The Devil’s in the Details

This weekend I spent 36 hours on my back in bed—and not in the good way! I was incapacitated, unable to use even my computer. Not my idea of a good weekend! I spent three of those long hours watching a series of shows about the Second World War aircraft carrier, the Enterprise. This was the jewel of the Pacific fleet and, apparently, it had more lives than a cat. An aircraft carrier is a floating city, a very complex piece of machinery for its day.

Near the end of the war, the Japanese planned kamikaze flights against the advancing enemy in a last ditch effort to slow or stop the U.S. Navy. What happened on one of these missions was that, after watching many of his fellow countrymen try and fail, one lone Japanese Zero pilot dropped out of the sky and flew to the center of an entire battle group of ships becoming the sole recipient of all the anti-aircraft guns that could possibly be pointed in his direction. He flew not into the ship but low alongside the ship, and as he approached the stern, he pulled up, did a half-roll and flew directly down the elevator shaft. The sole 500 pound bomb on his aircraft detonated on the fifth floor and incapacitated the Enterprise for the remainder of the war. The Enterprise never fought again and was eventually sold for scrap metal—cut up and undoubtedly turned into Fords or Chevys or washing machines or something.

Two things went through my mind as I watched this movie. First, I knew where George Lucas got the idea to end the Death Star. Granted, he didn’t use a kamikaze pilot, but that was because he was planning many sequels. The second thing that went through my mind was, “I wonder if anybody thought of this attack when Enterprise was being designed. Can you imagine walking into the design meeting and saying, ‘This isn’t good enough! Why give me one 500 pound bomb and a stunt pilot, and I will turn this boat into soup cans!’” I suspect you would have been laughed out of the office.

It never ceases to amaze me how often it is in life that one small detail that brings down one very large creation. Setting the Death Star aside, how about the first space shuttle disaster? One O-ring in untested conditions, and…well, you know the rest. Innumerable foreign aid projects have failed because no one checked that parts were available for machines that were sent over or because no oil or fuel was available. The problem could be the new plumbing part that I have that never fit with the plumbing parts already installed in the house. Or perhaps I forgot to get that one little conversion fitting. No amount of duct tape will hold up under 60 psi of water pressure. Trust me; I know this!

I am good at coming up with ideas. I have hundreds of them—some of them are pretty good, too—but a good idea needs to have the details worked out before it is of any use. I have been lucky to work with Murray all these years because he was able to get me to focus on the details in a learning assignment. Students need the details. I need the details. The designers of the Enterprise needed the details. It is great to have a visionary on your team, maybe even a couple, but you better have just as many detail-people or the project may come off the rails well into the construction or implementation stage. You can never plan for everything, but that is not a good reason to take the ‘it will all turn out fine in the end; we will deal with that later’ approach. If you know there is a problem, deal with it now. Plenty of problems will crop up later that you never expected to deal with. See the vision, but breathe the details.