Believe it or not, there are quite a few summer activities that allow you to distill useful heuristics for your project management toolkit. And one of these is sailing. This year me and my better half spent a week sailing with a group of dear friends. As we have been sailing for over ten years now, we as a team have had ample opportunity to test and sort out what works and what doesn’t. The fact that I am here to write these lines means that what works did prevail. This is why I thought the time was ripe to recapitulate our lessons learned. A sailing journey has a clearly defined goal: “A team has to get from A to B within exactly one week, keeping the vessel in one piece”. In this sense, a sailing journey is a particular type of project. (There is actually one more goal, but we will get to it later).

One of the particularities of sailing is that it keeps you constantly focused on what you are doing: reality evolves and changes literally with every blow of the wind, and you must adjust immediately. Thus, you and your team are constantly getting feedback on your actions from all possible directions – never solicited and sometimes quite literally right in your face. This allows for quick iterations and speeds up your learning process. And what a process that was! Especially our communication techniques enjoyed a long and adventurous journey that started one day with “Pull on that rope… but not THAT ONE, for Christ's sake!” (hiding the face in utter shame). Taking this level as a baseline one can safely say that the precision and the quality of communication have improved the most and thus helped to get the most leverage. We have tried to build upon the well-established sailor jargon and integrate our heuristics into it.

First, we have adopted “echoing”: whenever there is an order from the captain, it has proved to be very useful to reply to the order by simply repeating the words, such as follows:

“Drop the anchor. 40 meters.”  

“Anchor for 40 meters”.

Though simple at a first (and at a second) glance, this unassuming habit has helped pre-empt quite a few potential confusions and prevent the crew and the ship from cumbersome situations, when a slip of the tongue or left-right confusion would have had dramatic consequences.

If this sounds like overcommunicating – well, it probably is. Altogether, overcommunicating has indeed been our go-to strategy. Say, we are going to turn through the wind. The captain’s commando would be “Ready about?” where the crew would answer “Ready” – assuming, it is. And then, without further ado, we would proceed with the maneuver. If there is an issue, or something doesn’t go exactly as planned, we have opted for answering “Not ready” and repeating it several times while getting ready. At times this may sound like a broken record, but it beats every record in its effectiveness to prevent the ship from embarking on a maneuver before the crew is ready (pun intended).

And finally, the most crucial principle of all is “solve first, analyze later” – especially if something does not go according to the plan. What can possibly go wrong, you’d ask? To sum it up – pretty much anything and everything. It can be as mundane as realizing that you have run out of ice cubes. And it can be as severe as an unforeseen yet incredibly strong wind that loosens the anchor in your sleep so that the whole crew is gathered on the deck for an impromptu party in the middle of the night to find a solution (and the godforsaken ice cubes are still missing!). Whatever the issue is, our strategy is to solve it as quickly as possible. Hence, the only relevant question is “What is the plan, and who is doing what now?”. If we must park our boat in a wild bay between two yachts a scratch of which would cost more than the kidneys of all the crew members combined, this would be: “Who is throwing the anchor, who is jumping into the water with the ropes, who is holding fenders to prevent damage, who is praying to the weather gods and who is fetching a stiff drink for the afterward in the meanwhile?”

When the issue is resolved and the time pressure is out, we might embark on an analytical exercise to understand how we end up in a particular situation: “Right, so what should we do differently next time in order not to spend the whole week in life jackets and chained to the mast?”

Separating these two steps helps us to kill two birds with one stone. On the one hand, it sharpens the focus, speeds up the process of resolving the issue, and eliminates the tension. By the time we decide to reflect on the situation and deduce lessons learned, emotions are out of the picture, and everyone can think clearly and, most importantly, share a laugh – for in retrospect and once the problem is solved, a lot of things are quite hilarious. And this is pivotal for the long-term success of our expeditions, for besides our goal “to come safely from A to B in a timely manner”, we all are committed to a shared goal of spending a jolly good time together. And by Jove, we do! So here’s to your summer vacation, and may the weather gods be smiling upon you!