When project failures occur, it’s easy to place blame. But in the process, we often forget a simple fact: “it doesn’t matter, we’re here now.” Here are nine steps for getting past the problem to a solution.

1. Stop drinking coffee. When a major problem occurs, your adrenaline will kick in, if you add caffeine to the mix, you will likely just compound the problem. What you need when a major issue occurs isn’t to think fast, but to think slow. You need to make a good decision despite the tension. (I learned this from a colleague of mine.)

2. Instill trust. People need to feel secure after a failure. They need to know that you don’t plan to fire them, but instead that you just want to solve the problem. If you get angry with someone, you will put them on the defense, and, as a result, make them nervous and difficult to work with. What you need in the moment of failure is everyone, and especially those who failed–they know more than anyone else about the problem. If you make people feel trusted and that you’re trustworthy, your chances of success are much higher.

3. Provide confidence. People need confidence when things get rough. They need someone who they know they can trust. You need to trust them; and they need to trust you. If you can instill belief, you will get through the problem.

4. Bring up your past failures. When you’re presented with a major failure, it doesn’t seem like a good time for a story, but it’s actually the best time. Chance has it that you have failed before (well, if you’re human), and now is the time to tell that story. By doing so, you will remind yourself and others that the problems you’re facing can be overcome, just like past ones were. This will also bring a human side to you as the leader, which will make people feel comfortable.

6. Be 100% project manager. When a major problem occurs, you need to remove as much emotion from the equation as possible. You want to gather as much data as you can, within your time constraints, and then run the data through an unbiased system. You are likely incapable of being unbiased in the moment of chaos, thus you need a system to help you remove the emotional tension. Can math get you to a solution? If so, use math. I usually employ a version of the critical path method when chaos ensues. It helps me prioritize and be unbiased.

7. Delegate. Once you know the critical path tasks, delegate them, give people ownership and authority to make decisions, and then make it happen. Don’t stop until all the critical path issues are handled.

8. Rotate the team. Critical path tasks don’t necessarily mean all hands on deck, because the problem may take so long that you need to send some people home to sleep while others work, and then rotate your schedules. A sleepy crew is likely to make more mistakes, and you don’t want to add injury to insult. Also, rested people are more effective.

9. Leave yourself off the task list. In the process of handling the problem you’re dealing with, you also want to be sure not to assign too many things to yourself. It’s better to add too much to someone else’s task list because you’re going to be answering questions until all the problems are overcome, and thus will be more busy than you anticipate.

The types of problems leaders deal with are bad enough on their own; we don’t need to make them worse by reacting poorly. What we need is discernment in difficult circumstances and the stamina to overcome them.

What are your tips for overcoming major project failures?

One of the most difficult things for a strong-willed person to do is to admit that they’re wrong.

If you can admit that you’re wrong, you will gain the respect of others, be able to move quicker through projects, and continue to grow personally. If you can’t, your mistakes will catch up to you.

Small failures are part of innovation. And it may sound cheesy to say, but learning from your small failures is part of innovating yourself.

Ask yourself today: What’s failing? It’s not negative to go to work with that thought in your mind, it’s actually positive. If you can approach things that way today, chance has it that you’re going to fix a relationship along the way to improving a project.

What’s failing? How can you admit defeat, admit your wrong, and then improve your life and the lives of others as a result?

(Many of the ideas in this post stem from Seth Godin’s The Dip and Paul Arden’s Whatever You Think, Think the Opposite.)

I’m a project manager who can’t stand pre-built project management solutions. Churches use them, businesses use them, but frankly, they’re just not as helpful as we act like they are.

I used Microsoft Project. I’ve seen and used cloud based project management solutions—many of the ones available on the market. All the options frustrate me and waste my time. They each taught me something about my process and I’m certainly a better project manager for it, but they each led me to force projects into molds and ultimately inhibited workflow. Here are three reasons why you should create your own project management solution(s).

1. Smart people don’t need every task written out for them.

Writing out milestones and dependent tasks is essential for every project, but writing out every task isn’t. Many project management technology solutions require that every task be written out. (And even if they don’t require it, they make you feel like you should.) I have found myself spending hours writing out tasks when I could be accomplishing things. If you work with smart people, why do you need to write out every task? I work with smart people, so why would I force people into my style of a task list? Having one task list master also makes others feel small and bossed around. I want to work with others because of who they are, not force them to think like me. In addition, ridiculously detailed lists created by “supervisors” are for people who want to check boxes. And people who check boxes will never lead in a meaningful way.

2. To successfully innovate, efficiency must be gained.

The easiest way to save money is to spend less. Bringing in sales is far more difficult than not spending money. For these reasons, the easy solution, which seems cheap, is to adopt someone else’s pre-built system. But doing so will actually cost you more money. It will constrain you. Innovating is already difficult. If you impose someone else’s constraints and methods on your work, you will just make it more complicated. You need efficiency. Create it by making systems for your new process. Don’t lose efficiency by forcing your new process into a machine made for something else or created with variables you don’t need.

3. One-size-fits-all systems can’t accommodate substantial change.

When you adopt a technology solution for project management from someone else, you’re imposing a framework that can’t easily adapt. When you use someone else’s system, you don’t know how it was built, so how can you change it? Things will change and the system must change with you. If your projects are creative, they probably have some flexibility to them, which means you will need to prepare for the inevitable change. You also need to prepare for the human element: changing things because they’re not working. Adaptability is easy when the entire system’s creator is the user(s).

I wish project management was as easy as downloading an app, but it’s not. Systems must be built to accommodate us and our projects—sometimes per unique thing and almost always per unique team. This doesn’t mean you can’t reuse frameworks or have a process—you definitely should do both—but it does mean that you should be cautious when adopting someone else’s. They’re not you. Be unique. Make your own system.

What project management system do you use? Did you build or buy?

Pithy leadership statements can be annoying, but when forced to make a difficult decision quickly, they can be sage wisdom. This is especially the case when it comes to fiscal decisions. Perhaps this is why much of the biblical proverbs are about money. Here are four modern fiscal proverbs and why they will help you be a better leader.

1. Numbers don’t lie.

Numbers don’t lie when it comes to our bank accounts, yet they’re often ignored when it comes to employee performance. If you can’t measure it, and point to your accomplishment, then why do it? If people aren’t held accountable by data, our coaching is really based on feelings and intuition, not performance. After prayer and relationship building, start with the numbers. If you don’t have the numbers, create an unbiased system. Then, make decisions using it.

2. Intangibles are intangible.

When faced with ugly financial statements, we’ve all heard the appeal to intangibles, but intangibles are just that, intangible—they don’t pay the bills. The garbage collector won’t get the job done on the basis of purely good intentions. The collector can have all the great intentions in the world and the trash can still be sitting in front of my house. Likewise, the collectors won’t keep picking up my trash on the basis of my good intentions—they need to be paid. Why do we let intangibles guide businesses when intangibles will fail us? The numbers should back your intentions: does a pro forma and past financials prove it? If not, then you probably shouldn’t do it.

3. The early bird gets the worm.

The company first to the market is often the winner. And in business, the difference between second and first can be astounding—like the difference between 90% market share and 10%. After you have removed the intangibles from the equation, and are prepared to coach by the numbers, go after a market that no one has. If you’re first, you could very well get the worm.

4. Being first now doesn’t mean staying there.

If you want a business to stay alive, you can never call it “good enough”—you have to keep moving forward. If you’ve watched the stock market long enough, you know that major players can quite easily cease to matter. It’s extremely difficult for the company with 90% market share to lose, but it’s possible. It usually happens when the market the company dominates stops being as interesting to consumers as it was previously or when the market isn’t large enough to keep up with the company’s necessary growth. Don’t assume that being at the top means staying there. Never cease to find new places to make a profit.

Numbers don’t lie. Intangibles are intangible. The early bird gets the worm. Being first doesn’t mean staying there. Don’t just listen to your gut; back it with data or refute it with numbers. Stay friends with the numbers’ guru. Create the system that will enable you to lead by the numbers. Be a better leader by knowing the truth—don’t guess. Live by the numbers.

What fiscal proverb are you led by? How does it help you make good decisions?

If gross miscalculations of a person’s value could occur on a baseball field, before a live audience of thirty thousand, and a television audience of millions more, what did that say about the measurement of performance in other lines of work? If professional baseball players could be over- or under-valued, who couldn’t? Bad as they may have been, the statistics used to evaluate baseball players were probably far more accurate than anything used to measure the value of people who didn’t play baseball for a living.

—Michael Lewis, Moneyball, pg. 72, in reference to what Bill James’ Baseball Abstracts revealed.

Think for a moment how often you have heard people say, “Because I know it will work,” or “He just seems to work harder than his colleagues,” or “She puts in more hours and thus is more valuable,” or even “I was told this by x person and therefore y must be the case.”

Like baseball, business is full of mystery and assumptions. Because we feel or think something doesn’t make it true. Because it happened that way in the past doesn’t mean it will happen that way in the future. Because a few customers have that perception doesn’t mean the viewpoint is accurate.

Most people who are misplaced in a job are misplaced either because they were the wrong hire to begin with, or because no one took the time to train them properly. (Note the “most” qualifier—there are certainly exceptions.) But how can we properly train someone if we don’t measure their performance accurately, with statistics that matter and contribute to the bottom line?

These questions can be taken one step further beyond people. If business success is intrinsically connected to profitability, cash flow, and net assets, why do businesses spend so much time talking about sales figures? Is it sales figures that really matter, or if we “win overall”? If it’s really about how much cash you need versus how much you have, then why is the focus on sales figures that are always manipulated by cost (which is a variable)? Shouldn’t the focus be the overall “money plan” that helps achieve the bottom lines that matter for sustainability and goal achievement? (I add “goal achievement” because I think businesses should be geared around some sort of “world change value”; money is only a means to an end.)

If the point of every position in a company is to contribute to the bottom line—both in terms of goals and cash—then employees should be measured that way. If an employee can make a customer happy, that’s a direct link to social capital—which itself should be measured—and connected back to that customer’s future purchases. If an employee ships a product early, that should be a credit to their value—and thus something they could leverage in a review—in the amount that they either saved on its cost or in the amount they contributed to the next product.

But what is Lewis really getting at? Businesses often don’t know the value of these things because they’re not tracked. And when they are, like hitting averages or errors, they’re skewed by the biased judgments used to create the stat category.

In business, performance stats are skewed because the measurements for business success and value are also often skewed. When business deals are examined, it’s often guesswork and it shouldn’t be. Measurable and testable risk management must be a core part of everything in business. For example, when divisions are examined, the focus is often individual products, when it should be the entire division’s contribution to the bottom lines, as well as the value contribution to the business as a whole. This should also be the case for divisions geared around service.

Economic result is what really matters: What does this do overall? I come to believe more everyday that this is the case for everything.

If there is more fundamental knowledge to be found in baseball, as the Oakland A’s proved, is there still more fundamental knowledge to be found in business? Is the greatest way to play the game still yet to be discovered? What are your thoughts?

The word “impossible” keeps many people from doing what they’re capable of. Along with many other words, “impossible” should be banned from your vocabulary.

Now, there are certainly things in life that are impossible, but you won’t know what they are until you try them and then try again. A lack of precedence doesn’t necessitate a reality of constraints. Biblical interpretation actually serves as a good example for explaining this point.

The fallacious statements of “It doesn’t happen elsewhere in the biblical text and thus can’t happen here” or “It never happens before this passage and thus cannot be the conclusion” are common mistakes in academic biblical interpretation. Such statements are equal in their problematic nature to “We can’t do that because no one has done it before.” (We know the history of innovation contradicts such statements.) In the Bible, these statements are ridiculous because they rule out God’s work and because they assume that the written record is all that happened in biblical times. Likewise, when we assume that a project (or project schedule) is impossible, we’re ruling out the possibility of God revealing something new or doing something impossible. We’re also keeping ourselves from doing something innovative or amazing–our psyche stands in our way.

Similarly, a friend of mine recently told me about a software developer who regularly had his research rejected. It came back to him with the stamp of “impossible.” Today, the software developer has created the program deemed “impossible” by his academic peers and is likely going to make millions from doing so. Why? He rejected what other people considered impossible and made it happen.

Michael Jordan was deemed too short to make the varsity basketball team in his sophomore year. Jordan ignored this “not good enough yet” status and went on to invent shots and accomplish many firsts in the NBA. As we know, he is arguably the best basketball player who has ever lived. What if he had lived with his status as “b-team”?

Impossible not only hurts projects–it hurts you. It’s a dangerous word. It can end the usefulness of lives if believed and deem us to mediocrity. It can also keep us from seeing God at work, which is a far greater price to pay than lost productivity.

When Edison began working on the lightbulb, the lightbulb was essentially useless. Without power in homes, it didn’t matter. So Edison focused on the system to bring light to homes. Everyone around Edison must have thought he was insane. “You really plan to run cables to every home?” He probably responded, “Yep.” I’m sure they shrugged their shoulders and walked away. (Impossible wasn’t in Edison’s vocabulary.) What if he had believed them? It’s possible that I wouldn’t be writing this on a laptop plugged into the wall.

What words shouldn’t be in your vocabulary?

What is it like to be someone else’s writing voice? Fiction authors deal with this question. Editors contemplate this problem. Ghost writers live this dilemma.

Although I’m against the idea of ghost writing, and thus have never ghost written, I imagine that it teaches you a great deal about writing. When you have to be someone else’s voice, you learn to be more authentic to your own voice. You also learn about the art of rewriting.

I recently made one exception to my ghost writing rule—but it’s because the person I made the exception for can’t write (literally). I made the exception for my dog Milton.

Milton the dog recently started a birthday for a cause. If you like his writing voice, donate—he will appreciate you helping people living in extreme poverty.

Have you ever written in the voice of your pet? What did it teach you?

If your ideas aren’t on paper, they don’t exist. If the project doesn’t ship, it doesn’t exist.

This simple mantra, which I likely learned from the software industry, should make us think twice about the rewrite and that one last proofread. It should also make us consider how long we’re willing to spend with the white rabbit named Research.

Many academics spend lifetimes on research and most contribute rather insignificant work in the larger economic spectrum of the world. The scariest part? Most of the work of academics never reaches the world—it stays in some sort of note format locked away in a filing system. And if it ships to people, it ships to the academic’s colleagues who also don’t ship very often. This is one of the many highly wasteful endeavors that drives the university system. At the heart of this problem is fear. The question, “What will my colleagues think?” controls the lives of many people in the world. We should call this what it is: it’s sad and it’s an excuse. (That last thought is highly influenced by Seth Godin and Steven Pressfield.)

Indeed, editing is translating and writing is rewriting, but economics are always at work. When I think about an editor or writer’s time, I’m not just concerned with what is or is not getting done; I’m considering the long-term effects of the current focus. Time is the one asset we can never get back. We can always make more money, but we can never get more time. If we spend energy on x today, will y be more important tomorrow? Have we spent the adequate energy thinking about y today? Will x or y have longer economic viability?

Perhaps the single greatest mistake an editor or writer can make is choosing the wrong project. How you spend your time articulates your values.

The creative is, by nature, alternating between ideas and thoughts: Input comes from all directions. But the creative, even a group of creatives, will eventually run out of time. Time, whether we like it or not, will dictate reality. Saying “no,” then, becomes our most important decision. Neither x or y matters if they don’t reach the world. (And working on both simultaneously can keep both from reaching the world.)

Putting ideas on paper is always the first step, but economics should always dictate which ideas get executed. Shipping something to customers makes it exist in the real world. Until that happens, it’s all just a game we play.

What are you going to ship this week?

It was cold outside. I could see my breath. The section lead of the drum line didn’t show up. I was a freshman—third snare drum. I realized, “I’m going to have to lead this.”

I rallied the line and we went onto the field. My hands were shaking—part nerves and part cold. My drum roll at the beginning of the Star Spangled Banner was inconsistent. It was embarrassing. (Who messes up the national anthem?) We moved on. We began the pep band songs. I was off rhythm for two entire measures; it took four more measures to get the drum line back in sync.

We left the field. My band instructor grabbed my snare harness near my shoulders. He looked me in the eyes and yelled over the noise of the crowd, “Barry, what happened?” I replied, “My hands were cold. And I just learned the cadence last week.” He yelled, “You hear that?” He pointed towards the crowd. “They don’t care. They don’t care. They don’t care that your hands were cold. They don’t care that you just learned the cadence. They don’t care.”

That moment stuck with me. That was the day I learned that the world doesn’t want to hear excuses.

Leading is about much more than overcoming adversity. Half the battle isn’t showing up. The entire battle is fighting like nothing ever went wrong. The crowd didn’t know I was new; they just knew I was a poor percussionist who had no right to lead a drum line. I couldn’t take the cold or the pressure—at least that day. (I learned by the next field show that I had to be able to play the songs from muscle memory. When your muscles remember, they don’t care how you feel.)

Excuses don’t win battles and they certainly don’t win wars. There are times that leaders have to care more than everyone else combined. You have to care more for the success of the unit—of everyone involved (including the team, the crowd, and the customer)—than they even care for themselves.

How do you show you care? How do you do more than show up?

Innovation without excellent execution will fail. And execution without innovation is a waste of time.

What makes a team different? What makes them unique?

I think the combination of five things can set any team apart:

1. The Henry Gantt principle: Execute well and follow through
2. The William Zinsser principle: Use art, story, risk and science to communicate
3. The Jacqueline Novogratz principle: Solutions is the answer in an interconnected world
4. The Seth Godin principle: Be a rebar company that creates tribes around linchpin products and people
5. The Donald Clifton principle: Play to strengths, working as a unit

What type of leader are you? Where will you lead?

What principle would you add to the list?