War Room Short Story

“I feel a War Room comin’ on!”

Imagine, for this short story, that you are the special projects manager reporting to the CEO of a $100M global organization.  The company is surviving the recession and is growing in Europe with a breakthrough product that has the potential of capturing market share from the competition.

You are in the CEO’s office across the desk from him.  Claudette, the VP of European operations is on the phone.  Claudette lays out her pain.

“The goals I agreed to for sales this year are in jeopardy.  The lists of potential customers and companies in Europe that could be approached as sales prospects are a mess!  Duplicate outdated lists are everywhere and it is not clear how to move forward.  Some want to scrap all the bad data and start over.  Others want to merge and de-dupe the data since it holds our past intelligence and touch points. Every day that these lists are a mess is a day that the opportunity to grow European market share is lost!”

The CEO turns red and looks like he is going to boil over, “Claudette, I am not angry at you so don’t take this the wrong way.  Engineering burned the midnight oil to get this new product out and it burns me up to not be able to move faster in field sales.”

The CEO turns to you and says “I need a plan in 4 weeks.  If you bring me a plan that everyone agrees to, that I can fund and we can move on, we can turn this around.  Miss the deadline and you will need to find another job … and so will I.  Bring an acceptable plan faster than that and I’ll give you a $1,000 bonus for every day it’s early!”

Your palms are sweating as you leave the CEO’s office.  You sit down at your desk to look at the schedules of some key people and contemplate scheduling some kind of recurring meeting…  Weekly?  Bi-weekly?  Daily???? Bi-Daily????  Your head spins as you struggle with how to start so that you can move FAST.  Instead of starting with chartering meetings, you feel like you have to simultaneously solve everything at once… But that’s impossible, right?

With all the moving parts, incremental meetings just don’t feel right.  Hour or even hour-and-a-half meetings will only scratch the surface.  Then there is the fact that the European Sales offices get REALLY frustrated with US Corporate when change is imposed on them. How do you accelerate the project and co-create the solution in a way that keeps Europe from feeling like “Corporate is doing it again!?!?!”

You go to bed that night with people, process and technology challenges swirling around your head.  When you wake up the next morning,you know you were dreaming about it and the weird thing is that you can remember that Jerry was saying something.  Jerry is a friend you bike with and a consultant who told you about taking over a room to solve complex problems…. RAPIDLY.

You Google, “solving problems on the walls of a room” and several items down, “War Room” comes up.  That’s it!  That’s what Jerry called it!  You have never been involved in one but the online testimonies talked about acceleration, co-creation, high-involvement buy-in….  You remember Jerry saying that when the conditions are right, you will “feel a war room comin’ on” because no other approach is sufficient.

You call Jerry and your heart sinks when you go to voicemail.  While leaving a pitiful voicemail you see that he is calling you back!  He happens to be available for an early morning ride and to talk about the challenge.

Jerry isn’t as exuberant as you expected.  You have just started the ride and he provides three stern warnings:

“Don’t start a War Room unless you are going to finish it.”

“Never let it go stale.”

“And don’t over commit based on lack of war room experience or your availability.”

He stopped riding as he finished his warning and lets me pull up beside him, “Why do you think these commitments are these so important?” he asks.  You shrug your shoulders and he continues, “War Room failures are VERY PUBLIC!  It’s a breakthrough method if done right but if blundered, it tarnishes the War Room’s reputation and people start saying it doesn’t work.”

You never have seen this side of Jerry.  The wisdom of his experience is evident but you suddenly feel more calm about your challenge.  You can tell that there is something powerful about the War Room.  That it’s like handling a loaded gun.  Maybe like a loaded bazooka.  You need a bazooka right now.

You say, “Dude, I need your help with this because I have never done a War Room before.”

“Well, you’re in luck if the company can pay for my services.” Jerry says, “Because I just finished a gig and am available.  I can help you get started today if you want.” Then he gets stern again.  “But first, do you agree to the three commitments?”

“Yes, I agree.  I think I can get the CEO to hire you.  That should help with all three commitments since all I know is that in a War Room, you put stuff up on the walls.”

During the ride, Jerry and you build enough plans to get started.  It’s obvious to you both that you need to facilitate the War Room exercises in Europe.  You agree to first build the structure of the war room’s “story line” in the US with what is already known.  No answers… just the right wall spaces allocated for background info on the first wall and the right questions about the future.  You will also start drafting the charter for the war room exercise.  The charter will lay out the problem statement and the general resource commitment of the key participants.

Jerry advises, “Get intense and even dramatic about signing off the charter with the key participants when we get to Europe.  Signing the charter means they are going to commit to the War Room, implementing the co created solution and NOT let fire fighting outside business issues get in the way.  In other words, the charter says that we are not going to waste each others time starting something we are not going to finish.”

Almost at the end of the ride, Jerry asks, “How much of the War Room facilitation do you want to take on?” You comment again about knowing nothing but that you do know the sales process and systems.  Jerry says, “Ah Ha… I know War Room methods and you know the business.  I can serve as the War Room facilitator and you can be the Story Line Architect.  That means you will always remember why the solution was built the way it was while I drive the War Room process itself.”

Back at the office you call ahead to secure the room in the European office and the only viable room is ideally positioned right next to the sponsor’s office but is only big enough for 10 people at a time.  Your list has swelled to 35 people already… Road Block!

On the phone, Jerry calmly revealed that, “With a war room, waves of participants can come through and be involved.  People should feel respected and involved but they don’t all have to be there at the same time.  A manageable small Core Team of functional representatives should fit the room, so no more than 10 on the core team.  The content on the walls should be considered unfinished and still ‘wet’ until all of the ‘extended team’ stakeholders have been able to come through and contribute.” Jerry takes on that stern sounding voice again, “Never forget to involve the IT department or anyone else who must implement the changes as soon as possible.”

Jerry was on a roll, “The Story Line Architect stitches together the current state understanding and future state design with a duty to minimize their own contributions and instead maximize participant’s inputs.  But it’s not a democracy.  The Architect must maintain trust by demonstrating objectivity and keeping their ego out of the way. But they must move quickly to build a story line with holistic integrity.  You want an atmosphere of co-creation.  Ideally people lose track of who is saying “what” as discovery and creation happen for the group.”

Three days after being given the challenge, you are flying over to Europe with Jerry for the War Room exercises.  You put the draft charter on the wall at the beginning of the War Room and you then put up the posters and materials that represent the skeleton of the current state to future state story.   Claudette, the sponsor, is the first to review the structure and after some rapid input and changes, she agrees that she is ready to sign off the Charter.  Then the core team holds its kickoff meeting and after laying out the project and what the Core team is expected to do, you get dramatic about the commitment and one by one ask them if they support the charter.  They appreciate having a chance to each explain why they are behind the effort and they each sign the War Room charter.

The minimum daily War Room sessions are 2 hours first thing in the morning and an hour and a half at the end of the day.  That allows people to gather data and produce deliverables during the middle of the day as needed.  Jerry advises you to build out the current state on the wall first with all the stakeholders before starting the future state design.  He says “You are trying to rapidly develop what I call an ‘uncommon shared understanding’.”

It takes the core team 2 days to draft the current state story and then you bring in waves of extended team stakeholders throughout day 3.  You keep tweaking the story lines around the room by telling the “How we got here” story to the next group of participants and gathering their input.  More stakeholders surface during the discussions and you would have lost track of who was involved if Jerry had not posted a sign-in poster on the wall outside the room.  He also encouraged each participant to write what they thought of the process.  Before long, the door looks like a graffiti panel of names, encouraging statements and some wise concerns and warnings.  The one that caught everyone’s eye was where Claudette wrote, “The War Room will help us go from REACTIVE to CREATIVE!!!”

You have a long night at the end of the third day when you pull all the posters and post-it inputs off the walls, put them into PowerPoint and produce clean posters representing the current state story.  Everyone’s energy has been contagious and you feel honored to be consolidating the story.  You should be tired… but you can barely sleep that night.

What surprises you most is that people are always coming into the War Room on their breaks and catching up with the story.  Claudette makes time during her other meetings in her office to show everyone the War Room.  She naturally keeps the explanation high level (just the hill tops as Jerry says) while walking Directors and VPs through the content.

The War Room itself is a buzz with a type of project communications that you have never seen before.  Jerry curbs your urge to always be the one to walk new people through the War Room.  “Let the participants piece together the story line wherever possible. This is where the co-ownership magic of the shared story happens” says Jerry.

The future state design is complete at the end of the 7th business day of War Room work.  During the middle of future state design, the Sales and Marketing staff laid out their requirements and the IT staff came up with multiple options to satisfy them.  Once the solution was chosen, it became part of the story line and the implications of that decision were then rolled through the implementation chapters.

You do the final review with the Core Team and Sponsor.  Everyone already knows the basic story line but this time, the Operation Plan is agreed where people are assigned implementation responsibilities.  The team is excited and the sponsor must challenge people to avoid over commitment.

As the Core team leaves the room and you and Jerry start packing your bags to head out to dinner, Claudette asks to talk for a minute.  You are nervous that there is a problem.  She opens the door and the CEO is shaking the hand of the last core team member to leave the room.  He flew in to review the War Room!  Claudette had been keeping him updated through the week and he wanted to see the War Room himself.  You offer to walk him through it and he reveals that Claudette already has!

“Let’s go celebrate at dinner and tomorrow morning, we can discuss the implementation plan,” he exclaims with a gleam in his eye.  “Oh, and I almost forgot…  I had Finance downstairs cut your bonus check and hands me an envelope….  What’s wrong?” he says seeing the look in my eyes.

“I cannot accept this.  This was too much of a team effort.  Can the Core Team and Jerry please share this bonus?”

When the bonus was distributed, the Core Team started taking each other and extended team members out to lunches and dinners to share in the rewards.  Everyone recognized that that it wasn’t just about them and they also wanted to keep each other motivated throughout the implementation.

You weren’t ever quite the same after that first War Room experience.  You even started facilitating simple meetings with visual methods for recording a group’s agreements and plans.  And when you started your own practice as an international management consultant, your clients knew precisely when to call you …. when they, “Felt a War Room comin’ on!“