Monongahela

In the early history of ForeRunner, our administrative assistant brought up the idea of naming our conference rooms. I suggested that we name them after historical events. Nobody said no, so I gave them the names of different battles. No one ever asked why, simply writing it off to one of my many eccentricities. The battles chosen were never asked about either. As it happens, they are all from US history, but not the most well known. It may well be that today ForeRunner employees think the names simply obscure places on the map.

As it happens, they are all battles. To me they represent management lessons. They are metaphors for ideas and situations that I believed, at the time some 6-7 years ago, were important for me to remember. Many times as I have sat in those conference rooms, or walked by them, I have meditated on the lesson that I saw exemplified by the name on that room.

Over the years, things change. My perceptions of the way people work together and a company is managed have grown more nuanced. If you think on things over time, your thinking on that subject becomes more complex as well. A case in point is our smallest conference room. Its name is Monongahela, quite a mouthful unless you are from Pittsburgh.

The Battle of Monongahela took place in July of the year 1755 near the banks of that difficult to pronounce river. A large force of British and Colonial soldiers were marching from the Colony of Maryland to evict the French from what we now call Pittsburgh. Moving through the wilderness of the Pennsylvania forest, they had spent most of their march building a road to get them where they wanted to go. The British column had just crossed the river when they ran into a combined force of French and Indians. Though the British outnumbered the French and Indians by at least two to one, the British were routed and suffered what could only be described as a massacre.

Moving along a narrow road through the forest, the British were ambushed by their enemy firing from behind trees and rocks. British officers responded by attempting to form their men into line where they could fire in unison per the approved drills they had been taught. The officers out in the open were of course prime targets for those shooting at them from behind trees and were soon casualties. Firing lines of British soldiers waited for their dead officers and sergeants to issue orders to load their weapons. The choking clouds of dark grey smoke from the guns firing hid everything. Groups of Indian warriors crept up behind them with tomahawks intent on taking scalps. The heat and humidity of a Pennsylvania forest in July completed the hell for those British soldiers in their bright - red - woolen uniform coats.

I must admit that the situation always reminded me of a project. Moving from the ordered world of an engineering or design office, I would go to the job site. The behaviors and reasoning that served me well in an engineering office often failed completely in the very different environment of actually building what had been designed on paper. Monongahela was always a very personal warning to me about the dangers of being an "engineer" in the field or on a startup. I must be careful to take off my bright red woolen uniform and replace it with the buckskins of the French and Indians when I went on site.

Having learned to wear buckskins and face paint while on site over the years, I was often in a position to watch engineering companies on projects. Well versed in the parade ground drill of providing engineering packages, they ran afoul of the realities of client organizational politics or construction contractor/client alliances. Just as the lined up red coated soldiers of General Braddock were tomahawked from behind and scalped at Monongahela, so too were the engineers and designers of engineering companies ambushed by the non-technical realities of projects.

That is as far as my thinking went then. Heeding the implied lesson of Monongahela, we created an organization that was able to move from the engineering office to the field, and back again. We stressed a flat flexible organization that could move among the trees and rocks of our project fields as the French and Indians at Monongahela did. We focused on people that could operate in the smoke of an ongoing project. No parade ground drill for us. We were going to wear buckskin, not bright red woolen uniforms.

But we grew and our clients changed. Loose groups of savvy individuals work well until the project becomes more complex with higher standards of performance required. The French and Indians handled the ambush well, but only the British could build a road through the wilderness from Maryland to Pittsburgh in 1755. Being flexible was no longer enough. We needed to be able to handle the parade ground drill, and all that it implies, as well as the flexibility to deal with the unexpected.

It is useful to look at the British after Monongahela. They did win the war. After all, we speak English, not French. The British learned painful lessons there, but they learned how to maintain their organization and win in the forests of America. They didn't abandon their well drilled infantry in the bright red uniforms, but instead learned how to utilize tactical innovations like skirmish lines. They added elite forces like Rogers Rangers to scout and keep the French off balance. It was the British who captured Montreal on the Plain of Abraham to end the war, the French and Indians never came near New York or Boston.

So that is why we have a Monongahela Conference Room. It is a metaphor for where ForeRunner came from, and where it is going. We still wear buckskin. If you want to see bright red woolen uniforms, go to Buckingham Palace (or Jacobs or CH2MHill or Washington Group). But we can do the parade drill of engineering packages as well as anyone.