Project Management: The Vasa

Have you ever worked on a project or at a company where you knew that things were headed in the wrong direction? How did you react? Did you have the nerve to tell the truth and confront management?

If you aren't aware of the Vasa, she is a beautiful Swedish ship that went down in the Baltic in 1628 on her maiden voyage. 333 years later, she was re-discovered. She has been fully recovered and is displayed in a museum in Stockholm ( http://www.vasamuseet.se/en/ ).

When you see the ship, it is mind-boggling to think about the effort that it took to create it. Two years and hundreds (maybe thousands) of people working on it. The coordination of raw materials, skilled and non-skilled labor, and the myriad of details involved is amazing. And all in an age before power tools and Microsoft Project!.

But in spite of all the effort and attention to detail, the ship never made it past it's maiden voyage. It was towed along the water front to the southern side of the harbor, where 3 sails were set. Winds were not high and the sea was calm. As the Vasa emerged from the protective bay, a breeze caught her sails and she rolled to the port side. She recovered once as the sheets were cast off, but another gust rolled her onto her side and water rushed into the lower gun ports. She went down quickly, in front of thousands of on-lookers, taking approximately 50 people with her.

Years of effort and finances disappeared below the surface, a severe blow to Sweden's war effort and economy.

It did not have to happen. During a "rock test" after the ship was first floated, it was readily apparent that the ship was not stable (in a rock test, workers run back and forth across the beam of the ship). The Admiral refused to address the issue, saying "if only the King were here!".

Even prior to the rock test, there were certainly ship-builders (Dutch, "consulting engineers") that realized that there was a problem. I suspect many of the experienced ship builders and laborers knew that the ship was too narrow and top-heavy. Why didn't anyone speak up? The answer is apparent when you read the history of what happened after the ship went down; the King's response to the news was that "imprudence and negligence" were the cause of the disaster, and a full scale investigation was launched.

So the people around the King rightly judged that delivering the truth was risky.

How about you? Would you have confronted the issue and told the King? In retrospect, you would think that saving 50 lives would be worth the cost of confrontation.

What about your current environment? Are you willing to tell the truth and confront the facts? And if not, why not?