Columbia Shuttle Discussion

I was on the panel the question I answered was: How can it be said that its no ones fault?

My answer: I know that it is difficult to accept that there is no one person to assume the blame. After all there is a hierarchy at NASA everyone reports to someone. While that’s true and the low level employees are less responsible than the department heads. The responsibility is spread across the entire organization.

More than being the fault of a single person or a couple of people the real problem is the culture at NASA. NASA has about 26,000 employees. From reading the case study what becomes obvious is that these 26,000 people are not communicating. The culture at NASA is not facilitating good communication. In case study we read that engineers report that their concerns are not heard. What’s worse is that in one case an employee wrote a scathing e-mail to his superior but was too afraid to send it. That is the fundamental problem at NASA people don’t feel like speaking up will help.

I was then asked: Who was to blame in the Iraq situation?

My answer: The problem in Iraq is similar from an organizational stand point. Before the invasion no one was really listening to anyone on the ground. In fact there wasn’t really anyone to listen to. According to Robert Bair a CIA officer stationed in Northern Iraq during the late 90’s; US intelligence officers were being pulled out. For that reason the information about Iraq wasn’t accurate.

The real similarity between the NASA’s failures and the war in Iraq is American culture. Americans demand that someone be held responsible for everything. It’s the blame game and it’s a dangerous game. The danger is that you seek someone to hold responsible like the Mission Director or the President and you believe that once you get rid of them the problem is solved. Then the next time something goes wrong you do the same thing. After a while people loose hope that the problem can be solved. If you don’t believe that we live in a culture bent on blaming someone just think about the last time you got stuck waiting in a line at the super market. You looked ahead to see who was holding up the line. Did you ever think that maybe the supermarket was just under staffed, that the employee hadn’t received sufficient training, or that the machine wasn’t reading the coupons because they were printed on the wrong type of paper? Probably not you probably just assumed it was because your chosen scapegoat was stupid.

Insights

1) The problem isn’t a personal one it’s an organizational one. A statistician said that 96% of problems lay with the organization rather then the people.
2) Stephen Covey says agrees that 96% of the problems are organizational but it’s people that create the organization so in the end it’s people.
3) Sometimes pushing for better results will results will have the opposite effect. In the case of NASA there was a lot of pressure for them to keep launching shuttles. Due to the high pressure the launches were less scientifically significant.
4) It can be dangerous to have a large number of people reporting to one person. It creates a “bottle neck effect.”
5) Overlooking the smallest details that may seem insignificant can cause a major disaster. Columbia was destroyed because of small pieces of foam tile. The tiles falling off had been a problem for years but no one figured out how to fix it.

An Organization where I’ve seen similar problems is Alloy Ad Agency. Last semester I took over as President of Alloy Ad Agency. With the exception of me everyone was new to the organization. We had a total of 14 students aside from me. Since everyone was new everyone reported directly to me. This caused the “bottle necking”. After every meeting I would need to talk to about half the staff individually. They were always very nice about it but I could tell that they were really getting sick of waiting around to ask me questions. Many times people would just take off and say that they didn’t need anything after all; when they really did. This caused the inevitable effect of “bottle necking” delay. Our jobs weren’t getting done as quickly as they could have and the staff was getting frustrated.

Fortunately, this semester we have several returning students. We have created a couple of director positions. Each director has 6 or 7 people reporting to them. The directors then report to me and so far the whole thing is running a lot smoother.