Mitzi Perdue

Hell With The Lid Off: Do you have a Project Crisis? Things You Can Do To Rescue It

In theory, you can’t put a price on family happiness.

At some time in your work life you have had or will have a Project Crisis; a “You’re about To Be Shut Down” experience. It might be your company or your project, but my advice is, don’t be passive about it! Fight it with every tool you’ve got. And for that matter, if you don’t have the tools, go out and learn them!

My Project Crisis

It was 1980. I was a rice grower in Northern California, and there was legislation pending in Sacramento that would have put me out of business.

It was dire, because a major part of rice culture in California includes burning the rice stubble, and we do it to sanitize the fields in order to prevent “stem rot,” a virus that will completely destroy a crop if the field isn’t  sanitized each year. If the legislature prevented rice growers like me from burning our fields, it was the same as putting us out of business.

Unfortunately, the politicians had some really, really good reasons for wanting to ban agricultural burning. The smoke from burning was really bad that year. Billowing clouds of dark smoke had reduced the visibility on Interstate 5 to close to zero. The poor visibility resulted in a three-car collision and a fatality.

But that wasn’t the end of it. People with asthma were suffering, and hospital admissions for people with breathing difficulties were skyrocketing. On top of all this was the low-level irritation of people having their outdoor furniture getting dirty or having to have their cars washed more often.

It was a situation made in heaven for politicians. Voters were somewhere between irritated and outraged. Banning agricultural burning was a quick way for the politicians to show that they were doing something.

It may have been heaven for the politicians, but it was the opposite for me. I loved farming, I loved my farm, and I didn’t want to be put out of business.

I tried to think of what I could do to change things.

Assassination probably wasn’t the best option, so I began trying to figure out what other options were open to me. The one that occurred to me first was based on the idea that although the media was chock full of continuous stories about the harm stubble burning caused, absolutely no one in the media had told our side of the story.

What if I tried? What if I wrote an article telling why? Bad as the situation was this year, the rice growers had taxed themselves a million dollars to conduct research that would guarantee that the situation would never be repeated. What if I asked the urban public to give us time to put our own house in order?

The problem for me was that I had no background in communications. I hadn’t even taken an English course since high school. How could I write such an article and get it published?

Answer: the local public library. I took out a book called How to Write Magazine Articles that Sell. It directed aspiring authors to do research, write an outline, create topic sentences and it also made suggestions on how to write a query letter. I followed it like paint by numbers.

The directions on doing research proved fabulously useful.

By talking with meteorologists, I learned that the very quiet wind conditions that year were something of a rarity: only once in 17 years. More interestingly, the temperature inversion conditions that occurred that year were even rarer, to be expected only once in 40 years. The odds of the toxic atmospheric conditions that concentrated the smoke were so rare that they were a once in 680 year occurrence!

That meant that I could ask in my article if it made sense to put the rice growers out of business for a circumstance that had only likely to occur once in every 680 years?

I felt I had some powerful arguments, and the article itself was in good shape, but I wanted to dress it up so it would get attention. From Cooperative Extension, I found a fabulously alarming and graphic photograph of rice fields burning, with flames ten feet high and billowing black soot. I titled the article, “Hell with the Lid Off!”

Hell with the Lid Off!

My goal was to have the article appear in the in-flight magazine for the local airline, PSA. It was the one that legislators used to get to Sacramento. One of the problems with getting an article even considered by an editor is previous experience.

I didn’t have any, of course.

To get around this problem, I found the name of the editor of the in-flight magazine. I called him up and asked for advice about how to write my article. John Johns was kind and encouraging and gave me some great tips on how to write an engaging opening sentence.

When I sent in my article, he was already on the lookout for it. He had to like the opening sentence because he had helped me write it. The article got published almost immediately and became the cover story, with my horrible, threatening-looking flaming rice fields and my attention-grabbing title, “Hell with the Lid Off.”

The results were stupendous.

It became required reading for the California legislature. It was picked up as a front page story in California 240 newspapers. For weeks I couldn’t turn on a radio talk show without hearing it being discussed. Information on why the rice growers shouldn’t be put out of business was now part of the public discussion.

However, I wasn’t home free. It wasn’t enough to have people talking about our side. I needed action. I needed to have the legislation withdrawn.

How could I get to the politicians?

I had recently become a member of California Women for Agriculture (CWA). As a member of CWA, we were each supposed to participate in the “Adopt a Legislator” program, which meant making friends with a legislator, including inviting him or her to visit our farms while giving him or her the opportunity to meet dozens and dozens of their constituents. We’d also work for their campaigns, whether Republican or Democrat.

I made it a point to be assigned Assemblyman Greene for my “Adopt a Legislator.” Greene was the man carrying the legislation that would ban rice stubble burning. I got an appointment to see him.

When I first entered his office, he sat behind his desk, arms folded, face scowling. He looked as pleased to see me as he would be pleased to see a cockroach crawling up his arm. Every vibe said that I was someone whom he profoundly wished would go away, and soon.

This was predictable.

After all, he knew I was a rice farmer and my article had done one of the most foul things that could happen to him: I was costing him votes.

Of course I ignored all of this, and instead pranced in, and cheerily informed him that I was his mother.

He did a double take. “My mother?”

“Yes, Assemblyman Greene,” I answered, striking a pose and tossing my long hair just slightly, “I’m from California Women for Agriculture, and the organization has decided that you are my adoptee from the Adopt a Legislator program.”

I flashed my best smile, and watched as he tried to absorb all this. Initially he seemed not to know quite what to make of this, or for that matter, me. I think he was starting to conclude that I’d set down from another planet.

“Since I’ve adopted you,” I continued, my tone of voice pure Doris-Day-sweet-reasonableness, “it’s obvious isn’t it, that by definition, I’m your mother?”

By now he got it, that I was joking, and started laughing, but not just ordinary laughing, but throw your head back guffawing. The tone of the room had changed, and now he was all smiles. We quickly got into a long and engaging conversation about rice and the agricultural burning problem.

Since he was a brilliant guy and a skilled debater, in any serious argument, I was destined to lose. But I had a way around that little issue. Whenever he started to make a point that I couldn’t counter, I’d look at him and while shaking my head and wagging my finger at him, I’d announce, “Now don’t you go get technical on your mother!”

In the end he bought the idea that if he’d give the rice growers a year, we could clean up our own act and this problem wouldn’t occur again. Shortly after that visit, he announced in the press that he was withdrawing the anti-burning legislation.

The steps I used for escaping my “You’re about to shut down” experience and that I recommend to you include:

1. Decide to marshal your resources and fight!
2. Describe the problem, preferably in writing.
3. List all the obstacles.
4. List all the possible solutions to each obstacle.
5. Pick the best solution
6. Break your solution down into small pieces, prioritize them and do them.
7. Along the way, develop the skills and seek out the people who can help you implement the solution.
8. There are no guarantees of success, but in the process of fighting for your goal, it is guaranteed that you’ll gain knowledge, experience, and contacts that will make future successes more likely.