlements with the divers and their families, and combines them with estimates from multiple project players for such line items as legal fees, fines, insurance and administrative costs, and lost time. This newspaper account from prior to the vent solution decision in 2000 estimated that the additional costs to complete the tunnel following the accident could be as high as $30 million. Tom Walsh, “No Quick Fix for Troubled Tunnel,”
355 (Epilogue, note 9)
Although the approach: Dave Corkum went on to coauthor a book for specialist readers on the trend toward design-build. This approach has by now become mainstream in tunneling and other underground projects. He says it can speed up the process by which a project goes from concept to reality, and the project owners tend to like it because it offers streamlined responsibility. If there is a problem, the owner doesn’t have to figure out whether it’s related to design or to construction. Says Corkum: “He can point to his design-builder and say, ‘It’s all yours.’ ” But Corkum cautions that the approach can be misused by owners to dump all the risk onto the design-builder. While it can reduce the likelihood of the kind of dysfunction seen on the Deer Island job, Corkum says he doesn’t know if a design-build approach would have eliminated the fundamental standoff over the timing of the plug removal. For more technical perspective on this trend, see Gary S. Brierley, David H. Corkum, and David H. Hatem,