We had one thousand children and one hundred counselors on a cruise ship bound to Alaska. The project was the Young Presidents Organization family cruise, and I was contracted to help coordinate the youth activities under difficult constraints—space, time, and resources being the greatest of these.

To provide our clients with a memorable experience, we built a system that was capable of manipulating thousands of variables (staff, space, time, budget) into a solution that would allow each child maximum exposure to his or her favorite activity.

This solution was so complex that it confused the parents, children, and our staff alike. Extreme dissatisfaction emanated only three hours into our 168-hour contract. The project lead looked to me to uncover the source of our problem, as well as provide and implement the appropriate solution.

By hour twelve we had regrouped and redrawn our approach with a new understanding. Our objective was to ensure that each child went to bed with a smile; it was not to provide a custom adventure. Children were less worried about what they were doing than who they were with—fun, motivated counselors in an environment that included friends. We achieved tremendous success, resulting in accolades not only for our service delivery, but also for our flexibility and quick turnaround.

I learned that it is important to fully understand the client and her or his end objectives. Additionally, it is important to deliver a solution that is complex enough to meet those needs—but no more. We had spent too much time engineering the solution, and not enough understanding the problem. What seemed like a new and innovative approach was just a complicated, difficult, and time-consuming method of delivering fun.

Analysis

Irfhan’s essay is a good story about admitting a mistake and being willing to throw out lots of hard work and start over at a moment’s notice. Irfhan fails to untangle the Gordian knot of his situation, but rather than admitting defeat, cuts through the problem with a simple approach. This shows creativity on his part as well as a lack of stubbornness. The result is that even though his initial plan did not work as he had hoped, he was able to save the day and prevent the cruise from being a total disaster.

The story is well-paced, delivering its central message within a structured framework: situation, complication, solution, takeaways. While you should feel free to experiment with the form your essay takes, with a limited word count you may not want to stray too far from this basic structure. One caveat: ending on a negative note can leave the reader with the impression that the failure was total and irreparable. In Irfhan’s experience, this was not the case, and the final paragraph does illustrate the lessons learned. Nonetheless, unless you have a good reason not to do so, it is generally best to conclude with a positive accent.

From 65 Successful Harvard Business School Application Essays edited by the Staff of the Harvard Crimson. Copyright (c) 2009 by the authors and reprinted by permission of St. Martin's Publishing Group