# Presentation: 139899

## Building a Healthy Learning Organization at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

**Building a Healthy Learning Organization at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center**

- Dr. Edward W. Rogers
- Office of Mission Success
- November 8, 2005
- ISHEM Conference
- Napa, CA

**Notes:**
Knowledge and Risk, held in the balance by the decisions of people
How well can they apply their knowledge to address risk

## A Healthy Learning Organization

- Knows how to process knowledge
- Davenport, Information processing into usable knowledge
- Appreciates the value of shared knowledge
- Hayek, dispersed collective knowledge is the most valuable
- Evolves with knowledge use
- Fulmer, Shaping the Adaptive Organization
- Encourages meaningful subject matter interaction
- Novak, self directed learning behavior
- Facilitates meaningful human to human interaction
- Argyris, stimulate human learning capacity
- Loads Local units with knowledge
- Pfeffer, KM is not an upward extraction process
- Rewards local sharing and reapplication
- Rogers, Innovation and solution finding are intrinsic motivators
- Shares knowledge across usability lines, not reporting lines
- Wegner, Communities primarily help each other (not management)

## Not a Learning Organization

- “Shuttle management declined to have the crew inspect the Orbiter for damage, declined to request on-orbit imaging, and ultimately discounted the possibility of a burn-through.”
- “The Board views the failure to do so as an illustration of the lack of institutional memory in the Space Shuttle Program that supports the Board’s claim... that NASA is not functioning as a learning organization.”
- 	CAIB Report (2003) Section 6.1, Page 127

**Notes:**
Claim made by the CAIB report. Widely cited. Little understood.
Not a LO because of a failure to act. 
Why did the org fail to act?

## Unintended Consequences

- “NASA’s culture of bureaucratic accountability emphasized chain of command, procedure, following the rules, and going by the book. While rules and procedures were essential for coordination, they had an unintended but negative effect. Allegiance to hierarchy and procedure had replaced deference to NASA engineers’ technical expertise.”
-  		CAIB Report Vol 1, Section 8.5, Page 200

## Accepting Risk

- “When a program agrees to spend less money or accelerate a schedule beyond what the engineers and program managers think is reasonable, a small amount of overall risk is added. These little pieces of risk add up until managers are no longer aware of the total program risk, and are, in fact, gambling.”
-          CAIB Report Vol 1, Section 6.2, Page 139

## Blocked Communication

- “The organizational structure and hierarchy blocked effective communication of technical problems. Signals were overlooked, people were silenced, and useful information and dissenting views on technical issues did not surface at higher levels. What was communicated to parts of the organization was that O-ring erosion and foam debris were not problems.”
- 		CAIB Report Vol 1, Section 8.5, Page 201

## The Organization accepts unintended consequences
	Changes in classification of foam anomalies improved schedule but were detrimental to safety. 
The Organization stumbles over itself
	Engineering opinion was controlled by stifling demand for rule adherence to the point where no images were obtained of the orbiter. 
The Organization lacks capability for error correction
	Safety organization failed to operate as an error correction mechanism.

- 	*Changes in classification of foam anomalies improved schedule but were detrimental to safety. *
- The Organization stumbles over itself
- 	*Engineering opinion was controlled by stifling demand for rule adherence to the point where no images were obtained of the orbiter. *
- The Organization lacks capability for error correction
*	**Safety organization failed to operate as an error correction mechanism.*

**Not Functioning as a Learning Organization? **

## How We Accomplish So Much

**How We Accomplish So Much**

**Notes:**
CREATE CONVERSATIONS

## The KM Problem at the Project Level 

- Not Reliable
- Designer dependent outcomes (team make up determines team outcome as much as team function or structure)
- Organizational communication processes introduce risk to system (redundancy, reliability delusions, stress points)
- Knowledge loops are longer than operational throughput cycle time (knowledge is not timely in application)
- Not Sustainable
- Social networks are decaying faster than they are being reproduced
- Knowledge sharing legacy systems are not built around today’s workplace structures
- Mentors have a time-space gap with Mentees for effectively sharing knowledge

**Notes:**
What we do for a business is manage projects, from start to finish. That is where the KM meets the business value chain. KM must improve the way we do projects to be meaningful to GSFC.

## Goddard’s Learning Plan

-        **Goals of Learning Plan**
- Build a Learning Organizational Culture
- Manage Knowledge Assets Efficiently
- Facilitate Effective Knowledge Application
-        **Learning Practices**
- Pause and Learn
- Sharing Workshops
- Case Studies
- Lessons Learned
- Training & Development
- Design Rules

- “The Goddard Plan is designed to overcome the previous Agency focus on IT as a KM driver with its over-emphasis on ***capturing*** ***knowledge*** ***from*** ***workers*** for the organization and instead focuses on facilitating ***knowledge*** ***sharing*** ***among*** ***workers***.” 				p5 of draft Goddard Learning Plan

**Notes:**
No  mention of knowledge capture
Capture is not a prerequisite to sharing and application, actually it is an obstacle

## Open Loop Lessons LearnedTypical IT Tools Driven Approach

- Focus is on
- Deploying the
- LL Tool Set

- Capture is the Key Word

**Notes:**
CAPTURE is part of all KM systems designed by IT people because otherwise they have no role in KM
BUT KM is not fundamentally an IT problem. In this case, the system actually is a barrier to learning.
It does not bring people together but isolates them (anonymous to anonymous reporting)
It provides little benefit to the contributor.
It generates no interaction coefficient for learning.
Learning is represented as a ‘Dumb’ system.

Closing the Learning Loop
Lessons Learned from Individuals to the Agency LLIS and back to Individuals is:
Too open ended (not everything makes it in)
Too long (many people wait until mission end)
Too unreliable (material not always validated)
Devoid of context (not easy to assimilate)
Not part of project management culture
Viewed as largely a ‘check box’ activity

## Local Loop Learning ProcessPeople Process Driven Approach

- Focus is on
- Learning in the
- Work Group

- Share is the Key Word

**Notes:**
Learning takes place among people at the work level.
KM tools facilitate sharing, not extracting
Lessons are examined in the course of work (not separate from it).
Center provides means to close loop with training and policy.
LLIS serves as a system repository only. 

Learning Takes Place at the Work Site
Within Project Teams (the doers are the owners)
Within Project Schedules (part of project lifecycle)
Lessons are Shared within the Center
Project, Branch, or Program Level of Ownership
After Action Reviews and Lessons Learned
Workshops and Cases
Technical seminars and Mini Courses
The Owners Share the Lessons & Insights with Center

## Goddard KM Architecture

## Lessons Building Learning in the Army 

- The knowledge of the Army profession resides primarily in the minds of its members.
- Connecting members allows the knowledge of the profession to flow from those who know to those who need to know, from those with specific experience to those who need that experience right now.
***Person-to-person connections and conversation allow context and trust to emerge and additional knowledge to flow***.
- Relationships, trust, and a sense of professional community are critical factors that set the conditions for effective connections and convesations.
- From _Company Command_ by Nancy Dixon, et.al. (2005). Center for Advancement of Leader Development and Organizational Learning. p21.

## Why Knowledge Sharing Efforts Fail

- Knowledge management efforts mostly emphasize technology and the transfer of codified knowledge,
- Knowledge management tends to treat knowledge as a tangible thing, as a stock or quantity, and therefore separates knowledge as something from the use of that thing,
- Formal systems can’t easily store or transfer tacit knowledge,
***The people responsible for transferring and implementing knowledge management frequently don’t understand the actual work being documented***,
- Knowledge management tends to focus on specific practices and ignore the importance of philosophy.
- From _The Knowing-Doing Gap: How smart companies turn knowledge into action_ by Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton. (1999). Harvard Business School Press. Page 22.

## Lessons Learned About Lessons Learned

- “A second generation KM Architecture must show how learning will occur across the organization to produce a continuous knowledge supply, not just how current knowledge will be efficiently harvested with no thought to replenishment. Sustainment must be part of the design if the results are to last longer than the current version of KM software deployed. All three phases of the knowledge life cycle must be supported: knowledge production, knowledge diffusion and knowledge use. ***As smart as a KM system may be, it will never be smart enough to fool the people expected to use it***.”
- McElroy, M.W. (1999). Double-Loop Knowledge Management, MacroInnovation Inc. Available from www.macroinnovation.com