"The Way the EC Thinks" by Mous Chahine

Retold by Barbara Amago

At 3:45 p.m. on March 21, 2002 in the service area of the JPL Library,
the staff were putting the finishing touches on the sound system, and
Teresa Bailey, as she usually does on "Story Day," was wondering aloud
if anyone would show up to hear the story. As the 4:00 p.m. start time
approached, people began to file in and stake out their seats. Some
greeted each other and chatted as they awaited the start of the program.
A few jokes could be heard about the title of the upcoming story, along
with a few cynical chuckles. Finally, as Dr. Mous Chahine arrived, a
little out of breath from his run up the hill, and after a few warm
greetings to Mous from the audience, Teresa launched into her
introductory remarks.

She gave a quick overview of Mous's JPL career: "Currently, Dr. Chahine
is a Senior Research Scientist. After receiving his Ph.D. in fluid
physics from UC Berkeley in 1960 he came to JPL as a research scientist.
From 1975 to 1978 he headed the Planetary Atmosphere Section and in 1978
he established the Division of Earth and Space Sciences, which he
managed until 1984, when he became the JPL Chief Scientist. Dr. Chahine
has made incredible scientific contributions to the Lab, his current
research activities are in the study of the earth's hydrological cycle
with a focus on changes in the recycling rates of atmospheric water
vapor and studies of feedback mechanisms between clouds and water vapor
and the surface of Earth."

"I know Mous could talk for hours about all his scientific endeavors,
but today we're going to get to hear about his experience with our top
management team, the JPL EC," she said, as Dr. Chahine took center
stage.

After acknowledging the applause, Dr. Chahine shared the "story behind
the story" \-- that it was Dr. Katherine Dumas who convinced him to
present today's story and suggested the title. He said that as he
developed his remarks, the proposed title provoked some comments from
colleagues, such as, "Does the EC really think?" or "Isn't that an
oxymoron?" As he wryly acknowledged the laughter from the audience, he
stated that today's remarks would follow somewhat the same reasoning
that he used in a talk to colleagues in the Earth and Space Sciences
Division after he became Chief Scientist and was invited back to explain
how the EC made decisions. The issue was the apparent contradiction
between the high values the EC puts on research at JPL while outsourcing
the technical support they need. "There is one thing that we MUST do,"
he said, "and that is fundamental research." But at the same time, he
explained, certain things must be outsourced to industry. After the end
of the Cold War and the demise of the Soviet Union, new \"partnering\"
relationships between JPL and industry were needed in order to maintain
strong advocacy and support to the NASA Space Exploration Program. He
acknowledged that from the point of view of the researchers trying to do
their job, the feeling at time was "you want me to do a job, but you
take away my tools."

He further explained that as a JPL person "inside the fence" you have to
do the best you can do, and, at the same time, you need to look "outside
the fence" to see how the external environment is changing. The space
program needs new kinds of backup. It needs to rely on long-term
partnerships with the industrial sector. So JPL agreed with industry
about what could best be done at JPL and what could best be done
outside, by industry. Mous maintains that these two views, inside and
outside "the fence" were really two different kinds of thinking. Looking
outside to adopt something to use inside is \"deductive thinking\".
\"Inductive thinking\" is what a project does, facts and fact-based
decisions. Mous had been reading Edward O. Wilson's book *Consilience*
which includes some very good examples of deductive versus inductive
thinking. After that talk to the ESSD, Mous laughed, one of his
colleagues whispered in his ear, "Mous, you've sold your soul to the
devil!"

The next topic Mous addressed was his own career at JPL. He came to the
Lab in 1960 to work on fluid physics. With a laugh, he shared an
anecdote about receiving an offer of employment from JPL, and then, two
days later, an "I regret to inform you ..." letter. But he did come and
spent the first seven years doing inductive thinking "based on research
facts" when JPL was the best in the world (or at least one of the top
ten!) at fluid physics. Then in 1967 his section manager called the
section to a meeting and explained that the Lab had decided to eliminate
three sections, including fluid physics. Looking outside the fence, the
Lab wanted to get ready for an important new JPL mission called \"The
Grand Tour\" - which became Voyager. This, of course, was a big shock.
Mous's advisor at Caltech, Professor Hans Liepmann thought the decision
was stupid, but it was done, and most of Mous's colleagues left the Lab
to continue working on fluid physics at other institutions. "And they
all did very well," Mous said. However, Mous decided to stay and changed
his field of study to remote sensing of climate. He noted that while JPL
management terminology has changed since the 60s, from "fired" or "laid
off" to "outsourced," the end result was the same.

Later in his career when he was a section manager, he was informed in
1973 that his section was to be audited. This, of course, provoked the
fear that his group would be outsourced again. The auditor showed up,
got an overview of what the section was doing and seemed satisfied. But,
after the presentation, she pulled out a copy of Mous's calendar and
told him he had some unscheduled hours in the day and asked him what he
did with this "downtime." Surprised, he answered, "I think!" This
response seemed unexpected to the auditor; she got up thanked him and
left, but the section was never audited again!

Mous stated that how the EC was regarded had changed over the years. In
Bill Pickering's day, we used to say, "The Lab decided ..." and
beginning with Bruce Murray's directorship, we started saying, "The EC
decided ...." However, in Mous's opinion, "Executive Council" is really
a misnomer, since it is more of a cabinet that makes recommendations,
discussing and debating issues, not making decisions. When he was on the
EC, he was still a researcher and details were still important, but
things had to fit within a bigger national goal. The conflict between
deductive and inductive thinking never ceased.

During his tenure on the EC there were two very interesting issues where
the EC \"decisions\" differed with the expectations of researchers. The
first was desktop computers -- VP Gore\'s Information Superhighway
promised that every employee who needed a computer should have one, and
to be fair only one. But, what if one has a new computer and a very old
one that no body wants? He gave the example of the Atrona, a very old
computer where a researcher had stored "all his stuff" for many years.
While he wasn't ready to give up his Atrona, and the stuff couldn't be
converted for a Mac, when he got a Mac, he was asked to give up the
Atrona (to junk it). From the researchers point of view that was clearly
\"idiotic.\" The second issue was TQM/PBM (Total Quality
Management/Process Based Management). The driver was "faster, better,
cheaper." Dr. Stone decided to look at the JPL processes to see how they
can be made to support more than one mission. Mous made the point that
process-based management was only valuable as a tool, although it seemed
to have been adopted, by some, as a kind of religion. And PBM, like
other tools, was only valuable in the hands of a skilled person. This
point was driven home for him when he attended a seminar at Caltech,
where the presenter made the statement that "if you have the right
processes, you can trust your management to the gardener or to Ed Stone,
and it wouldn't matter." Mous clearly thought this was a stupid
statement, and it caused him to lose confidence with the PBM tool in the
hands of this unskilled practitioner.

Mous closed his story with an anecdote he heard from General Terhune,
former JPL Deputy Director and Acting Director, 1982. A two-star general
in charge of running an air base was trying to solve the problem of
continued vandalism on the base. He sent a memo to the three-star
general above him asking for support to secure the base by fencing it
completely in. The three-star general turned him down. But he second
year he decided to write another memo, including more facts and more
indisputable documentation of the problem. Still no word back.
Meanwhile, the three-star general was promoted up and out, and the
two-star general was given his position. One of his first jobs as a
three-star general was to make a decision on his own request to secure
the base by fencing it in. And, Mous laughingly said, "Of course, he
didn't approve it!" In his new position, it was now his job to keep the
air base as part of the community! He now had to take the broader view
(deductive thinking) versus the inductive, fact-based thinking of his
two-star-general job.

"So," Mous laughed, "Had the general sold his soul to the devil?"

After the audience had applauded, they were invited to either approach
him and ask their questions quietly "in my ear" or share the questions
with everyone. A couple of people raised their hands.

Q: What about ISO 9000?

A: The Lab produces and uses many products from instruments to
spacecraft. We work with industrial partners and we need to be able to
tell them clearly what practices we follow and we need to show that we
follow our practices. The issue with ISO was that we had stated our
practices very clearly, but did not always follow them. In the age of
globalization, we need to know the ISO certification of our customers
and partners in order to work with them. The problem with ISO was that
exemptions are very difficult to justify, even where there are good
reasons, e.g., unlike flight instruments, absolute calibration in
research may not be necessary, only the *relative* measurements are
important, but ISO demands that all instruments at JPL be exactly
calibrated, which produced unnecessary burden on research and delays in
research experiments. We should have been able to make exemptions under
ISO at JPL; instead we had to make exceptions on case-by-case basis.

Q: What about the "gardener versus Ed Stone" remark?

A: I had a conversation with Ed Stone about PBM, and the speaker. Ed
said that he was treating PBM like a research experiment and that he
wasn't going to force the data, but that the experiment was still in
progress. Throughout that period there was no clear consensus inside or
outside the EC on what PBM meant. When Charles became Director his views
of process-based management were that management should be
"people-based" and processes are just tools. In the past we always used
procedures and in the future, we will continue to develop new process
tools and use them.

Another experience for Mous regarding interactions among EC members came
during the initial stages of TQM/PBM at JPL. Ed Stone wanted to test the
initial workshops on the EC before deploying them Lab-wide. The EC all
took the seminar together, and "it was awful!" John Casani and Mous
admitted that they did not like the workshop materials. Ed had the
workshop materials redone but then he asked John and Mous to take it and
evaluate it again. John complained that he would never criticize "Ed's
workshops" again (but he DID). The revised workshop was better, but the
second evaluation by John was nothing short of superlative. The
interactions among EC members are friendly with good humor bubbling up
now and then.

Q: When the federal government shut down, and we had no budget for
months, how did the EC handle it?

A: Obviously, the situation was agony for the EC. They (the EC) weren't
worried that NASA would have to close JPL, but the EC had to go through
an enormous effort looking at the entire Lab and define what was
critical in case of a shut down and what was not.

Q: With the external pressures to implement new things, why is the
implementation always so awful? It's like no one ever thought about them
before they were implemented.

A: TQM was an experiment in common sense and I liked it. Oracle we had
to implement quickly because of the shortness of time. Since the days
under Fred Felberg, we had developed our own \"business\" system, which
was very expensive, and, in the end, it didn't work well. In the process
of moving to the Oracle system in 1999-2000 it would have been helpful
to run our old system and Oracle in parallel. We couldn't run two
systems in parallel, because the old system was not Y2K compliant. In
addition the old system would have had to be modified to implement the
new NASA-Caltech contract. We had to either fix the old system, which
would have been very big task, or dump it. After lots of thinking we had
no choice but to dump it and concentrate on the new Oracle system. This
it how it happened

There were two issues during Mous's time on the EC that the Director or
Deputy Director decided upon without much debate at the EC. One was to
outsource computer support. This was a NASA mandate. However, including
both engineering and business computers under in the support contract
was a JPL decision. Goddard had outsourced its computer support, but,
only the business side. Once you've done something like this, how can
you get out of it at a reasonable cost?

Q: What was the other issue?

A: You and the EC found out about that decision at the same time. It
impacted your pocket book. Yes, the zero-percent rise.

Q: A clarification of the Voyager Grand Tour. Why there were no missions
planned to the moon?

A: In the late 60's the National Research Council Space Science Board
created a handbook on the solar system that provided a sort of menu of
future exploration for NASA to choose from. Completing a survey of the
solar system was higher on the priority list and, besides, was a great
challenge. Only the US could do outer planets missions.

Q: So, does the EC think? (Mous asked this question of himself.)

A: Yes, they do, but in a different way.

4/5/2002