Weeks from disaster

Have you ever watched the show Seconds from Disaster? This National Geographic show ran from 2004 to 2007 and analyzed everything that happened in selected disasters. The disasters ranged from natural disasters to oil rig explosions to train and plane crashes.

One that still haunts me was about a plane that crashed because the tail mechanism broke and put the flappers or whatever they are called into a position which forced the plane to nose dive straight down. The cockpit recordings are chilling as the pilot asks the co-pilot two or three times “Are we flying? Are we flying?” as they hurtle to the ocean below.

My job feels a little bit like that right now.

Due to the complete inability of Congress to pass a budget, the contract I work on full time will probably go away May 7. In the meantime, my company has pitched an intensive consulting effort to improve graduation rates at the programs we support. This is supposed to demonstrate how much they need the services we offer. Normally I’d be all for this project since organizational consulting is something I specialize in. But I don't have high hopes for a good outcome for the following reasons:

• The classes are approaching the halfway point--in other words, we can't change the selection process which is a big problem at a lot of programs
• 80% of the chosen programs cannot meet their graduation targets because they have already fallen below those levels. The best we can do is mitigate damage.
• I have no assigned resources to gather and analyze the data I need to create the get well plans
• The whole thing must be completed by May 6, and the programs don't graduate until various dates in June. So we won't even know if we did anything effective.
• I'm out all next week training another class which puts the timeline in jeopardy.

Much like the pilot in that doomed flight, I’ll be doing all the right things for this initiative and I, too, won't be flying.