It was the afternoon of the second day and the group was becoming raucous. Laughter and cheers were coming from the open door behind me.

“You want what!” my secretary asked in amazement.

“Rubber ducks.  Yellow ones.  The kind children have in their bathtubs. At least half a dozen.  And, oh yes, more donuts, lots more donuts.”

“Why do they need rubber ducks?”

“To show that they’ve got their ducks lined up, of course.”

A meeting that started badly was rapidly turning into a high-spirited party. It was 1986, and the Government of New South Wales had asked me to help sort out some problems with a project to create a Museum on the site of an old Power House in Sydney.

The project had been underway for five years and was the centrepiece of celebrations of the Bi-Centennial of Captain Cook’s first landing in Australia. However, it had gained a bad press due to the public acrimony between the project manager responsible for the Museum’s content and the architect responsible for the building. With only two years left to the anniversary both said that, judging from the other’s progress, the project would be late.

I asked four people from the Museum team and four from the Construction team to meet together for three days to plan the remainder of the work. The atmosphere was tense. The Museum’s project manager brought all his functional heads plus the curators of all the collections, more than twenty people. Not to be outdone, the architect sent for his managers and supervisor. Soon there were forty people. I couldn’t find a big enough room, so we pushed tables aside and sat in a big circle gazing at each other’s knees, project manager and architect scowling at each other.

I improvised, asking everyone to introduce himself or herself by analogy with an animal or car. “Hi, I’m Helen”, said one of the Museum people, “I’m the curator of the Communications Exhibit and I like to think of myself as a seagull, flying around at a dizzy height, shitting on people down below”. Jim, a member of the Construction team, said he felt like a taxi, because he spent his life moving people from one place to another and back again. This gave everyone a chance to speak, and the light touch made them smile.

I told everyone that they had a lot in common: they all cared deeply about the success of the project and all were, in different ways, highly creative individuals. Together they could almost certainly overcome any problems that they now faced.

With little help from me, they began to list and prioritize issues, and brainstorm solutions.

It was clear that there were key places  – “interfaces”, no less – where coordination between Museum and Construction teams was essential. For example, a Catalina Flying Boat had to be hung from the rafters of the old turbine hall before the roof was completed. Elsewhere, a steam locomotive had to be rolled into place before the walls were built. And there were more complex interfaces: the Museum wanted to be able to run their collection of steam engines and Construction had to install the boilers and air-conditioning to make this possible.

A fundamental difference in philosophy emerged. The architect had designed a bright and spacious building in colors that “echoed the changing light of the Australian day”.  However, the Hong Kong Science Museum, a concrete monolith whose exhibits are spot lit dramatically in darkened rooms, had influenced the Museum’s ideas on display. It had hired the same US designer to oversee its work. The architect saw this as an affront to the Sydney creative community and wholly inappropriate for a prestigious Australian project.

Once the Museum agreed to drop their American consultant, the participants began to explore the idea of exhibits and spaces that harmonized rather than contrasted, and they became more and more excited about the possibilities. People grew in mutual respect and understanding.

The Museum people were mostly female, academic certainly but charming nevertheless, and often single. While the Construction crew were all male, fit and tanned from outdoor work.  They had found a wonderfully Australian solution: all parties would meet bi-weekly for an onsite barbeque… and to review progress.

Impatient to get on with the job, the meeting broke up early; they had produced no central plan, but made new relationships and begun to form close friendships.

The Sydney Power House Museum opened on time.  It attracted 1.7 million visitors in its first year and remains one of the finest museums in the world. 

Yet many such conflicts are not resolved, as demonstrated by the British Millennium Dome.  This project, marred by increasingly public discord, was a showcase like the Power House Museum, except that it cost ten times as much, failed to attract a million visitors and closed after one year.

The success of the Power House Museum is a reminder that we have the capacity to solve many of our problems ourselves, if we can find a way to hear and understand the messages that surround us.

While many companies have employee suggestion boxes, hold staff meetings and conduct quality circles, these are not “sexy” activities.  As individuals, we try to keep things simple, dwell on success, stick to routines and avoid trouble.  We would rather see ourselves as strategists than fire fighters.

However, diverse groups, focused on specific problems, find it easier than the same individuals do acting alone to heed early warnings, contain crises and mitigate consequences.