Dogfighting Hot Air Balloons

 

If I were to ask you which craft you would prefer in a dogfight, a Grumman F-14D Tomcat, or a hot air balloon, which would you take?

Of course, the obvious selection would be the Tomcat, the U.S. Navy’s go-to all-weather air superiority fighter from 1974 to 2006. It had a top speed of Mach 2.34, and could carry a deadly array of bombs, missiles, and aerial cannon rounds. Hot air balloons, conversely, are not known for carrying any ordnance whatsoever, and have a top speed of 245 miles per hour (and that was for a balloon named the Pacific Flyer, specifically configured to travel in oceanic jet streams). The balloons at the Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta (held each October) will not even launch if the winds are above 15 mph. The choice is a no-brainer, right?

Well, just a moment. There are a couple of disruptive influences that might be taken into consideration.

The Tomcat weighs 61,000 pounds fully loaded.[i] In order for it to get airborne off of a carrier, it has to be catapulted to 140 knots, which requires an enormous amount of energy. Even if it’s on a runway, it’s going to need at least a mile to take off, and that’s with afterburners. A hot air balloon only requires the space needed to unfold the balloon’s envelope, fan ambient air into it, and begin to heat it with its propane burners. All of this can be done in the space used for a small business’ parking lot. So, if the start conditions include that each vehicle is in an uneven field (where hot air balloons typically take off and land), then the odds have been altered, no? The Tomcat could not even get airborne, much less dogfight, though, I suppose, it could use its aerial cannon, should the hot air balloon be positioned directly in front of it. Its missiles would be useless, since they are actually dropped off of the Tomcat’s hard points, rather than shoot directly ahead, as from a gun.

And how would our airborne hot air balloon disable a Tomcat, exactly? Well, I suppose they could carry an anvil aloft, and simply drop it on the grounded interceptor, Coyote and Roadrunner – style. In most instances it would probably not inflict enough damage to make the Grumman no longer airworthy, but our balloonists could get lucky. After all, hot air balloons delivered the coup de gras against the belligerent alien invaders in the television series V.

Meanwhile, Back In The Project Management World…

When we’re talking about disruptive influences (ProjectManagement.com’s theme for October), we have to take into account the question (as I posited last week), disruptive to whom? Most organizations carry with them, through the communication mechanisms of corporate culture, the canned strategies that they expect their in-the-combat-zone PMs to execute, given the presented circumstances. These canned strategies are perceived to be rather robust in most, if not all, analogous Project Management scenarios, having been tried and found successful in previous projects. But what if the project at hand isn’t really all that analogous to the one where the canned strategy worked? What happens when the new project is sufficiently different that the canned strategy is almost guaranteed to fail?

In these instances it’s the experience of the executives that, ironically, becomes the disruptive influence. By insisting that the organizations’ PMs make their decisions in a highly formulaic manner, and punishing dramatic departures from this norm, they not only set the proverbial table for eventual project failure, they hamstring the very PMs who are in a position to not only save the project at-hand, but to introduce a new, novel approach to resolving this project’s destabilizing issues. These are the very innovations that allow the macro organization to adapt and grow, and the reflexive crushing of them for being non-compliant with the organization’s norms is an automatic, if not immediate, death knell.

But let’s assume that you just know the “right” technical approach to your organization’s projects’ difficulties, and have mandated it to your team. I have one quick question: do you have enough runway space to take off in your F-14? ‘Cuz, if you don’t, you might want to be wary of dogfighting hot air balloons.

[i] Wikipedia contributors. (2018, September 19). Grumman F-14 Tomcat. In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 02:28, October 7, 2018, from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Grumman_F-14_Tomcat&oldid=860238298