Topic 1: break down inter-center rivalry. NASA was established in 1958 as a collection of 10 loosely federated fiefdoms and it has never broken out of that paradigm. If you ask a typical NASA employee who they work for, the response will be their center, not the agency. Can’t blame them; they are hired through a center, promotions and career advancements come through their center, the very culture of the organization enforces loyalty to a center. Every center has its local politicians and politics centered on local interests, every center has its own history and area of expertise, and every employee is inculcated with the beliefs and norms. Centers sometimes seem united only in their disdain for NASA Headquarters. Not that anybody openly works to sabotage direction from Headquarters, they just bend the direction toward what their individual project and center would like to do. Competition for scarce resources drives rivalries between centers. In addition, there is a huge ‘not invented here’ problem everywhere. Not just with any idea from an organization outside NASA but also with any idea from another center. It makes the workforce ready to find fault, slow to see the advantages of any new thing not born from within their own organization. Secretive, competitive, and ultimately destructive of the larger purpose, these behaviors have been worse in the past but are still present. My solution: make people move. Many organizations both government and industry do this as a matter of course. Move not just the senior leaders, but the journeyman workers. Take the center name off the badges. Develop a ‘Bureau of Personnel” to centralize promotions, bonuses, and career advancement. No small tasks these.
Topic 2: mind numbing bureaucracy. The organization has evolved, as all bureaucracies do, to the point where too many people can say ‘no’ to any action. In the early days of NASA, this was not so. It is good to have checks and balances and oversight, but the pendulum has swung too far in the direction of (electronic) paperwork, diffuse responsibility, and inaction. The system now has watchers watching watchers watching doers – and always with criticism for the doer. Corrective action will take serious attention from any leader. Achieving the proper balance may well be impossible and the best we can hope for is to swing decision making back to the lowest level possible. Gibbs Rule #13 applies here: Never involve the Lawyers.
Topic 3: the cultural imperative to make everything perfect. This is a very sensitive topic for me. I have personal been involved with decisions that were made with too little information, riding roughshod over the experts in the field. But these days, after Columbia, the agency is paralyzed by requiring too much: too much data, too many tests, too much analysis. In the Apollo days, this was not so. We – and I am a guilty party in this – have trained the work force to make everything perfect before any project can proceed. In this business, nothing is ever perfect. Space flight involves risk, it can never be completely eliminated. But real space flight is actual flight, not studies and ground tests. It is difficult to find the balance of having done enough to be reasonably sure of success and safety and to get on with a project and actually fly. I hate the term ‘risk averse,’ but as much as it makes my teeth grate, the effect of wanting to make every detail perfect has the same outcome as cowardice: never flying.