Nasa Columbia and Challenger Disasters: When Management Pulls Rank and There Is a Big Disconnect Between the Manager s View and the Engineer s View

Nasa Columbia and Challenger Disasters: When Management Pulls Rank and There Is a Big Disconnect Between the Manager's View and the Engineer's View

I have been a big fan of NASA since I was in grade school. When I was in college studying physics, I used to dream about working at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California. It is one of my big "side interests" to keep up with what the latest cool things that they are doing. Most people would probably agree that NASA has some deep financial pockets and extremely smart, hard-working people. So, although it's tragic, it is interesting to see how the organizational culture or shortcomings contributed to the two space shuttle disasters. My heart goes out to the family and friends of the incredible people who perished we really lost some good ones.

This brief summary of what happened at NASA shows the importance of suggestion 5 Not worrying about getting fired gives you incredible power, and suggestion 6 Never take no from someone who does not have the power to say yes. It also shows how a high-profile, good intentioned, and financially backed organization can have problems that seem unlikely or that you might think can only occur in smaller organizations. I'd like to point out that I am not blaming any specific person or group for the tragedies. This example is given here to see if there are some parallels with what happened at NASA and what might be happening in your company.

Background

Allow me to clarify what I am talking about: In 1986, the space shuttle Challenger exploded about 60 seconds after take-off due to a failure of the O-ring seal. In 2003, the space shuttle Columbia broke up during re-entry just 16 minutes before landing because of tile damage to the left wing caused by a stray piece of foam during take-off.

If you would like more details on these accidents, check out http://library.sau.edu/bestinfo/Hot/space.htm.

What Can Be Learned

Because of large public attention to these accidents, a lot of investigations were done to make sure that these incidents never happen again. In both cases, an engineer somewhere in the organization raised a red flag about the possibilities of a disaster but was somehow ignored. With Challenger, the engineer sent several memos, but upper-management pulled rank and decided to launch despite the warnings. With Columbia, an engineer who was monitoring the erratic behavior of the computer sensors on the left wing sent e-mails while the shuttle was still in orbit. Once again, management ignored the e-mails and made the decision to return the space shuttle to earth.

A Look at the Organization

NASA can be better understood by examining the culture that arises from the inevitable and (sometimes) healthy tension among scientists, managers, and engineers.

In his book, What Do You Care What Other People Think?, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard P. Feynman writes that while he was on the committee to investigate the Challenger explosion, he came up with the following theory of why every time he talked to high-level managers at NASA, they said they "didn't know anything about the problems below them:"

Because of the exaggeration at the top being inconsistent with the reality at the bottom, communication got slowed up and ultimately jammed. That's how it's possible that the higher-ups didn't know. Or the other possibility is that the higher-ups did know, and they just "said" they didn't know.

I think it's safe to assume that the high-level managers are telling the truth. I'd like to think that people rise to higher positions because of their ability to maintain their integrity and honesty in the toughest positions. Furthermore, we are talking about NASA. If you have seen the movie Apollo 11 or The Right Stuff, you know that NASA must have one of the toughest weed-out programs in existence.

Feynman's observation can be seen at many corporations.

Conclusion of Shuttle Investigations

Joseph Lorenzo Hall of the astronomy department at the University of California at Berkeley says it best:

There is a strong need for leadership in NASA that is favorable to and capable of organizational change. The NASA leadership has shown a self-interested reluctance in the past to advocate and execute extensive organizational overhaul. Until NASA itself sees that its best interests lie in organizational-level change, the "echoes of Challenger'' will continue to reverberate.

I also like what Dr. Diane Vaughan of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board said in April 2003:

What we find out from a comparison between Columbia and Challenger is that NASA as an organization did not learn from its previous mistakes, and it did not properly address all of the factors that the presidential commission [in 1986] identified.

I have seen managers at Microsoft pull rank or just plain ignore an engineer's view of a problem, but the difference between us and NASA is that Microsoft does not have upper managers answering questions with "I never heard of that" or "I don't know." If managers do give that answer, you will have the answer from another source shortly.

An important point here is that if you are 100 percent sure that the information you have is vital to the organization you work for, do not hold back even if it means you might lose your job. (Remember Suggestion #5.) Also, if you are in a position to influence culture, keep the NASA lessons in mind.