National Aeronautics and Space Administration 

Academy Sharing Knowledge 

The NASA Source for Project Management and Engineering Excellence | APPEL SUMMER | 2009
 

Inside 

ManageMent by Wandering around 

Collaboration at Cern 

innovating to Fly in Cleaner SkieS 
Photo Credit: NASA 

ON THE COVER 

This image of Earthrise was taken during lunar orbit by the Apollo 11 mission 

crew in July 1969. The first manned lunar landing mission, Apollo 11, launched 

from Kennedy Space Center on July 16, 1969, with a three-man crew aboard 

the flight: Neil A. Armstrong, commander; Michael Collins, command module 

pilot; and Edwin E. Aldrin, Jr., lunar module pilot. The lunar module “Eagle” 

was the first crewed vehicle to land on the moon. 
ASK MAGAZINE | 1 

Contents
 

DEPARTMENTS 

3 

In This Issue 

By Don Cohen 

4 

From the APPEL Director 

By eD hoffman 

61 

ASK Bookshelf 

62 

The Knowledge Notebook 

By LaurenCe Prusak 

64 

ASK Interactive 

9 29 

INSIGHTS 

5 

Some Safety Lessons Learned 

By Bryan o’Connor NASA’s Chief of 

Safety and Mission Assurance offers his 

recipe for flight safety. 

13 

Balancing Security and Knowledge 

Sharing 

By ryan averBeCk, John Day, anD G. a. GaDDy 

The Mission Critical Information assessment 

team helps NASA balance two responsibilities: 

sharing technical information and protecting it. 

23 

Interview with Alexander Laufer 

By Don Cohen The author of Breaking the 

Code of Project management talks about 

the value of learning, judgment, trust, and 

leadership for complex projects. 

34 

Innovating to Fly in Cleaner Skies 

By kerry eLLis Pratt & Whitney’s VP of 

Technology and Environment describes 

the development of a new, more efficient 

jet engine. 

41 

Rocketdyne: Committed 

to Knowledge Sharing 

By Carri karuhn Knowledge-sharing 

events help Rocketdyne engineers share 

valuable expertise. 

57 

Process Improvement for Space 

Flight Safety 

By fayssaL m. safie A systematic approach 

to process control improves foam 

application to the shuttle’s external tank. 

34 

STORIES 

9 

Management by Wandering Around 

By noeL W. hinners To learn what is really 

going on, managers need to leave their 

offices and listen to people throughout the 

workplace. 

16 

Unmanning the Fire Lines 

By Brent CoBLeiGh Thanks to commitment 

and cooperation, a NASA unmanned aircraft 

is ready to help fight a fire emergency. 

29 

A Model for Collaboration 

By krisztina hoLLy How do thousands 

of scientists successfully collaborate on 

CERN’s ambitious physics experiments? 

38 

Answering the Call: 

Communicating with Soyuz 

By eD CamPion Responding to an 

agencywide request for ideas, a NASA 

engineer solves a communications problem. 

44 

Engaged Workers Boost 

the Bottom Line at Ames 

By nanCy manGini In the course of a 

management training program, one team 

explores the inspiring experiences that 

foster employee engagement. 

48 

Bidding Your Way to the Launch Pad 

By ranDii r. Wessen anD DaviD Porter 

The authors promote the advantages 

of a market-based system for trading 

project resources. 

53 

Managing the Trauma 

of a Terminated Project 

By roBert k. hurLey anD JosePh t. 

Jimmerson Skillful handling can limit 

the pain of project cancellation. 
Issue No. 35 

Staff 

APPEL DIREcTOR AND PubLISHER 

Dr. Edward Hoffman 

ehoffman@nasa.gov 

EDITOR-IN-cHIEf 

Laurence Prusak 

lprusak@msn.com 

MANAGING EDITOR 

Don Cohen 

doncohen@rcn.com 

EDITOR 

Kerry Ellis 

kerry.ellis@asrcms.com 

cONTRIbuTING EDITOR 

Matt Kohut 

mattkohut@infactcommunications.com 

SENIOR KNOwLEDGE SHARING 

cONSuLTANT 

Jon Boyle 

jon.boyle@asrcms.com 

KNOwLEDGE SHARING ANALySTS 

Ben Bruneau 

ben.bruneau@asrcms.com 

Katherine Thomas 

katherine.thomas@asrcms.com 

Mai Ebert 

mai.ebert@asrcms.com 

APPEL PROGRAM MANAGER 

Yvonne Massaquoi 

yvonne.massaquoi@asrcms.com 

DESIGN 

Hirshorn Zuckerman Design Group, Inc. 

www.hzdg.com 

PRINTING SPEcIALIST 

Hanta Ralay 

hanta.ralay 1@nasa.gov 

PRINTING 

GraphTec 

The Academy of Program/Project and Engineering Leadership (APPEL) and ASK 

Magazine help NASA managers and project teams accomplish today’s missions and 

meet tomorrow’s challenges by sponsoring knowledge-sharing events and publications, 

providing performance enhancement services and tools, supporting career development 

programs, and creating opportunities for project management and engineering 

collaboration with universities, professional associations, industry partners, and other 

government agencies. 

ASK Magazine grew out of the Academy and its Knowledge Sharing Initiative, designed 

for program/project managers and engineers to share expertise and lessons learned 

with fellow practitioners across the Agency. Reflecting the Academy’s responsibility for 

project management and engineering development and the challenges of NASA’s new 

mission, ASK includes articles about meeting the technical and managerial demands 

of complex projects, as well as insights into organizational knowledge, learning, 

collaboration, performance measurement and evaluation, and scheduling. We at 

APPEL Knowledge Sharing believe that stories recounting the real-life experiences 

of practitioners communicate important practical wisdom and best practices that 

readers can apply to their own projects and environments. By telling their stories, 

NASA managers, scientists, and engineers share valuable experience-based knowledge 

and foster a community of reflective practitioners. The stories that appear in ASK 

are written by the “best of the best” project managers and engineers, primarily from 

NASA, but also from other government agencies, academia, and industry. Who better 

than a project manager or engineer to help a colleague address a critical issue on a 

project? Big projects, small projects—they’re all here in ASK. 

You can help ASK provide the stories you need and want by letting our editors know 

what you think about what you read here and by sharing your own stories. To submit 

stories or ask questions about editorial policy, contact Don Cohen, Managing Editor, 

doncohen@rcn.com, 781-860-5270. 

For inquiries about APPEL Knowledge Sharing programs and products, please contact 

Katherine Thomas, ASRC Management Services, 6303 Ivy Lane, Suite 130, Greenbelt, 

MD 20770; katherine.thomas@asrcms.com; 301-793-9973. 

To subscribe to ASK, please send your full name and preferred mailing address 

(including mail stop, if applicable) to ASKmagazine@asrcms.com. 
ASK MAGAZINE | 3 

In This Issue
 

We usually think of innovation as developing some 

new product or technology. NASA is in the business of 

technological innovation, of course, and several articles in 

this issue of ASK deal with new or improved technologies. 

Brent Cobleigh’s “Unmanning the Fire Lines” reports, in part, 

on the novel capabilities NASA’s Ames Research Center 

and Dryden Flight Research Center brought to Ikhana, an 

unmanned science aircraft. “Innovating to Fly in Cleaner 

Skies” describes the new, efficient jet engine being developed 

by Pratt & Whitney. And building the Large Hadron Collider 

at CERN (“A Model for Collaboration,” by Krisztina Holly) 

demanded new capabilities in areas including cryogenics, 

superconductivity, and vacuum systems. 

These articles and others also consider innovation in how 

things are done. Process innovation often contributes to the 

other kind. So, for instance, CERN’s radically collaborative 

way of working helps ensure that the best ideas will be heard 

and applied to the project’s technical challenges. Widening 

the search for knowledge is a process innovation featured in 

a number of articles. Ed Campion’s “Rising to the Challenge” 

tells the story of one of NASA’s agencywide requests for new 

ideas. Rocketdyne has developed a variety of ways to make 

important knowledge available (“Rocketdyne: Committed 

to Knowledge Sharing,” by Carri Karuhn), and the Pratt & 

Whitney engine innovation story is partly one of knowledge 

shared back and forth between companies. 

More broadly, developing innovative ways of doing 

work is often necessary to carry out complex, challenging 

projects with limited budgets. That is why Alexander Laufer, 

in the interview, says that the most important attribute of 

a project leader is the ability to challenge the status quo— 

that is, to insist on a new approach when it becomes clear 

that the old one won’t do the job. In “Bidding Your Way to 

the Launch Pad,” Randii Wessen and David Porter make 

the case for a (so far) rarely used market-based system to 

allocate project resources. Noel Hinners (“Management 

by Wandering Around”) describes his experience with a 

communication practice that is not new but that we can think 

of as innovative because it is probably not used as much 

as it should be. Fayssal Safie’s “Process Improvement for 

Space Flight Safety” shows the far-reaching consequences 

of a new approach to process control, one that lessens risks 

for missions and astronauts. 

None of these improvements would do much good 

without the commitment, cooperation, and goodwill that 

make project work possible. That is why Bryan O’Connor 

emphasizes shared values and universal accountability in 

“Some Safety Lessons Learned,” why Nancy Mangini’s article 

promotes engagement (“Engaged Workers Boost the Bottom 

Line at Ames”), and Robert Hurley and Joseph Jimmerson 

insist on the importance of helping team members deal with 

the cancellation of their project (“Managing the Trauma of 

a Terminated Project”). It is also why the words “trust” and 

“judgment” appear so frequently (for instance, in the Laufer 

interview, Laurence Prusak’s “Knowledge Notebook,” and 

the CERN article). In other words, innovation and the ability 

of teams to do work well in general rest on a foundation of 

very old and very basic human values. 

Don Cohen 

Managing Editor 
4 | ASK MAGAZINE 

From the APPEL Director
 

Technology-Enabled Learning
 

BY ED HOFFMAN 

Information technology develops at such a rapid clip 

that most of us are scrambling to keep up. This is 

particularly true for those of us involved in workforce 

development. If you need compelling evidence of 

how information technology is affecting the delivery 

of learning, you need look no further than higher 

education, where many colleges and universities are 

experiencing double-digit growth in technologyenabled courses and programs. Government agencies 

have discovered that technology assists with 

learning at a significant cost savings. But there’s the 

rub: management loves the idea of saving money, 

so learning efforts that promise better learning 

with fewer dollars are immediately embraced, even 

though they may actually result in less learning. 

I possess a healthy skepticism when it comes to 

using technology to achieve better learning outcomes. 

This is not an unfounded bias. I have seen millions 

of dollars spent on technology that promises gains 

in workforce competence and capability but fails 

to deliver. One example: learning repositories that 

store organizational knowledge to make it available 

for reuse. Some very expensive systems have been 

constructed on the Field of Dreams build-it-andthey-will-come philosophy, but they don’t come, 

and that money and effort are wasted. 

But the right technology in the right situation 

can pay off. Applying good learning practitionerbased learning-design principles to clearly defined 

and strategically aligned learning objectives comes 

first. Then technology can often help achieve 

these clear objectives at a cost savings. I have seen 

established programs and courses use technologies to 

improve what they already do very well; for example, 

by helping them to extend the reach of their products 

and services or allowing them to update content 

more rapidly and efficiently. Effective learning 

in the future will rely on the smart application of 

technology because of accelerating knowledge 

expiration, with content becoming outdated and 

inapplicable much faster than in the past. 

The Academy for Program/Project and 

Engineering Leadership currently uses various 

technologies for learning. ASK Magazine is 

available on the Web as well as print; case studies 

are distributed online; and we use decision-making 

tools to guide discussions in meetings. Blogs and 

wikis allow us to create updated online essays to 

distribute knowledge and invite participation 

through online editing. Social and professional 

networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, and 

LinkedIn help us create communities of practice, 

chat, and share information using videos and 

sound. Virtual worlds allow us to socialize in 

simulated environments based on real-world and 

imagined situations and processes. Twitter and 

Tumblr create mini-blogs that allow people to 

report and follow activities minute by minute. 

YouTube allows the sharing of knowledge in a 

video format and connects us to other potential 

resources related to the content. 

One new development that excites me is 

Google Wave, a communication and collaboration 

platform based on HTML 5 that is open source, 

browser-based, and will encourage myriad thirdparty widgets, gadgets, and Web-based tools to 

enhance learning. Think of it as a combination of 

any technology tool you can think of in a browser. 

One Google Wave gadget already allows for 

automatic translation of more than forty languages 

in real time as you type. So take it from a skeptic: 

technology can be wonderful. ●
INSIGHT | ASK MAGAZINE | 5 

Some Safety Lessons Learned 

BY BRYAN O’CONNOR 

The proximate causes of an accident and the changes needed to avoid repetition are usually clearer 

and more readily dealt with than the associated root causes. As a team of engineers, we usually 

find a way to modify the design, change the software, or develop an operational workaround that 

adequately mitigates the proximate and near-proximate causes of our mishaps. But root causes are 

different kinds of problems. 

Lightning strikes near a silhouetted mobile launch tower 

about 36.5 seconds after the 1969 liftoff of Apollo 12, 

which was also struck during its ascent. This event led to 

updated weather criteria for governing launch decisions, 

but a rationale for the update was not recorded. 

Photo Credit: NASA 
6 | ASK MAGAZINE 

Root causes tend to be related to the broader, sometimes 

squishier aspects of what we do: such things as the what-versushow of our procedures and requirements and the appropriate 

volume and frequency of organizational communications 

up and down and left and right. Sometimes they involve 

organizational and authority relationships, the effectiveness of 

checks and balances, and other cultural aspects of program 

and operational management. 

The Columbia Accident Investigation Board (CAIB) report 

recommendations and associated internal studies resulted 

in two very challenging sets of activities: the first technical, 

the second managerial. Efforts dealing with the proximate 

(technical) causal factors were tough because the physics and 

engineering and production processes related to external tank 

insulation in the ascent environment are very complex. As for 

the managerial changes, they too were difficult, but probably 

for very different reasons. 

The CAIB report listed a number of organizational/ 

cultural findings and recommendations, but that section 

did not include the kind of factual basis that characterized 

the technical parts of the report. Of seven volumes of factual 

information in the CAIB final report, none pertained to the 

root causes of the mishap; they were all about the technical 

failure itself. The relatively limited summary of organizational 

and cultural material in volume one was all we had, leaving 

much to the NASA team to determine for itself. By itself, this 

should not have been a problem for us. After all, any mishap 

board is advisory, and the ultimate findings often come from 

Agency follow-up. In this case though, the high visibility of 

the CAIB investigation, along with the public statements by 

the board about lack of engineering curiosity and authority 

imbalances between the institution and the program, made 

it very difficult for the Agency to modify, let alone disagree 

with, their specific recommendations. 

On top of that, we asked another external group (the Covey 

Stafford team) to oversee our return-to-flight activities and told 

them they should evaluate our efforts relative to the “intent” 

of the CAIB. We asked the Covey Stafford management 

team to interpret the intent of the CAIB’s three management 

recommendations. Unfortunately, the CAIB members they 

consulted, the Covey Stafford management team members, and 

our own NASA leaders could not agree on intent. The result was 

several false starts, uneven application of the new governance 

model, and residual issues and misunderstandings that persist 

to this day. 

Having said that, I believe NASA’s governance model and 

safety culture in general are as good today as they have been 

for a long time. In retrospect, though, I think it was a shame to 

waste so much time and effort getting to this point. 

A Recipe for Safety 

So what are the best ways to make the inherently risky activity 

of human space flight as safe as possible? My recipe for flight 

safety goes like this: 

1 part shared values 

1 part organizational structure 

1 part requirements 

2 parts risk management 

A pinch of luck 
A CAIB reconstruction team member examines debris with a video 

microscope. The CAIB report included technical and managerial 

recommendations, both difficult to put into practice for different reasons. 

CAIB Photo by Rick Stiles 2003 

ASK MAGAZINE | 7

The value of luck goes without saying and, although some 

environments seem to be more conducive to good or bad luck 

than others, luck generally is not something you can do much 

about. I’ll look briefly at the other ingredients. 

Shared Values 

An organization whose core values include teamwork, integrity, 

excellence, and, of course, commitment to safety is likely going to 

have a good mission success and safety record. Alcoa and DuPont 

are two well-known organizations whose strong core values are 

reflected in excellent safety records. Closely related to teamwork 

and commitment to safety is accountability. Everyone in NASA 

is responsible for safety, although the degree of individual 

accountability varies in accordance with this formula: 

Accountability = 

responsibility x authority x capability 

A given individual’s level of formal responsibility and 

authority may vary from project to project. Their capability— 

the relevant knowledge and experience they have—will also 

vary from situation to situation. But none of those factors— 

responsibility, authority, or capability—is ever zero, so no one 

can entirely lack accountability, regardless of how far they are 

from the prime decision makers. At the very least, every person is 

accountable for his or her own safety. Those with programmatic 

and technical authority and capability find themselves more or 

less accountable for the safety of the mission. 

Organizational Structure 

A key aim of NASA’s recent governance changes has been to 

establish an independent technical authority and ensure that 

technical concerns that arise at any level will be addressed. 

The check-and-balance model we have chosen means that 

the programmatic and agency strategic leadership decide on 

programmatic and performance parameters, and the institution 

uses years of lessons learned to decide which technical requirements 

apply. The program needs institutional (independent technical 

authority) approval for relief from technical requirements but 

works as necessary within the programmatic chain of command 

for relief from cost, schedule, and performance requirements. 

This is the model we believe the CAIB intended. 

Requirements 

Good requirements are nothing more than lessons learned. To 

be effective, though, they must come with enough context and 

background to explain why they exist. Without an understanding 

of the underlying reasons for a requirement, decision makers are 

more likely to make the wrong choices. An example of the problem 

is the 1987 Atlas Centaur 67 lightning strike that destroyed an 

Atlas 2 and its FleetSatCom payload. A lack of rationale—of 

context—for the weather criteria governing launch decisions was 

a factor in a faulty decision and the loss of the mission. 

Risk Management 

Much of what we do at NASA is not conducive to simple 

requirements compliance. The nature of our missions means 

that our performance margins are often very low, and we 

often find ourselves accepting “residual” safety risks in order 

to accomplish the mission. If we were to design a human space 
flight vehicle that fully met all our standards and requirements 

for human rating, it likely would be too heavy to fly. So some 

number of waivers for our technical requirements and less than 

fully controlled hazards are inevitable. Bad experiences from 

the past (notably Challenger and Columbia) tell us that we are 

capable of fooling ourselves when we fail to apply technical rigor 

and process discipline in our risk management processes. 

Learning from Experience 

No matter how dedicated we are to safety, accidents happen. 

When they do, they give us an opportunity—though often 

a painful one—for learning that can prevent problems in the 

future. We also need to be careful not to derive the wrong lessons 

from experience. Specifically, we don’t want to “learn” from a 

string of successes that a particular kind of mission is inherently 

safe and we no longer need to look so carefully at risks. 

There are, broadly speaking, two modes of learning and 

behaviorthathelporganizations prevent mishaps.Oneis incident 

recovery: the intense, focused period of analysis and action that 

follows an accident and takes steps to avoid a recurrence. The 

other is complacency avoidance: countering the tendency to 

assume that recent success promises future safety. 

Learning from Incident Recovery 

A serious mishap galvanizes an organization. Experts minutely 

study the evidence to uncover the proximate causes of the 

accident. This type of work, though reactive, is engineering in 

every sense of the word. NASA engineers know how to investigate 

failures and, in the wake of a major mishap, motivating them 

to do it well is not an issue. If anything, we have to tell our 

investigators to back off and take a breath once in a while. 

Fighting Complacency 

After the mishap investigation and the return to flight, the team 

focuses again on the mission, and the challenge for the leadership 

team shifts from recovery to fighting complacency. Countering 

complacency is arguably harder than recovering from a mishap. 

We have to find creative ways to counteract the common 

psychological tendency to assume that a string of successes 

means that we have somehow reached a state of engineering and 

operational perfection—and, therefore, immunity from failure. 

One way I have found useful to get our team back to the proper 

state of humility and respect for risk is to occasionally revisit 

accident case studies. This does two things. It reminds us that 

other people who thought they were paying sufficient attention 

to safety have been surprised by failure; the case study serves as a 

vivid reminder of the fact that most past accidents almost always 

happened during a period of complacency. It also gives them a 

challenging and—we hope—relevant technical problem-solving 

session. These two things can go a long way toward reviving the 

critical recovery mind-set. They, along with the safety factors 

I mentioned above—shared values of teamwork, integrity, and 

commitment to safety, and requirements that make clear why 

they are important—are crucial weapons in our fight against 

complacency. ●

Bryan O’COnnOr is a former Marine Corps test pilot and 

aeronautical engineer. He served at NASA as a Space Shuttle 

commander and program director and is currently serving as the 

Agency's Chief of Safety and Mission Assurance. 
STORy | ASK MAGAZINE | 9
 

Management by 

Wandering Around: 

A POTENT ARROW IN THE MANAgER’S QUIvER

 BY NOEL W. HINNERS 
One of the great mysteries of life is that very few 

of those we work for have the least inclination, or 

possibly the needed skills, to consciously mentor 

us in the fine art of management. We are left 

largely to trial and error, with the likelihood 

that error will occur at just the wrong time and 

we won’t realize it until the infamous stuff hits 

the fan. This is not necessarily bad as long as a 

lesson is indeed learned and no serious damage 

occurs. In many regards, on-the-job training is 

much more effective than reading myriad books 

on management; it is not the ideal way to avoid 

a management catastrophe, however.
 

10 | ASK MAGAZINE 

Many of us don’t avail ourselves of potentially useful techniques 

either because we don’t know about them or don’t believe in 

them. NASA’s Academy of Program/Project and Engineering 

Leadership helps with the former. Disbelief and skepticism 

remain particularly rampant among scientists and engineers 

steeped in the mythology that only technical expertise and gutlevel management matter. 

I think those are necessary but insufficient. Even a casual 

perusal of failure reviews should convince you of that. So, of all 

the pet techniques of management gurus, which ones might work 

best in our frequently stressful environment? One I’ve found 

especially useful and enjoyable is “management by wandering 

around” (MBWA). The “wandering” is often replaced by 

“walking,” but I prefer “wandering” as it connotes a sense of 

purposeful randomness and the possibility of an unexpected 

and fruitful chance encounter. 

I was first exposed to MBWA in the early sixties with my 

first employer, Bellcomm, a NASA contractor hired to assist 

with Apollo systems engineering. My bosses frequently would 

stop by my cubicle and either talk about a specific topic or 

sometimes just chat about how things were going. I presumed 

that was the normal way to interact, rather than always going 

to the boss’s office or presenting in a formal situation. (Nor am 

I sure that all the Bellcomm managers did it; maybe it was a 

quirk of the ex-pat Brits in the company.) In any case, it seemed 

normal and added a personal touch to interactions. They would 

comment on things on my desk or wall and I’d get the chance to 

discuss subjects I’d normally not raise in a formal environment. 

That they were genuinely interested in me as well as what I was 

working on was a big boost to me as a novice in the workplace. 

Their approach was not called MBWA in those days—it wasn’t 

called anything until popularized by the management guru Tom 

Peters in the early eighties. (And I missed an early opportunity 

to become a rich management consultant myself.) 

When I joined NASA’s lunar program in 1972, I was struck 

by the fact that MBWA was not the norm. I generally didn’t see my 

boss or boss’s boss except at meetings or when I was called to his 

office. However, when I became associate administrator for Space 

Science in 1974, I started to use the practice myself, enjoying the 

opportunity to break out of my confines and go to a person’s office 
ASK MAGAZINE | 11 

THEy Would CoMMENT oN THINGS oN My dESK oR WAll ANd I’d GET THE CHANCE 

To dISCuSS SubjECTS I’d NoRMAlly NoT RAISE IN A foRMAl ENVIRoNMENT. THAT 

THEy WERE GENuINEly INTERESTEd IN ME AS WEll AS WHAT I WAS WoRKING oN WAS 

A bIG booST To ME AS A NoVICE IN THE WoRKPlACE. 

either for a one-on-one meeting or simply to drop in and chat 

about what they were doing. I was struck (retrospectively, as I don’t 

recall ever thinking about it as a technique) that the informality 

of such encounters increased interaction and information transfer. 

In contrast, being called to the boss’s office can create a stiffness 

that inhibits effective conversation; the setting lends itself more to 

monologue than dialogue. 

Of course there are exceptions. In 1972 Rocco Petrone, Apollo 

program director, called me into his office to talk about science 

on the Apollo missions. Our thirty-minute meeting extended to 

three hours as Rocco—interrupted by short phone calls with Jim 

McDivitt about lunar module problems—philosophized about 

the impact of space science, especially astronomy, on civilization 

and asked me more questions than I had answers to. 

In stark contrast, Rocco could be a tyrant in the formal 

meetings. On one occasion he demanded I tell him if it was a 

Phillips-headorastraight-headscrewintheboxunderdiscussion. 

I annoyingly responded, “How the hell would I know?” Years 

later I deduced that this was Rocco’s technique for getting 

you to the point where you’d best say, “I don’t know,” rather 

than try to fake it and was part of his “pay attention to detail” 

mentality. This is not your typical MBWA story, of course, but 

it demonstrates that talking one on one abrogates the need to 

playact for the audience. And the fact that nobody is writing up 

what is said makes it possible to say more. But usually meeting 

on neutral ground or in the other fellow’s environment is best, 

getting away from the intimidation factor of the boss’s office 

and the desk separating the two of you. 

After developing an eye twitch at HQ, I left NASA in 

1979 for a new career as director of the Smithsonian National 

Air and Space Museum. I didn’t know a thing about what a 

museum director does and didn’t immediately have to, as the 

staff was skilled and good. It was an unbelievably different 

environment from NASA, however. Instead of focusing on 

making viewgraphs (they really were in those days), writing 

Congressional testimony, or worrying about the launch of Solar 

Max, my challenge at the museum was to focus on the next 100 

years and work with the staff to ensure an ongoing orderly mix 

of permanent and evolving exhibits. There is no better way than 

using the MBWA technique to find out what people really do. 

Coming in early (not to get more work done, but to avoid 

Washington traffic) I’d get to talk with the people who made the 

museum tick: the security folks and the janitorial staff. Security 

had the essential job of protecting exhibits and the public, all the 

while being pleasant to the visitors. Janitors made the museum 

hum, cleaning it thoroughly after closing and before opening 

the next day. Clearly, the importance pyramid was upside down 

relative to the organizational one. 

I stumbled upon another MBWA technique that I’d like 

to be able to say was deliberate and skillfully planned, but it 

wasn’t. One very snowy evening I decided not to go home but 

to camp out in the museum. This was an eye-opening occasion 

to talk with the folks and see, for example, how they got that 

damnable chewing gum off the carpets (hit it with a burst of 

liquid nitrogen and off it pops) and the meticulous care given to 

sprucing the place up before the morning opening. 

Three years later I was privileged to become director of 

Goddard Space Flight Center. Goddard was, and is, an immense 

organization of more than 3,000 dedicated and capable civil 

servants and many thousands of contractors. When information 

flows up through four or five layers of management, you don’t 

know what really goes on. Every layer filters information in one 
12 | ASK MAGAZINE 

way or another. So, break out the MBWA. For half an hour 

once a week or so, I would wander into a building and office 

at random and chat with the occupant. Initially, some of the 

directors were nervous and would try to intercept me. (I never 

deciphered their early-warning system.) When they found out 

I was really harmless, they stopped and let me do my thing, 

including having breakfast meetings with their immediate 

reports. Lesson learned: the success of MBWA is based wholly 

on trust, without which you are in reality a spy. 

As at the museum, I spent a night at Goddard during a large 

snowstorm (who in his right mind would travel the Beltway in a 

big storm?), riding for hours in the cab of a snowplow and seeing 

what an incredible art it is to plow without boxing yourself into 

a corner of the parking lot. Those folks had the lots cleared by 

midnight and I found out that plowing is above my pay grade. 

MBWA can be especially useful in gaining insight into 

major issues that are bothering folks and that would not 

normally be evident. This was brought home to me when I 

queried a manager as to why we were having so many issues with 

HQ and another center. Our informal chatter soon led to his 

telling me that he was dealing with extreme problems at home. 

Clearly that was affecting his ability to function well at work. 

This helped me devise a graceful way to reassign him, removing 

management pressures and enabling him to devote more time 

to family matters. This was not a one-time occurrence. During 

my career I found numerous instances of nonwork issues being 

a root cause of management problems; developing a sensitivity 

to this can often help to resolve those problems. 

There is a fantastic multiplier effect of MBWA. Word gets 

around rapidly and, if you listen to the stories, you’d believe that 

I spent my full time doing it. It also had an interesting reverse 

effect at Goddard: people felt comfortable coming unannounced 

to my office to get some tidbit off their chest. It also led in part to 

managers writing more openly in the Goddard Weekly Report, 

which, largely unencumbered by protective editing, grew to 

fifty or sixty pages. 

After an abortive return to HQ in 1987, I joined Martin 

Marietta at their headquarters in Bethesda, Maryland, 

transferring to Denver two years later. Here I was fortunate to 

associate with Norm Augustine and yearn for a gene transplant. 

Norm is a most unusual leader with, in addition to superb 

technical abilities, an incredible talent for gauging an audience, 

using pointed humor and incredible speech skills. Norm uses 

“management by thinking around” and leaves the listener 

mesmerized by his superb knowledge and logic. 

I continued using MBWA in Denver and found a downside. 

I thought I knew what was going on in my organization. I did 

not. The traumatic failures of the two 1998 Mars Surveyor 

missions left me wondering how I could have missed or ignored 

so many signs of a fatally stressed project. Indeed, in my 

conversations with folks working the project, I did not pick up 

on the individual stress that many felt. They put on a “cando” face: after all, isn’t the impossible and challenging “what 

we do?” That issue came up in the failure review in a pointed 

exchange between two highly regarded senior members: one 

said he wants a “can-do” team, the other questioned the wisdom 

of unmitigated “can do.” Yes, it is a balancing act, but we were 

way off center. 

Clearly MBWA gives the practitioner insights not obtainable 

in any other way. MBWA has the corollary benefit of letting you 

get to know your people as people, not technical automatons, and 

letting them know you value them as people. The bafflement 

is why so many managers do not practice MBWA. Caveat 

emptor: MBWA is not a cure-all. As is true of any individual 

management tool, it must be augmented and complemented by 

a host of other proven techniques. But it can tell you things 

that you as a manager need to know and can’t learn by reading 

reports or hibernating in your office. ●

WHEN INfoRMATIoN floWS uP 

THRouGH fouR oR fIVE lAyERS 

of MANAGEMENT, you doN’T 

KNoW WHAT REAlly GoES oN. 

EVERy lAyER fIlTERS INfoRMATIoN 

IN oNE WAy oR ANoTHER. So, 

bREAK ouT THE MbWA. 

nOel W. Hinners consults for NASA, the aerospace industry, 

and 4-D Systems, which supports the NASA Academy of Program/ 

Project and Engineering Leadership. He currently serves on the 

executive committee of NASA’s Mars Exploration Program Analysis 

Group and chairs the External Advisory Board of the University of 

Colorado Aerospace Engineering Sciences Department. 
INSIGHT | ASK MAGAZINE | 13 

Balancing Security and 

Knowledge Sharing 

BY RYAN AvERBECK, JOHN DAY, AND g. A. gADDY 

The Fall 2007 issue of ASK Magazine generated a lot of discussion among those of us involved in the 

NASA Exploration Systems Mission Directorate (ESMD) Technology Protection Program. William 

Gerstenmaier’s “On a Need-Not-to-Know Basis” made us ponder the overwhelming, ubiquitous 

onslaught of information that constantly bombards the NASA family. As he stated: 

During a single week in October 2006, the NASA Headquarters e-mail servers delivered approximately 

1.25 million e-mails. With roughly 1,000 people at Headquarters, this works out to 1,250 messages per person. 

The nasa.gov domain has approximately two million distinct Web pages residing on its servers. This yields roughly 

thirty-two Web pages for every civil servant and contractor in the NASA family. 

Viewed from an information-overload perspective, this shows ... contribute materially to: 

just how much NASA information is exchanged, transferred, The preservation of the role of the United States as a 

and requested on a daily basis. These same facts, viewed from leader in aeronautical and space science and technology 

a slightly different perspective, raise another question: How and in the application thereof to the conduct of peaceful 

much of the information in this flood should in fact be activities within and outside the atmosphere; 

protected? NASA, the world’s premier space agency, often leads The preservation of the United States’ preeminent 

advances in space-related sciences and engineering. If NASA position in aeronautics and space through research 

were a commercial entity, the knowledge possessed by civilians and technology development related to associated 

and contractors could be called proprietary information; in manufacturing processes ... 

certain instances it would manifest itself as intellectual property, 

with the ownership rights that term implies. Thought of in The balancing act between sharing information and 

this manner, the intellectual property is knowledge that gives protecting it is further complicated by the 2006 National 

NASA a competitive advantage in space sciences, engineering, Space Policy, which states that space capabilities are vital to the 

and exploration. nation’s interests and the United States will “take those actions 

NASA has a deservedly proud fifty-year history of sharing necessary to protect its space capabilities.” Many of the requests 

innovation at an astonishing rate. The National Aeronautics for information that come to NASA come from foreigners. 

and Space Act of 1958, as amended, calls for “... the widest To contribute to this balancing act, NASA’s ESMD 

practicable and appropriate dissemination of information developed a Technology Protection Program and has devoted 

concerning its [NASA’s] activities and the results thereof ....” time and effort tailoring the program to specifically address 

This same Act, though, also requires NASA scientists and NASA needs, charter requirements, and national strategies 

engineers to compatible with the current global environment. 
14 | ASK MAGAZINE 

To help mitigate the challenges associated with the 

establishment of the Technology Protection Program, ESMD 

enlisted our services to form the core of the Mission Critical 

Information (MCI) assessment team. The MCI assessment team 

is the “nervous system” of the ESMD Technology Protection 

Program. Ryan Averbeck’s technology protection experience 

related to the Department of Defense and commercial sectors 

comes from an extensive background as a counterintelligence 

agent and service as an assistant director at the Army Research 

and Technology Protection Center (ARTPC). John Day is 

a board-certified security management professional and has 

extensive experience implementing security programs at NASA. 

G. A. Gaddy brings extensive experience and insight as a 

Department of Defense scientist, former National Academies 

of Science National Research Council postdoctoral fellow at 

Langley Research Center, and a senior technology protection 

engineer at the ARTPC. The team’s experience proved critical 

in the development of the Technology Protection Program 

processes. Our varied backgrounds and experiences provided a 

multidiscipline foundation for NASA to develop and implement 

a unique, customized Technology Protection Program. 

The ESMD Technology Protection Program process 

requires the impartial MCI assessment team to review and 

evaluate all pertinent technical aspects and documentation 

related to the research, components, systems, elements, projects, 

and programs under consideration. The team’s analysis includes, 

but is not limited to, the daunting task of horizontal crossreferencing. This involves referencing technologies against the 

Militarily Critical Technologies List, the Developing Science 

and Technologies List, the export control criteria from the 

Department of State, and other sources. The MCI assessment 

team also conducts analysis to determine if research or technology 

under development is “state of the world” versus “state of the 

art,” and revolutionary versus evolutionary. 

For example, if NASA were developing a Pentium 4 

processor and the rest of the world possessed Pentium 3 

processors, the technology could be considered evolutionary 

in nature, since Moore’s Law would lead us to believe the 

rest of the world would catch up with a Pentium 4 of their 

own in relatively short order. In this instance, the Pentium 3 

processors are state-of-the-world technology, and the Pentium 4 

is not a large enough order of magnitude improvement 

to be revolutionary or state of the art. If NASA were 

developing a Pentium 4 processor while the rest of the 

world possessed Commodore 64 processors, this technology 

would then be revolutionary since it represents orders of 

magnitude improvement. 

After conducting technical discussions with NASA and 

contractor subject-matter experts, the MCI team presents its 

findings and recommendations to NASA management for 

an MCI determination decision. If information is designated 

mission critical, the team then works with NASA management 

and Technology Protection Program personnel to develop 

the appropriate procedures to protect it. Protection does not 

necessarily mean the information or technology cannot be 

shared or disclosed. In most cases, it provides the foundation 

for NASA management to make informed decisions regarding 

appropriate dissemination. 

An MCI designation is not necessarily permanent. For 

example, during a recent assessment, a particular set of test results 

was deemed MCI by NASA management. This determination 

was largely based on the active steps a foreign entity was taking 

to obtain the information. When an acquisition decision was 

later made by NASA management to pursue another engineering 

solution, the MCI was no longer of great value to NASA or 

the foreign entity, so the Agency removed the mission-critical 

designation from the test results. 

In light of the information overload problem described by 

Gerstenmaier, the Technology Protection Program assists in 

identifying and protecting NASA’s information from unauthorized 

release or inadvertent disclosure. The team helps the NASA family 

understand and mitigate a multitude of concerns: 
ASK MAGAZINE | 15 

WITHIN THE SECuRITy ANd PRoTECTIoN dISCIPlINES, oNE AxIoM AlWAyS 

HoldS TRuE: THE bEST CouNTERMEASuRE To THREATS IS AN EduCATEd 

ANd ENGAGEd WoRKfoRCE. 

• How much of NASA-controlled information is 

inadvertently released outside approved channels 

because employees are overwhelmed by volumes of 

information? 

• How well-trained and equipped is NASA to “know” 

what would require protection? We are currently charged 

with protecting several categories of information such 

as export controlled, contractor proprietary, sensitive 

but unclassified, classified (such as confidential, secret, 

and top secret) information, and the recently codified 

MCI, just to name a few. 

• Does the NASA team (civilians and contractors) 

understand the nature and capabilities of those that 

wish to obtain our controlled information via nefarious 

means or by simply exploiting our information overload? 

When was the last time employees requested or received 

a threat briefing from N

equately prepa

 thousands 

 what should r

ASA counterintelligence? 

• Are we ad

to review

red and staffed as an agency 

of pages of information to 

determine eceive protection? 

• What arethe benefits and ramifications of controlling 

versus sharing critical NASA information? 

The Technology Protection Program helps streamline 

information dissemination by giving the NASA workforce 

guidance on the limits of sharing particular information. 

Identifying the specific information that requires protection 

makes information sharing easier and clearer. One of the major 

factors in the success of the NASA technology-protection model 

is the MCI team’s understanding of programs’ cost, schedule, 

and performance drivers. The entire technology-protection 

team respects NASA’s mission, history, and culture and 

works hard to minimize the impact of these essential security 

measures on programs. The program explains why particular 

information is of extreme value to the Agency and the nation 

and should not be shared outside established protocols. Within 

the security and protection disciplines, one axiom always holds 

true: the best countermeasure to threats is an educated and 

engaged workforce. 

To promote education and awareness of the Technology 

Protection Program, the team participates in meetings, 

including project control boards, quarterly conferences, and 

the PM Challenge. The team also provides tailored briefings 

to project element scientists, engineers, and management. The 

team and NASA strive to put programs and projects in direct 

control of their technology-protection activities. ●

ryan averBeCk is currently a PhD candidate completing his 

dissertation in computer and information security at Northcentral 

University and works as a principal technical manager at 

Concurrent Technologies Corporation, where he develops and 

implements research and technology protection programs for 

government and industry clients. 

JOHn Day is the security operations manager for United 

Space Alliance at Kennedy Space Center, Florida, where he is 

responsible for security and access control for the Space Shuttle. 

He also is the program manager for the United Space Alliance/ 

Concurrent Technologies Corporation team for the NASA 

Technology Protection Program. 

G. a. GaDDy is the principal technical manager of the 

Technology Protection and Management Office at Concurrent 

Technologies Corporation in Huntsville, Alabama. He has been 

a researcher for the National Academy of Sciences’ National 

Research Council at NASA Langley Research Center and a civil 

servant at the U.S. Army Research Laboratory. 
16 | ASK MAGAZINE | STORyUnmanning 

the Fire

Lines 

BY BRENT COBLEIgH
ASK MAGAZINE | 17

Ikhana flies a test mission with the Autonomous Modular Sensor 

mounted in a pod under the left wing. Ikhana is a Choctaw Native 

American word for intelligent, conscious, or aware. 

Photo Credit: NASA/Jim Ross 
18 | ASK MAGAZINE 

Ikhana piloting, system management, and FAA 

coordination were accomplished by the Dryden 

team members in the ground control station 

alongside the Ames team members, who monitored 

the AMS systems and wildfire imagery collection. 

On October 18, 2007, I received an e-mail from Thomas Zajkowski, remote-sensing analyst for 

the USDA Forest Service’s Remote-Sensing Application Center. It read, “Does Ikhana still have 

its wings? There are two ‘high-risk days’ (October 21–22) due to winds for the South Central 

Mountains and the Southern Mountains. If we do get a fire start, could we support it with a 20- to 

24-hour mission?” 

A red-flag warning had been issued by the United States 

National Weather Service, informing area firefighting and land 

management agencies that conditions were ideal for wildfire 

ignition and propagation in the Southern California area. 

During the prior year, the Ikhana team at Dryden Flight 

Research Center had run a marathon that started with the 

delivery of the unmanned science aircraft from the manufacturer, 

General Atomics Aeronautical Systems Inc., and culminated in 

the highly successful Western States Fire Mission. That mission 

demonstrated the advantages of using a long-duration unmanned 

aircraft system outfitted with an advanced infrared sensor to 

image wildfires in the western United States. We had met all the 

objectives and had already started aircraft modifications for the 

next experiment. So my response to Tom’s e-mail said, “Sorry 

guys—we held out as long as we could. We started grinding the 

paint and bondo channel along the wing this morning for the Fiber 

Optic Wing-Shaped Sensing System [an aeronautics experiment]. 

We won’t be able to reconfigure to the fire mission.” 

That weekend, wind-driven wildfires erupted all over 

Southern California, causing an initial evacuation of more 

than 500,000 people. Up to that point, our missions had been 

technology demonstrations, but the ongoing disaster put the 

project team members, our careful operational planning, and 

cutting-edge wildfire imaging technology to the test. 

Developing Ikhana 

Ikhana was a Predator-B aircraft that Dryden acquired to 

conduct remote-sensing Earth science studies and demonstrate 

new aeronautics technologies. For its first mission, Ikhana had 

been outfitted with the Ames Research Center–developed 

Autonomous Modular Sensor (AMS), an infrared line scanner 

that could see through the smoke of a wildfire to thermally 

image the hottest part of the fire’s front line and the warm 

embers left in the fire’s wake, and quickly deliver that imagery 

in a useful format to firefighters. 

The Western States Fire Mission was initiated by Dr. 

Vince Ambrosia from Ames. Vince, together with Everett 

Hinkley from the United States Department of Agriculture 

(USDA) Forest Service, brought together a team that included 

the National Interagency Fire Center, USDA Forest Service, 

Bureau of Land Management, and other government agencies 

responsible for combating and managing wildfires across the 

nation. These wildfire experts helped develop the requirements 

for the Western States Fire Mission and also served as the 

project’s stakeholders and customers. Vince’s vision was to 

bring the latest technologies together to increase the situational 

awareness of the frontline fire commanders in order to increase 

the safety of the fire crews and better allocate resources to the 

firefighting effort. 

Vince’s team at Ames focused their efforts in three main 

technology areas. The first was an advanced infrared line scanner 

capable of seeing through smoke and measuring the temperature 

on the ground with a resolution less than 1 degree. The system 

also included an onboard, real-time geo-rectification algorithm 

that combined the aircraft’s position and orientation to align the 

measured imagery with a three-dimensional terrain map. The 
Photo courtesy Brent Cobleigh 

ASK MAGAZINE | 19

second technology was a Collaborative Decision Environment 

that allowed fire command teams to rapidly overlay the measured 

infrared imagery, weather information, satellite data, and other 

information onto a Google Earth 3–D terrain map. The third 

technology focused on how to get the autonomously corrected 

imagery from the unmanned aircraft to the fire command teams 

in the shortest possible time, ideally less than ten minutes. Up 

to now, wildfire incident command teams had to wait until the 

imaging aircraft completed its mission before the imagery could 

be transmitted. 

In parallel with the Ames work, our team at Dryden 

focused on establishing the initial Ikhana flight operations and 

planning an unprecedented set of unmanned aircraft flight 

operations. The Dryden team had to complete the development 

of a mobile command center that integrated the pilot station 

with research-monitoring stations, satellite antenna systems, and 

fiber-optically connected command antennas near the runway. 

Several aircraft modifications were also required, including the 

integration of the under-wing AMS sensor pod, installation of 

instrumentation, and wiring systems. 

The Western States Fire Missions challenged the Dryden 

team to accomplish something that had never been done before: 

high-altitude (20,000+ ft.), long-duration (twenty hours or 

more), unmanned aircraft operations in the national airspace 

(airspace that is not segregated for military use), covering 

the entire western United States from the Pacific Ocean to 

Colorado and from the Mexican border to the Canadian border. 

We needed to be prepared to launch a mission to wherever the 

highest-priority wildfires might be located and do it within the 

national airspace, where regulations on how to safely operate 

unmanned aircraft have yet to be written. 

Through previous work with less-ambitious unmanned 

aircraft operations, the Dryden team had some experience—not 

all of it the good kind—that informed us what risk mitigation 

we needed to please the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) 

and our own Dryden Airworthiness and Flight Safety Review 

Board. We developed a fault tree to identify all the possible 

contributors to a loss of life, either in the air or on the ground, and 

used that information to focus our risk-mitigation strategies. 

In order to protect the public on the ground and the aircraft 

itself, the project identified more than 300 potential sites where 

Ikhana could divert in the event an emergency landing was 

required. The FAA restricted us from performing an emergency 

landing with Ikhana at public airports, so the project team 

WE NEEdEd To bE PREPAREd To 

lAuNCH A MISSIoN To WHEREVER THE 

HIGHEST-PRIoRITy WIldfIRES MIGHT bE 

loCATEd ANd do IT WITHIN THE NATIoNAl 

AIRSPACE, WHERE REGulATIoNS oN HoW 

To SAfEly oPERATE uNMANNEd AIRCRAfT 

HAVE yET To bE WRITTEN. 

identified abandoned runways, dry lakebeds, farm fields, and, 

in some cases, remote terrain to either land the aircraft or crash 

it safely away from the public. A book containing satellite 

photos of the 300 sites along with important information on 

the quality of the site was compiled and kept in the mission 

control center during all flights. The Dryden range safety office 

carefully defined the moderate to heavy population centers in 

the western United States that were declared no-fly zones during 
20 | ASK MAGAZINE Imagery of the Santiago fire in the mountains of 

Orange County is draped over a 3 D Google Earth 

terrain map showing the active fire (yellow), previously 

burned areas (red), and unburned areas (green). Image Credit: NASA 
ASK MAGAZINE | 21

fRoM dAy oNE, EVERy MEMbER of THE MulTIAGENCy TEAM HAd THE SAME GoAl: 

dEMoNSTRATING THE uTIlITy of A loNG-duRATIoN uNMANNEd AIRCRAfT SySTEM 

ouTfITTEd WITH AN AdVANCEd INfRAREd IMAGER oN THE MANAGEMENT of WIldfIRES. 

the missions. The project team also increased the number of 

batteries in the aircraft to allow up to three hours of flight time in 

case of an electrical system failure. In most situations, this would 

give Ikhana enough time to come back to Dryden or divert to 

one of two military fields that had agreed to allow emergency 

landings. The team also developed a moving map display that 

overlaid Ikhana’s position and satellite weather information on 

traditional aviation navigation maps so the pilots would have 

sufficient information to manage the mission. 

The Dryden operations team worked closely with the FAA’s 

Unmanned Aircraft Systems Program Office and air traffic 

controllers from all affected areas to come up with acceptable 

mission plans that culminated in the issuance of a Certificate of 

Authorization (COA) that permitted these unmanned aircraft 

operations in the national airspace. With the COA in hand, 

the multiagency Western States Fire Mission team was able 

to complete four long-duration wildfire-mapping missions in 

August and September 2007. 

After significant air traffic control rerouting around 

dangerous thunderstorms over Nevada, the second flight 

mapped wildfires as far from Dryden as Idaho, Montana, and 

Wyoming. The longest mission lasted twenty hours and covered 

more than 3,200 miles. Along the route, Ikhana conducted 

high-resolution infrared mapping of up to eleven wildfires, 

passing the position-corrected imagery to fire commanders 

within minutes of acquisition. Our USDA Forest Service 

partners sent experts to some of the incident commands to help 

interpret the advanced imagery and instruct them on the use of 

the Collaborative Decision Environment. 

The response from the fire commanders on the ground 

was immediate. The imagery was extremely useful for both 

strategic and tactical deployment of resources to combat the 

wildfires. In one case the incident commander credited the near 

real-time imagery with stopping the deployment of firefighters 

to a dangerous position between the massive Zaca fire and 

a secondary fire that was to that point unknown due to the 

rough mountainous terrain and the smoke. In another case, 

the imagery uncovered an unknown fire front (8 miles long) 

that was headed toward the town of Ojai. They immediately 

dispatched a team to light an 8-mile-long backfire to intercept 

the new fire. The Ventura County fire chief was emphatic that 

we had a great tool. 

After the September 27 mission, Vince declared the 

Western States Fire Mission complete, having met or surpassed 

all its objectives. Over the next three weeks, the multiagency 

team reviewed data and caught up on well-deserved sleep. 

Back at Dryden, we began Ikhana modifications for the next 

flight experiment. 

Responding to the Crisis 

On Monday, October 23, it became clear that Ikhana needed 

to respond to the Southern California wildfire emergency, and 

I pulled together a team to identify and implement a quick 

method to patch the wing modifications that had been started. 

Simultaneously, Vince and Everett spun up the Ames and Forest 

Service teams and began deploying them to Southern California. 

The FAA quickly granted us an emergency extension to our 

COA that allowed us to fly within 10 miles of the Mexican 

border. By midday, we received a request from the California 

Governor’s Office of Emergency Services to use Ikhana for 

airborne wildfire imagery. A day later, after fixing a failed 

hard drive in the AMS imager, Ikhana took off for a nine-hour 

mission that imaged ten major wildfires across five counties. We 

continued to follow our range safety rules by flying up to, but 

not over, the populated area boundaries. We relied on the AMS 

sensor’s capabilities to image 3 miles to the sides of the aircraft, 

allowing us to collect imagery where the wildfire had traveled 

through canyons and into neighborhoods. 

Over five days, Ikhana flew a total of four nine-hour 

flights. These missions imaged wildfires that surrounded the 

highly populated areas of the Los Angeles basin and multiple 

areas surrounding San Diego. Near real-time imagery and 
of emergency, air traffic control gave Ikhana flight priority in 

Image Credit: NASA 

Ikhana flight paths flown during the four 

2007 Western States Fire Missions. 

22 | ASK MAGAZINE 

streaming video was delivered through the aircraft’s satellite link 

to wildfire incident commanders, the California Emergency 

Operations Center, Air Force Northern Command, and the 

Federal Emergency Management Agency (which also paid for 

several of the flights). Close cooperation with these agencies 

resulted in changes to imaging priorities while Ikhana was in 

flight. The cooperation and coordination with FAA to make 

these flights occur was outstanding. Because of a declared state 

the congested Southern California airspace. 

The 2007 Western States Fire Missions received multiple 

NASA Group Achievement Awards and the Association of 

Unmanned Vehicle Systems International’s Operations Award. 

From my perspective, the success of the project was due to 

many factors. The first was the decision to build a strong 

and lasting partnership between the technology developers 

(NASA) and the technology users (USDA Forest Service, 

Bureau of Land Management, and others). This partnership 

was as strong during the requirements phase as during the 

operations phase. 

The second success factor was pulling together 

organizations with expertise in each of the disciplines required 

by the project and giving each full responsibility for their 

contribution. The Ames team focused on the wildfire sensor 

system, automated data processing, networking, and mission 

priorities. The Dryden team led the aircraft integration, flight 

operations (with help from General Atomics), and mission 

safety. The Forest Service focused on the prioritization of the 

wildfire resources, the needs of fire incident commanders, and 

interpretation of the imagery. 

The third factor was keeping the entire team focused on 

the goal. From day one, every member of the multiagency team 

had the same goal: demonstrating the utility of a long-duration 

unmanned aircraft system outfitted with an advanced infrared 

imager on the management of wildfires. Staying focused on 

this goal helped strip away the “nice to haves” from the absolute 

requirements. The project team would have prized additional 

science sensors on the aircraft, improved Collaborative Decision 

Environment capabilities, or added flexibility in the FAAapproved mission plans, but not at the expense of taking imagery 

of snow-covered mountains (as we often joked) because we were 

six months late for the fire season. 

I look back at the Western States Fire Missions as one of 

the highlights of my career, not just because of the project’s 

successes, but also due to the chance to work with some of the 

most talented and dedicated public servants. ●

Brent COBleiGH was the project manager for the Ikhana 

unmanned aircraft system, from procurement through initial 

flight operations. He currently serves as the Exploration Mission 

Director at Dryden Flight Research Center. 
INSIGHT | ASK MAGAZINE | 23 

INTERvIEW WITH 

Alexander 

Laufer 

BY DON COHEN 

Dr. Alexander Laufer is professor of civil engineering at the 

Technion (Israel Institute of Technology) and director of 

the Center for Project Leadership at Columbia University. 

His books include the recently published Breaking the Code 

of Project Management. He is also the former editor-in-chief 

of ASK. Don Cohen spoke with him at the College of 

Engineering at Columbia. 

cOHEN: How would you sum up the Many of them are what Ronald Heifetz 

central idea of your new book? would call technical problems that one 

can solve with a set of rules, or with 

LAufER: The key is that projects must available technology. But more than a few 

be led, not just managed. We need both are what he calls “adaptive problems”— 

leadership and management, but right now problems that are not well-defined and 

the prevailing paradigm is that projects are cannot be solved with a set of rules. 

managed—that planning and control can The current repertoire of responses is 

solve all the problems. My studies have inadequate. Solving adaptive problems 

shown me again and again that the best requires learning—at times difficult 

projectsarefirstofallledandthenmanaged, learning—and often requires changing 

or led in order to be manageable. work patterns as well as other kinds 

of innovation. To meet these adaptive 

cOHEN: How do you define leadership? challenges, the project manager must 

adjust the plans and practices or sometimes 

LAufER: Leadership is necessary to create even shape the project environment. And 

change. Project leadership is primarily he or she has to do it with a group of people 

about challenging the status quo. Because who usually don’t have much experience 

of the dynamic environment they exist in, working together, who have different 

projects are plagued with many problems. skills, functions, cultures, and interests. 
24 | ASK MAGAZINE 

I LEARNED the hard way THAT THE oN-SITE PRACTITIoNERS
 

KNEW BETTER AND did not rush to prepare DETAILED
 

PLANS Too SooN, WHEN information is still missing
 

AND CHANGING.
 

Finding a solution to adaptive 

problems with a group doing a unique and 

innovative task in a dynamic environment 

by challenging the status quo requires 

leadership. The project leader doesn’t 

want to challenge the status quo every 

day. People are not used to adapting every 

day, so the leader needs to be selective. 

But in our dynamic environment, every 

once in a while it is necessary. Solving 

these adaptive problems renders the rest 

of the project manageable, and this is 

indeed what allows the leader to apply 

standard project management practices. 

The importance of both leadership and 

management to the success of the project 

is the theme of two Forums on Leadership 

being held this summer at NASA HQ 

in Washington, D.C., and at Columbia 

University in New York City. 

cOHEN: Can you give me an example 

of a project leader challenging the 

status quo? 

LAufER: There’s a story in Shared Voyage 

[written with Ed Hoffman and Todd 

Post]. When Terry Little from the U.S. 

Air Force was given a project because the 

previous project manager was released, 

the key requirement was to finish all the 

preparation needed to be able to assign 

the contract to two of the five contending 

contractors as soon as possible. Little told 

his team that they should be ready in six 

months. He explained later that he could 

have chosen seven or eight months, but 

he wanted them to work differently—not 

just harder or faster. He wanted them 

to learn to do things differently. He 

challenged the entire team to let go of the 

status quo. Another example: Joan Salute 

from NASA managed a project to study 

the effect of reentry on experimental 

materials. The air force wanted to restrict 

the use of the findings of her mission, but 

she said no, and eventually she prevailed. 

People in her community didn’t like it, 

but she said, “I own the mission. This is 
ASK MAGAZINE | 25 

my work, and this is what I will do. I’m 

working for the science community.” She 

challenged the status quo. 

cOHEN: As you say, that’s not the kind of 

thing you can do every day. 

LAufER: Which brings us to something else 

that unfortunately is not well addressed 

in our literature: the need to exercise 

judgment. Judgment can be improved 

through experience. Better judgment 

in the context of adaptive problems is 

often improved by being exposed to a 

variety of challenging experiences, and 

by reflecting on these experiences while 

paying attention to the unique contexts 

surrounding them. 

cOHEN: Does the drive for efficiency get 

in the way of reflection? 

LAufER: This is the common perception. 

However, one must achieve both efficiency 

and effectiveness. In stable conditions 

and in the short run, efficiency should 

be stressed. As uncertainty increases and 

the time horizon becomes longer, other 

dimensions, like impact on the customer 

and business success, become more 

important. The need to find the right 

balance between the various dimensions 

requires reflection. 

cOHEN: Your interest in leadership, 

adaptation, and judgment is quite 

different from project theories that 

emphasize control. 

LAufER: Most of our current theories 

were developed primarily by engineers 

almost half a century ago and have not 

been updated significantly. In recent 

years, we are witnessing an earnest 

quest for a new paradigm, and many 

theoretical articles are being published 

on this subject. We are beginning to see 

experts from other disciplines—business, 

management, organizational behavior— 

becoming involved in research on 

projects. I believe that soon enough, 

especially once researchers focus more on 

empirical studies of actual projects and 

less on developing models based on the 

old paradigm, we will see some useful 

changes that will also stress the need for 

adaptive leadership. 

cOHEN: How did you arrive at your ideas 

about projects? 

LAufER: Most of my ideas are based on 

learning directly from practitioners, 

usually from the best of them, and these 

findings were always tested and refined by 

feedback received in my consulting work. 

This mode of research started through 

some disturbing observations early in my 

career as a researcher. I was a typical civil 

engineer. I spent seven years in the military 

working as a structural engineer and a 

project manager of construction projects. 

Then I came to Austin, to the University 

of Texas, to do my PhD in construction 

management. I taught for a couple of 

years at Texas A&M. When my wife and 

I went back to Israel, I went to work for 

a construction company, but I had caught 

the research bug, so I joined the Technion 

in Haifa but continued to teach and do 

research during the summers in the states. 

Based on my construction experience 

and my teaching at Texas A&M, I 

found that something didn’t click. I 

didn’t understand, for example, why my 

graduate students who were applying 

various industrial engineering techniques 

to improve productivity on site would 

come at the end of the semester bragging 

about the detailed construction plans they 

created, something I thought should have 

been already prepared by the construction 

people themselves at the beginning of 

construction. I learned the hard way 

that the on-site practitioners knew better 

and did not rush to prepare detailed 

plans too soon, when information is still 

missing and changing. Similar incidents 

later on convinced me to start working 

closely with practitioners, and I quickly 

learned to reverse the question I used to 

ask. Instead of, “Why don’t practitioners 

use what researchers know?” I began to 

ask, “Why don’t researchers use what 

practitioners know?” 

Later, I was invited to be a consultant 

for Procter and Gamble for three years. I 

came to share my new planning concepts, 

to change the mind-sets of project 

managers at P&G. But I found that it’s 

very difficult to do that. I also found that 

the best project managers there already 

applied my new concepts without always 

being able to explicitly describe them. I 

decided my life would be easier if I could 

capture their stories and share them with 

the rest of the community. We captured 

seventy stories of thirty-six project 

managers within Procter and Gamble, 

and in 1994 we published them in a book. 

The surprising thing is that these stories 

are still read and shared within P&G. 

cOHEN: Trying to convince people 

with stories is more effective than 

frameworks and theories? 
26 | ASK MAGAZINE 

LAufER: Absolutely. Often you can try to 

influence and persuade people with an 

argument until you are blue in the face, 

but stories capture people’s attention. 

Stories can convey complex messages in 

an easily digestible form, making them 

easier to remember while also stimulating 

curiosityandinducingreflection.Ilearned 

later on, especially through my extensive 

collaborative work with Ed Hoffman, 

that people change their minds based on 

action and reflection, and stories are an 

excellent trigger for reflection. 

cOHEN: over the years that you’ve 

observed projects, have you seen a shift 

in how they are carried out? 

LAufER: Yes, but not a sufficient one. 

People are much more results-oriented. 

They don’t necessarily use the right tools 

or theories, but I see a lot of pressure 

for deliverables. I also see a great deal of 

interest in trust and in the unique context 

of each project, but still not in a wellorganized fashion. Experienced people 

are aware of the limitations of planning 

tools; only the beginners are not. 

Unfortunately, for the moment they have 

nothing better. In software development, 

on the other hand, the agile movement 

is offering very innovative and practical 

approaches. 

cOHEN: What needs to be done to 

generate a sufficient shift in the way 

projects are done? 

LAufER: I believe there are a couple of 

things that should be done. Schools 

and universities should do empirical 

studies of real projects rather than just 

focus on theories and tools. They need 

to come up with paradigms that have to 

do more with practice and experience. 

We are all influenced by paradigms; a 

powerful article by Sumantra Ghoshal 

describes how bad theories kill good 

practices. I think this happens in project 

management as well, so we need better 

theories. Business schools in general, and 

especially in this country, do not have a 

project management function. The field 

of project management can be found in 

operations or organizational behavior or 

in management,butmostbusiness schools 

do not have a full-time faculty member 

focusing on project management. We also 

need executives to pay more attention to 

project management. 

cOHEN: In what ways? 

LAufER: In selecting and developing 

project managers, in fostering a learning 

environment and embracing a new 

culture. I think it will happen one way 

or another because the world is becoming 

even more volatile, unpredictable, and 

chaotic, and the competition is going 

to be even tougher. People will have to 

produce more innovative products faster 

and cheaper. They will have to get beyond 

simple planning and control. It’s just a 

question of how fast, and which country, 

industry, and organizations will gain a 

competitive advantage by being the first. 

cOHEN: Do you see people in projects 

thinking consciously about the knowledge 

they need? 

LAufER: Many people related to projects 

are keen to learn because they are 

aware that the context of each project 

is different, and they can enrich their 

own arsenal. I saw tremendous openness 

to learning at Procter and Gamble and 

NASA—people listening to case studies, 

analyses of projects, and stories because 

they realized that this is what they need. 

People craved coming to the two and a 

half days held twice a year [at Masters 

Forums] because they wanted to know 

how things were done at other centers and 

in the air force or navy. They felt hunger 

for this kind of knowledge—not so much 

general “lessons learned,” but knowledge 

about specific projects and their context 

as presented to them by their peers. 

cOHEN: Are you suggesting that this 

knowledge is different—maybe less easily 

definable—than typical lessons learned? 

LAufER: Lessons learned in science and 

engineering are important and can be 

easily generalized. But if you take a 

typical list of fifty project management 

lessons and attempt to apply them to 

your specific project, you may find that 

twenty-five of them contradict the other 

twenty-five. In management, including 

project management, most lessons are not 

universal. It all depends on the context, so 

you want to learn the lessons within their 

specific context and then adjust them to 

your own project context. 

cOHEN: Let’s talk a little about 

geographically distributed projects. 

Can people work successfully together 

virtually? 

LAufER: Don Margolies of NASA said, 

“Location, location, location.” Goddard 
ASK MAGAZINE | 27 

IN MANAGEMENT, INCLUDING PRoJECT MANAGEMENT, most 

lessons are not universal. IT ALL DEPENDS on the context, 

So YoU WANT To LEARN THE LESSoNS WITHIN THEIR 

SPECIFIC CoNTExT AND THEN adjust them to your own 

project context. 

and Johns Hopkins are twenty minutes 

apart. He said the fact that we could drive 

over there or they could come to us and 

meet face to face was gold. Many projects 

are done internationally and you cannot 

drag people all over the world, but meeting 

at the beginning of the project to establish 

trust and acquaintance is crucial. When 

you pick up the phone to talk to your 

good friend that you established trust with 

in the army, there is no need to be there. 

Some companies are very much aware of 

this. Early on, at the planning stage, the 

entire team of sixty or seventy people will 

be located at the client’s headquarters. 

Whentheprojectmovestothedesignstage, 

the entire team will be moved together to 

the designer’s location. They understand 

the significance of teamwork and trust, 

which is most naturally developed by 

being together. 

cOHEN: Many companies don’t want to 

spend the money to meet and think they 

can do everything virtually. 

LAufER: Nowadays, requirements are 

still shifting when projects start; the 

projects suffer from change and uncertainty 

throughout their life. We need to exchange 

information with the other party as soon as 

possible, as freely as possible, and as fully as 

possible. This happens only when trust is 

high. You cannot establish trust virtually. 

You can work virtually throughout the 

project once you establish it. But trust does 

not last forever; you have to maintain it by 

meeting periodically. 

cOHEN: John Seely Brown has described 

the purpose of those periodic meetings 

as “recalibrating.” 

LAufER: Indeed. In our current dynamic 

environment, projects suffer from a 

wide variety of changes; therefore, 

even a trusting team must “recalibrate” 

periodically to sustain teamwork. 

cOHEN: What do you see as NASA’s 

project strengths and weaknesses? 

LAufER: NASA has some of the best people. 

NASA has the advantage of having the 

coolest projects on Earth, which attracts 

excellent people. On the other hand, I’d 

say that while some centers are very well 

advanced and foster a culture of trust, some 

are not. In my opinion, the biggest hurdle 

for applying these ideas of leadership and 

adaptation is a non-trust culture. Trust 

and distrust are self-fulfilling prophecies. 

If you behave to people with distrust, 

suddenly you both are sure that this is the 

only way to behave. 

cOHEN: What does NASA need to do 

to meet the current challenges of its 

ambitious projects? 

LAufER: At NASA I would invest in social 

capital because people come here for thirty 

years, so the return is huge. I would also 

try to decouple large projects into smaller 

ones so if something happened I could 

still continue, absorbing uncertainty. I 

would also try as much as possible to think 
28 | ASK MAGAZINE 

about how I can use the project learning 

for innovations applied to industry. I 

wouldn’t focus only on the long term. I 

would look for deliverables that could be 

produced in half a year or a year. I would 

almost force myself to come up with a list 

of innovations that can be delivered at the 

end of every year working together with 

private companies. I would force myself 

to look for small wins and not focus too 

much on something that may or may not 

be eventually pursued. 

cOHEN: At NASA and elsewhere there’s a 

tension—maybe a necessary tension— 

between standard procedures and 

flexibility. 

LAufER: I am a strong believer in the need 

for written processes and procedures. Even 

unique operations like projects share many 

regular, repetitive patterns of action. These 

written procedures prevent reinventing the 

wheel,savetime andenergy,andcontribute 

significantly to the parties’ ability to 

maintain cooperation efficiently, even in 

the face of uncertainty. The procedure 

manuals in advanced organizations are 

often prepared by the most experienced 

practicing project managers in the company, 

not by staff people, and procedures are brief 

and simple, allowing for and even 

encouraging flexibility. Moreover, these 

manuals explicitly recognize that the 

procedures are not intended to cover all 

possible situations, but rather only the most 

common ones. In recent years, project 

managers at P&G, for example, have 

had the number of procedures markedly 

reduced from eighteen technical standards 

and thirty-two standard operating 

procedures to only four of each. 

cOHEN: Before we finish, would you sum 

up the elements of successful project 

management? 

LAufER: If I think about the new world of 

project management, I’d say it starts with 

ongoing learning. Such learning is the 

key to effective project planning when 

information is missing or constantly 

changing, as well as to reflection during 

and after the project. So learning is a 

constant theme. Second is judgment, 

which always must take into account 

the unique project context. Context is a 

key because, contrary to the old project 

management paradigm, there is no “one 

best way.” Number three: trust. There 

is no success in projects without trust. 

Number four is being action-oriented, 

focused on doing, on the deliverable. 

I like to quote the Persian proverb: 

“Thinking well is wise; planning well is 

wiser; doing well is wisest and best of all.” 

Number five, the riskiest one, is courage. 

It’s not the same courage as on the field 

of battle; you’re not going to die. But you 

may risk your esteem or your career. And 

you need the judgment to know when 

to challenge the status quo, while not 

risking the project just because you want 

to be heroic. Projects need leaders, not 

heroes. ●
Eight torodial magnets can be seen on the huge ATLAS detector with the calorimeter before it is moved into the middle of the detector. 

This calorimeter will measure the energies of particles produced when protons collide in the center of the detector. 

Photo Credit: The ATLAS

Experiment at CERN, atlas.ch 

A MODEL fOR 

BY KRISzTINA HOLLY 

STORy | ASK MAGAZINE | 29 

As a leader, imagine trying to manage more than 7,000 scientists from eighty-five countries around 

the world—with their own languages, cultures, and expertise—on a twenty-year collaboration to 

create the most complex system ever built. 
Photo Credit: The ATLAS Experiment at CERN, atlas.ch 

Technicians mount power distribution 

cables onto a cylinder that houses nine disks 

with silicon sensors while assembling an 

endcap of the ATLAS silicon strip detector. 

30 | ASK MAGAZINE 

Now imagine the goal is to recreate the conditions existing 

a billionth of a second after the big bang. And none of the 

experts on your team will get personal credit for changing our 

fundamental understanding of the universe. And, by the way, 

you don’t have control of anyone’s paycheck. 

It might seem like an impossible management situation. But 

that is exactly what is going on at the Large Hadron Collider 

(LHC) at the European Organization for Nuclear Research 

(CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland. 

The LHC has garnered some attention to date: a catastrophic 

accident delayed the experiments for a year, myths of black holes 

still plague the program, and the just-released movie Angels and 

Demons features a fictitious “antimatter bomb” from CERN. 

But these issues distract us from the real story. 

Beyond the atom smashing, leaders have special reason 

to examine what is going on in Geneva. CERN’s remarkable 

innovation culture is what makes their extraordinary 

advancements possible. Most importantly, we all can apply these 

same lessons to stimulate innovation in our own organizations, 

no matter how big or how small. 

Collective ownership 

The LHC is a wonder to behold: a circular tunnel 27 km in 

length with four enormous detectors, 100 meters entirely 

below ground. The detector for one of the four experiments, 

called ATLAS, weighs as much as the Eiffel Tower, has about 

20 million components, uses 3,000 km of cables and 1,000 km 

of piping, and requires some 5 million lines of computing code 

to run. The Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) weighs twice as 

much, and “although it is the size of a cathedral,” CERN officials 

explain, “it contains detectors as precise as Swiss watches.” 

The machine has shattered technological frontiers. The team 

has put together the largest supercomputer on Earth, which will 

crunch 15 petabytes of data every year using a grid of 100,000 

processors around the world. They have built the world’s most 

powerful magnets, pushed the limits on communication speeds 

for radiation-hard electronics, and built a silicon detector twice 

as large as anything else ever built before. They have developed 

new technologies in cryogenics, superconductivity, vacuum 

systems, heat dissipation, and so on. 

One would assume that a project of this magnitude would 

require decisive, authoritative leadership; a clear-cut, top-down 

management hierarchy; and a culture of individual successes 

and proprietary approaches. 

But there are no directors. No chairmen or presidents. No 

corner offices. In fact, the main building is cylindrical, with 

every office the same size. Instead of “chief scientist” or “CEO,” 

the leader for each experiment is unassumingly called the 

“spokesperson.” A “resource coordinator” tracks the allocation 

of money and people, which come from eighty-five different 

countries with almost as many languages and currencies. 

PEoPlE doN’T fAIl, ExPERIMENTS do. 

THE SCIENTIfIC METHod VIEWS fAIluRES 

AS lEARNING oPPoRTuNITIES RATHER 

THAN CAuSES To PoINT fINGERS, ANd 

THIS ATTITudE PERVAdES THE CulTuRE 

AT CERN. 

When I first visited him in his office, ATLAS’s resource 

coordinator, Markus Nordberg, dropped the hefty four-inchthick binder tracking the resource allocations on the desk 

between us. No question his responsibilities run deep. But 

instead of making all the decisions himself, he nurtures them 

through constant discussions with collaborators. Nevermind 
Photo Credit: The ATLAS Experiment at CERN, atlas.ch 

ASK MAGAZINE | 31 

Collaborators from the ATLAS 

experiment, the largest particle 

detector in the world, are seen in 

CERN s new building 40. 

that he has an advanced degree in physics and a PhD in business 

administration, Markus humbly claims his role is to “stand like 

a shepherd behind the troops, who are the real experts.” 

Later, I met Bob Cousins, deputy spokesperson for the 

CMS, who explained that the young and experienced alike are 

valued for their input: “People volunteer and say ‘I’ll do that’ for 

any task they think they can do.” 

Perhaps it’s worth noting that the concept behind the LHC 

was born literally over a potluck lunch in 1984. Ubiquitous 

gathering spaces throughout CERN serve as giant “watercoolers” 

for ideas to be shared. There is a sense that anything is possible, 

it just needs to be imagined and agreed upon. (And there is no 

question that good European coffee and pastries help fuel the 

discussion!) 

The leaders create the framework for people to share and 

contribute. Different perspectives are valued, and decisions are 

made with input from everyone. How does this happen? With 

weeklong summits, held three to four times a year; thousands of 

lesser meetings, which are optional and open to the public; and 

an online system that allows collaborators to browse agendas 

and watch presentations remotely. As a result, the best ideas can 

be advanced. This may seem like a lot of extra overhead, but 

the investment up front eliminates the costly issues that would 

surface later if team members were not on board. Everyone feels 

ownership and commitment to the project from the beginning. 

Trust 

The entire scientific community at CERN operates with an 

inherent and profound sense of trust. Trust in the process. Trust 

in their colleagues. Trust in the science. 

This trust emerges from a mutual “code of ethics” built on 

a culture of reciprocity. Because their community is close-knit 

and their most valuable currency is reputation, experimental 

physicists around the world know who contributes. Conversely, 

the few who have been too proprietary with their ideas have 

been ostracized. It’s like a crowd-sourced performance review. 

Notably, CERN promotes the “open access” movement in 

scientific publishing; anyone can access the results, which are 

posted to the CERN library site (library.web.cern.ch/library/ 

Welcome.html). 

Experimentation 

People don’t fail, experiments do. The scientific method views 

failures as learning opportunities rather than causes to point 

fingers, and this attitude pervades the culture at CERN. Notably, 

after one of the supercooled magnets disastrously exploded last 

September and delayed the experiments for a year, the CERN 

scientists took a hard look and learned from the problem, but 

so far no one has been fired. This kind of environment is the 

foundation for risk-taking and innovation. 

It may seem like there is no room for taking risks on a 

project of such great scale, but, in fact, the project has evolved 

through a well-organized yet organic process of experimentation 

and peer review. 

CMS and ATLAS both needed to make several very 

fundamental design choices in the early 1990s, such as what 

technology to use for the magnets. But they did not make a 

decision, build it, and hope for the best fifteen years later. Failure 

at that level would definitely be disastrous. Instead, two or three 

teams for each experiment were given budgets to prototype 

different technologies in parallel. After numerous iterations, CMS 

and ATLAS made their final bets based on years of designing, 

building, testing—and, yes, sometimes failing. Notably, the 

scientists building and advocating for the other technologies are 

valued and most are still working on the LHC. 

Shared Vision 

Perhaps the most memorable takeaway from my visit to CERN 

is how the scientists seem unrelentingly driven and dedicated 

to the same goal. George Brandenburg, former director of the 

Harvard High Energy Physics Lab, moved from Cambridge to 

Geneva to see the ATLAS project come together. Over espresso, 
32 | ASK MAGAZINE 

A view inside the liquid argon calorimeter endcap. 
Photo Credit: The ATLAS Experiment at CERN, atlas.ch

ASK MAGAZINE | 33 

he mused that because so many scientists have contributed to 

the project, it will be very difficult for anyone on the team to 

win the Nobel Prize. But it doesn’t seem to matter. Somehow 

thousands of experts manage to keep their egos in check and 

collaborate. No matter what happens, they all have a common 

yardstick to measure everything and make decisions: what is best 

for the physics. In business or any other endeavor, this would 

translate to having an ambitious yet attainable vision for the 

organization that is embraced by the grassroots and embodied 

by the leadership. 

There is a risk here: that we all look at the “organism” 

called CERN and think we can’t learn anything because it is 

such a unique place. They make it look so easy, as though the 

LHC runs itself. But taking a deeper look at its history and the 

personalities, we realize that it takes careful leadership to make 

it all work. 

Of course, egos do clash and people have a hard time 

giving up their ideas at times. And there is spirited competition 

between ATLAS and CMS to be the first to discover the Higgs 

particle. But the leaders cleverly avoid wasting energy on trying 

to control everything; they instead focus on nurturing the right 

environment for innovation. 

As I spoke with the scientists around CERN, I was struck 

by the palpable sense of wonder and humility about being part 

of one of the most significant advancements in scientific history. 

But I was also struck by how simple, yet revolutionary, their 

approach to innovation seems. 

Simple enough that we could all try it. ●

Thank you to Markus Nordberg, Robert Cousins, and George 

Brandenburg, who contributed to this article. A shorter version 

of this piece originally appeared in Businessweek.com. 

krisztina “z” HOlly is vice provost for innovation and executive 

director of the University of Southern California (USC) Stevens 

Institute for Innovation. She is a serial entrepreneur with a BS and 

MS in mechanical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of 

Technology (MIT). Prior to USC, she was founding executive director of 

MIT’s Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation. 
34 | ASK MAGAZINE | INSIGHT 

Innovating to Fly in Cleaner Skies
 

BY KERRY ELLIS 

Photo courtesy Pratt & Whitney 

The Pratt & Whitney PurePower PW1000G engine was put through its paces 

during 250 hours of ground testing for component performance and acoustics 

conducted at Pratt & Whitney s advanced test facility in West Palm Beach, Fla. 
ASK MAGAZINE | 35 

Before my conversation with Alan Epstein, the new—and first—vice president of technology and 

environment at Pratt & Whitney, my only concern about my flight out of the country this summer 

was whether I’d board on time. Now I know that my air travel will be among the nearly 10 million 

flights taking off from U.S. airports this year, pushing out 2 billion metric tons of CO2

, consuming 

about 20 billion gallons of jet fuel, and roaring out 91 to 95 decibels of noise. With Boeing and 

Airbus predicting that air travel will continue to grow 4 to 5 percent per year for the next thirty 

years, it’s no wonder Pratt & Whitney and the aviation industry as a whole are dedicated to 

finding more environmentally friendly ways to fly. 

In the past the aviation industry has concerned itself with 

compliance and environmental regulations, such as meeting 

noise and nitrogen oxide emission standards required by the 

International Civil Aviation Organization. There are several 

regulations with which the industry must comply, but with 

climate change concerns—and the industry itself—growing 

steadily, the focus is shifting from mere compliance to actively 

pursuing environmental improvements. A large part of Pratt 

& Whitney’s response to this challenge was the creation of 

Epstein’s current position. “In previous decades, our predecessors 

in aviation thought you could negotiate environmental 

standards; they were secondary. The environment is now 

nonnegotiable, and it’s very clear the environment is as important 

as safety,” said Epstein. 

One of the ways Pratt & Whitney is making environmental 

safety a priority is in the development of its new PurePower 

PW1000G engine, which uses an innovative geared turbofan 

the company says will reduce noise, fuel consumption, and 

CO2 emissions. Jet engines rely on a fan to pull air into a 

combustion chamber, where it ignites with fuel before it’s 

pushed through a turbine to create thrust. Fans and turbines 

perform better at different speeds, but in existing engines 

the two are connected by a shaft, forcing them to turn at the 

same speed and significantly reducing the efficiency of both. 

Pratt & Whitney’s new gearbox allows the fan and turbine to 

rotate independently at their optimal speeds. 

In addition to the gearbox, which required developing 

a super-efficient and lightweight gear, Pratt & Whitney also 

developed a larger fan and lightweight ultra-low-drag nacelle, 

or engine housing, for its PurePower engine. “Any one of those 

three technologies gives about a 2 percent reduction in fuel 

burn,” explained Epstein, “but if we have the three technologies 

together, it doesn't equal a 6 percent reduction, it equals 

15 percent.” The PW1000G engine is in the final stages of 

initial design with engine certification scheduled in late 2011, 

supporting the engine’s 2013 entry into use on the Bombardier 

CSeries and Mitsubishi Regional Jet. 

Innovation Isn’t Cheap ... 

Developing cutting-edge technology to change how an entire 

industry operates is not a cheap undertaking, but senior 

management at Pratt & Whitney believe in the investment, 

which is a big reason why Epstein left his position as a professor 

at Massachusetts Institute of Technology to join the company. 

“These products take a billion or two to develop, and 

this company had already spent about $250 million over two 

or three years on research and development, before they even 

had a customer,” Epstein said. “In engine development, you 
Airbus test engineers 

conducted a rigorous 27 flight, 

100 hour test of the PW1000G 

engine on an Airbus owned 

A340 test aircraft in Toulouse, 

France, in late 2008. The 

flights measured performance, 

acoustics, and operation under 

high stress maneuvers and 

included approximately sixty 

high angle airplane maneuvers 

with up to 2.1 G s of force. 

Photo courtesy Pratt & Whitney 

36 | ASK MAGAZINE 

can spend $2 million every day, and it’s hard to spend it wisely. 

But if you spend a few thousand a day five years before 

development, the development goes much more smoothly.” 

This practice of long-term research and development is 

commonly known as technology readiness, a concept NASA 

developed in the eighties with its technology readiness levels, 

and Pratt & Whitney continues to follow it by investing in 

research for future technology that will eventually improve 

upon and replace innovations currently in development. But 

first they have to finish developing the geared turbofan and 

convincing customers this new technology is economically and 

environmentally beneficial. 

... or Easy 

“This is the problem with innovation: the customer doesn’t have 

a backup if ours doesn’t work,” said Epstein. “If we just had a 

‘me, too’ engine, our airframe customers could say, ‘All right, 

we’ll buy your engine and a competitor’s engine, and if yours 

doesn’t deliver, we’ve got the competitor’s just in case.’ But if we 

have an innovative concept that looks and operates differently, 

then the customer has no backup,” he explained. Because of 

this, customers need a higher level of assurance that the new 

technology is ready to fly. And the best way to do that is to 

actually fly it. 

“As an engineering professor, I didn’t understand the 

value of flight tests,” Epstein explained. “We’d done several 

wind-tunnel and other tests and answered all the engineering 

questions. What could we learn flying—which is a lot more 

expensive—that we couldn’t by running a few more hours on a 

test stand?” A lot, it turns out. 

Among other things, PurePower developers discovered 

that the drag on their larger engine was much less than they 

expected, and the engines performed better than anticipated 

under adverse conditions, which Airbus happily tested for 

itself by maximizing stress to the airplane through a series of 

windup turns. The flight tests also proved to customers that 

the technology actually worked. “The same people who were 

skeptical eighteen months ago now just want to talk about price, 

not whether this thing will work,” said Epstein. 

But It’s Necessary 

The United States has been a leader in aviation technology, 

thanks in significant part to research and technical development 

done by NASA in the seventies. But with less investment 

going toward aeronautic research, we’re potentially at risk 

of losing that lead. “NASA and industry aren’t idea or talent 

limited, we’re resource limited. And you get what you settle for,” 

said Epstein. 

In addition to its advances in aerospace, NASA has played a 

large role in aeronautic innovation through its X-plane projects 

and test flights, which have helped convince industry that 

groundbreaking technology is not only feasible but factual. 

These NASA aeronautics projects could be pivotal in changing 

the current airplane configuration, which some say has reached 

its limit. But without the nation’s investment in research, and 

NASA’s dedication to creating and flying radically new designs, 

industry influencers such as Boeing and Airbus likely won’t buy 

in. A lack of research and proven flight tests results in a lack of 

customers, which in turn impedes industry innovation. 

“I don’t know that U.S. industry has done an adequate job 

in voicing the value that NASA brings to the nation,” Epstein 

said. “We’ve been pumping the well in industry using NASA 

expertise, but the well is pretty dry now. The United States 

having the lead in aeronautical technology has been true the 

past five or six decades, but there’s no law that says it has to be 

true the next five.” 

Collaboration for New Ideas 

Innovation doesn’t just happen by locking a brilliant engineer 

in a room and asking him to brainstorm. New ideas require 

feedback and testing and other new ideas to help make them a 

reality. Pratt & Whitney’s new gear for the PurePower engine, 
ASK MAGAZINE | 37 

for example, grew out of an early idea from one of their sister 

companies in United Technologies, Sikorksy, which specializes 

in rotorcraft technology. “Now we’re sharing the fundamental 

science of the gear we developed back with Sikorsky, because the 

gear science that’s gone into this is just as applicable to rotorcraft 

and convertible aircraft,” said Epstein. 

THE MAjoR INTERSECTIoN bETWEEN 

uNITEd TECHNoloGIES’ AERoSPACE 

ANd CoMMERCIAl buSINESSES TENdS 

To bE uNITEd TECHNoloGIES RESEARCH 

CENTER, WHICH IS THE SPARKPluG foR 

ExCHANGE of TECHNICAl INfoRMATIoN 

The United Technologies companies do more than share 

technology and ideas, however. They also share personnel. 

“People go back and forth because it’s easy; we’re here and they’re 

only fifty miles down the road,” Epstein explained. “But it’s also 

true for divisions out in California. If someone in one division 

has a technical challenge and someone in another division has 

deep expertise, you ask if they’d like to go to San Diego.” 

Many engineers rotate among United Technologies 

companies, gaining expertise and developing their careers. 

Often, they’ll return to Pratt & Whitney with a new set of 

skills and ideas to share. Engineers tend to circulate among the 

aerospace companies, but employees also move between the 

other United Technologies companies, like Carrier and Otis. 

“The major intersection between United Technologies’ aerospace 

and commercial businesses tends to be United Technologies 

Research Center, which is the sparkplug for exchange of 

technical information,” said Epstein. 

United Technologies Research Center has more than 300 

scientists and engineers, 96 percent of whom hold advanced 

degrees, 76 percent of them PhDs. It serves as both an idea 

generator and incubator and a technical-problem solver for 

the corporation, delivering technology and innovation that 

often create product differentiation in the marketplace for the 

businesses of United Technologies. 

That information hub could help progress environmentally 

friendly aviation further toward what Epstein sees as a plausible 

future: airplanes you can’t hear that also emit 20 to 30 percent 

less CO2

. “It’s unquestionably possible in the next decade or 

two that you and I could stand on the street and have a plane 

fly over that doesn’t interrupt our conversation. The planes 

will run on biofuels, which will continue to drive down the 

price of an airline ticket,” he said. “I wouldn’t mind having 

more leg room, either.” ●

Note: Statistics calculated using data from the Bureau of Transportation 

Statistics, part of the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Research and 

Innovative Technology Administration. 
BY ED CAMPION 

A

38 | ASK MAG

n

AZINE | STO

s

Ry 

wering t

Co

h

mmu

e 

nicat

Ca

ing with So

ll

yuz 

: 

The Soyuz TMA-13 spacecraft approaches the International Space Station, 

carrying NASA astronaut Michael Fincke, Expedition 18 commander; Russian 

Federal Space Agency cosmonaut Yury Lonchakov, Soyuz commander and 

flight engineer; and American spaceflight participant Richard Garriott. Two 

passes to obtain data from Soyuz were made before Garriott returned to Earth 

on October 23, 2008, with two Expedition 17 crew members. 

Photo Credit: NASA 
A blind engineer at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, had the vision for a 

solution to a problem that ultimately required him to fly to Europe to obtain potentially important 

data on the flight of a Soyuz capsule returning two International Space Station crew members and 

spaceflight participant Richard Garriott to Earth. 

ASK MAGAZINE | 39 

Marco Midon is an electronics engineer in the Microwave and 

Communications Branch at Goddard and has been with NASA 

for almost eleven years. In October 2008, Midon read a memo 

from the head of Space Operations at NASA Headquarters 

asking for ideas on how the Agency could respond to a request 

from the Russian Federal Space Agency to provide telemetry 

data on the Soyuz capsule during de-orbit and reentry. 

“I saw the e-mail asking for ideas about how data from the 

Soyuz could be received and recorded and right away I knew 

how it could be done,” said Midon. “The real question was 

whether it could be done in the time that was available.” 

The agencywide request from the head of all human space 

flight efforts came after it was determined that no commercial 

or space station partner facilities could provide the service 

needed because the VHF downlink frequency is not usually 

used for space telemetry. NASA and Russian partners agreed 

that providing data beyond that which is recorded just prior to 

separation of the Soyuz modules might be valuable in shedding 

light on the spacecraft’s past entry performance. Midon’s proposal 

involved a low-cost mobile system that could be transported and 

deployed along the planned separation and reentry track of the 

Soyuz vehicle. 

“In the spirit of the old NASA, the Goddard team responded 

to my request with an amazing ‘can-do’ attitude. The team 

was focused on the problem to be solved and let no hurdles 

stand in the way,” said William Gerstenmaier, NASA associate 

administrator for Space Operations. “Good Soyuz performance 

is important for International Space Station operations, and any 

help NASA could provide helps all the partnership.” 

“After getting the ‘go ahead’ to pursue my idea, my first 

course of action was to verify that we could obtain the necessary 

equipment,” said Midon. “I called one vendor about the antenna 

needed and then another about the pre-amp that would be 

required to amplify signals tuned to this particular oddball 

frequency and how both items were needed immediately. The 

answer from everyone was ‘yes,’ so rush orders were placed.” 

With less than four days before the Soyuz landing, the 

next step involved Midon contacting individuals at NASA’s 

Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia to confirm that the center 

could support a test of the system being proposed. After getting 

confirmation, he traveled to Wallops and supported activities 

that simulated what the Russian signal would look like and 

verified it could indeed be received and recorded. A day later, all 

the equipment ordered was in place, and the stage was set for the 

final test to prove that Midon’s idea could work. 

“We took the equipment down to Wallops and set up 

everything,” said Midon. “While we were busy doing that, other 

folks talked to the Russians, who agreed to turn on the Soyuz 

that was docked to the space station for two communication 

passes. Basically we were seventy-two hours out from landing 

and knew we would only have these two short communication 

passes to prove the whole thing worked.” 

As it turned out, the first pass wasn’t successful, with little 

or no signal received. But Midon came up with some tweaks 

to the system to make it a little more sensitive, and during the 

second pass, good data was received. While Midon and his 

group continued with their efforts, other NASA engineers were 

busy determining the best location to place the portable system. 

Three potential locations were initially identified: Turkey, North 

Africa, and Greece. After reviewing flight path trajectories, it 

was decided that Athens would provide the best view to capture 

telemetry data. 

So on Wednesday, October 22, with less than forty-eight 

hours before the Soyuz landing, the site for the temporary 

station was set. Midon and Jim Evans, a Honeywell Technical 

Solutions employee at Wallops, traveled to Baltimore– 

Washington International Airport with all the equipment. 

A new challenge arose when one package was determined to 

be twelve pounds over the airline’s allowed limit. Midon and 

Evans decided to take most of the equipment on their flight to 

Greece while others worked options for getting the remaining 

equipment delivered. Because no commercial delivery service 
40 | ASK MAGAZINE 

Goddard Space Flight Center employee Marco Midon (left) and Jim Evans, a Honeywell employee at Wallops Flight Facility, are seen in an office at the American 

Embassy in Greece, where they set up equipment used to collect data during a Soyuz capsule’s reentry and landing on October 24, 2008. 

Photo Credit: NASA 

could guarantee the equipment would arrive in time, Harry 

Schenk, a Honeywell employee at Goddard who had helped 

with earlier efforts, volunteered to fly to Greece with the 

remaining items. 

By the time Midon and Evans arrived in Athens, less than 

twenty-four hours remained before the Soyuz flyover would 

take place. The two went immediately to the American Embassy 

in Athens, which was the chosen location for setting up their 

equipment. Throughout the afternoon and into the evening, 

Midon and Evans worked to set things up while waiting for 

Schenk to arrive with the final pieces of equipment. By around 

10:00 p.m., less than eight hours before the event, all the 

equipment was powered up and verified ready. 

After finally checking into the hotel and getting at least 

a few hours sleep, the three men were back at the embassy 

around 4:00 a.m., local time, for the Soyuz flyover, which was 

planned for just after 6:00 a.m. But there was still one more issue 

to resolve. 

“When we got back to the embassy for the event, we 

realized a recorder wasn’t working,” said Midon. “We realized 

that the likely cause was a heating problem because the room 

wasn’t air conditioned. We found a marine, one of the few 

people around at that time of day, who found us a fan so we 

could circulate more air around the unit and that seemed to 

fix the problem.” 

Basedoninformationprovidedbyflightdynamicsengineers, 

the antenna on the roof was positioned, and just after 6:00 a.m. 

the system began receiving data from the Soyuz capsule as it 

traveled through the atmosphere. 

“The pass was very low, only 8 1/2 degrees, and we were 

in a valley so I wasn’t sure we were going to get anything,” said 

Midon. “At first, the signal was very weak. But then after two to 

three minutes, the signal got much stronger, and it was clear we 

were getting good data. The strong signal lasted about a minute 

and with processing back in the lab, we’re hoping there is at least 

ninety seconds of good data that can be utilized.” 

Later, Midon had a phone conversation with Gerstenmaier, 

who thanked him and his group and said how much both the 

American and Russian flight control teams appreciated their 

incredible effort. 

Midon remarked, “I think the real story here is that we only 

had two or three days to come up with a solution to something 

and were then able to implement it in Europe. I may have been 

the technical guy who figured out how to do it, but there were a 

lot of other folks whose willingness to pitch in provided us with 

an opportunity to succeed.” ●
INSIGHT | ASK MAGAZINE | 41 

Photo courtesy Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne 

The RL10 program team displays a five-foot mock-up of the RL10 rocket engine, 

complete with plastic valves and combustion chambers. 

Rocketdyne: Committed 

to Knowledge Sharing 

BY CARRI KARUHN 

Steve Yows had a problem. 

He was working on some rocket engine technology and hoped to find something “out there” in the 

industry that would help two computer software programs communicate with one another faster. 

But he wasn’t sure what it was and didn’t know how long it would take to find. 

Then Yows, a design engineer at Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne 

(PWR) in Canoga Park, California, attended an internal 

technical conference, where he presented a paper on his design 

approach and Mathcad worksheet. During his presentation, 

Yows happened to mention the need to link other departments’ 

tools to the forty other engineers attending the annual event. 

Another engineer, who was visiting from the company’s office 

in West Palm Beach, Florida, approached Yows later and said, 

“You might want to listen to my presentation. It’s about a new tool 

that allows you to link your software to other applications.” 

“This was a total coincidence,” said Yows. “You never know 

what you’re going to find at these conferences.” 

The new tool solved Yows’s problem—one success story 

in PWR’s ongoing campaign to improve its ability to share 

and capture information and skills among employees through 

knowledge management. PWR holds an annual Technical 

Excellence Conference that showcases engineering disciplines 

across the company. It hosts an annual Knowledge Management 

Share Fair, where teams from across the company set up booths 

to showcase their innovations to other employees. Through its 

Passport to Leadership series, PWR invites outside speakers to 

give presentations on professional and general-interest topics. In 

past sessions, legendary basketball coach John Wooden discussed 

his famous “Pyramid of Success,” and Homer Hickam, bestselling author of Rocket Boys, spoke about Sputnik’s influence 

on him growing up in West Virginia as well as his distinguished 

career at NASA. 

Then there is the Knowledge-Sharing Seminar Series, where 

employees give presentations on subjects including intellectual 

property, gasification technology, and other areas of expertise. 
42 | ASK MAGAZINE 

The eLearning team used a computer 

based learning model that resembled a 

cockpit zipping through space. 

As Yows’s experience shows, bringing groups of people together 

is valuable because you don’t always know where the answers to 

your technical problems will come from. 

It all happens in the name of transferring knowledge 

to create a better product—to take social and professional 

networking from the coffee rooms and drinking fountains into 

a forum where expertise can be shared and captured on a large 

scale. Most of the presentations are videotaped and stored on 

internal Web sites for employees to view later. Leadership has 

embraced the concept of knowledge management as a way to 

improve efficiency, ensure best practices, and preserve lessons 

learned. Employees see it as a way to share innovations, learn 

from others, and record their findings for generations to come. 

“These events break down the silos to promote the sharing 

of knowledge among groups. We often don’t know what other 

employees are working on because we’re so focused on our own 

jobs and responsibilities,” said Kiho Sohn, chief knowledge officer 

at PWR. “These events provide an opportunity for people to show 

what they have accomplished, and for people to learn something 

that can be applied to their own life and workplace.” 

Evidence that it works at PWR includes increasing attendance 

at each event. Attendance at the Knowledge Management Share 

Fair has doubled to 400 since its inception nine years ago; in the 

three years PWR has held the Technical Excellence Conference, the 

number of attendees has risen from 190 in 2006 to 248 in 2008. 

PWR’s investment in knowledge management was driven 

by the realization that its senior engineers would not be around 

forever. The company needed to capture their technical 

knowledge and expertise for future generations before it was lost 

forever, especially knowledge relating to the Space Shuttle main 

engine program and other heritage propulsion systems. 

Nine years ago, PWR launched knowledge management 

using discretionary funds. It started by creating databases that 

include a directory of experts, data-mining tools, materials and 

fluids properties, and knowledge-capture methods. It also began 

training employees in knowledge management techniques and 

promoting a culture of collaboration. 

One employee who took the training is Deanie Snell, who 

oversees PWR’s technical library in Canoga Park, California. She 

attended a weeklong class through the American Productivity 

Photo courtesy Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne 

and Quality Center in San Diego, where she learned how to share 

knowledge, transfer best practices, and collaborate effectively. 

She then shared what she had learned with her team. 

Her classroom experience led her to propose an annual event 

at PWR that celebrated knowledge, and thus the Knowledge 

Management Share Fair was born. A conference room is reserved 

at the California site’s Leadership and Learning Center. Booths 

are set up, and a large tent is pitched outside to serve lunch at 

the Tacit Knowledge Café. Posters, banners, and internal music 

videos advertise the event. PWR President Jim Maser sends out 

companywide e-mails and appears in internal commercials, 

encouraging all 2,200 employees at the Canoga Park facility to 

attend. He and fellow executives browse the booths with the 

crowd, viewing firsthand the accomplishments of their staff. 

Last year, the Space Shuttle Main Engine Nozzle team used 

charts and graphs to show off its progress in the manufacture 

of the nozzle, while the RL10 program team displayed a 5-foot 

mock-up of the RL10 rocket engine, complete with plastic valves 

and combustion chambers. 

PWR Fellow Awadh Pandey attended last year’s Share Fair 

in Canoga Park to showcase a new high-strength aluminum 

alloy he invented, known as “Pandalloy,” which few knew about 

until the fair. “It generated a lot of interest,” said Pandey. “That’s 

the whole objective. The Share Fair provides great opportunity 

for sharing the information about the capability of Pandalloy 

and how it is produced. I don’t think anyone just goes to one 

Share Fair saying, ‘This material will be used tomorrow.’ It takes 

time for things to happen, but the fairs get the wheels of thought 

moving so it can be applied down the line.” 

The Share Fair booths are not all engineering-based. Socialnetworking groups like the PWR Hispanic Leadership Forum, 

Rainbow Alliance, and Women in Network pass out pamphlets 

and register new members, as does Team Rideshare, which 

encourages employees to carpool and take public transportation 

to and from work. Local universities, including Cal State 

Northridge’sTsengCollegeofExtendedLearningandPepperdine 

University’s Graziadio School of Business, are also there to recruit 

new students. The events are a hit, with employees taking home 

giveaways and more information than they came in with. 

“The Share Fairs keep growing,” said Snell, co-chair of the 
Photo courtesy Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne

event. “You know they’re successful when teams ask to be part 

of the event—not just asking but insisting they get a table.” 

The teams do have various ways of encouraging people 

to drop by their booths, from offering baked goods and 

giveaways to building clever models and wearing appropriate 

costumes. The Program Management Office team caught 

people’s attention by using a Rube Goldberg–type machine as 

a metaphor to demonstrate the movement of knowledge within 

an organization. The eLearning team donned U.S. Air Force 

flight suits to demonstrate a computer-based learning model 

that resembled a cockpit zipping through space. 

“A lot of people don’t know we have the capability to create 

multimedia training courses for them,” said Brandan Laura, lead 

producer for the eLearning team. “We wanted to show them the 

resources we have and that we are a first-class group.” 

PWR knowledge-sharing videos and multimedia training 

courses are posted and stored on internal Web sites and learning 

portals, and they include lessons from technical experts no longer 

with the company. One includes a presentation on space nuclear 

thermal rockets, while another conducted by an engineer provides 

an overview on nuclear reactor engineering considerations, 

reactor physics considerations, and the effects of radiation. 

Knowledge management has branched out at PWR since that 

first Share Fair. In 2003, PWR introduced AskMe, an internal 

Web-based social-networking tool that allows employees to locate 

experts, published documents, and previously answered questions 

within the company. And last year, the PWR facility in West 

Palm Beach held its first Share Fair, where forty teams presented 

projects ranging from revolutionary product design and business 

system improvements to cost-saving initiatives and employeeenrichment programs. More than 600 people attended. 

Employees have also launched their own events. 

Three years ago, Dr. Bob Jensen, an associate fellow at PWR, 

discovered the need to better document the company’s technical 

innovations. He found that engineers gave excellent verbal 

presentations when using charts and graphs, because they were 

able to fill in the blanks about the nuances and reasoning that 

gave rise to their discoveries. When fellow engineers came back 

years later to review those presentations, however, all they had 

were the briefing charts without the nuances and reasoning. 

ASK MAGAZINE | 43 

(From left) Felix Delgado and William Bellows 

display their Enterprise Thinking Network at a 

recent Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne Knowledge 

Management Fair. 

“The things that get lost are ‘Why did you decide to do it 

this way? What was your reasoning? What assumptions were 

made?’” said Jensen. “If you have the research fully documented, 

you don’t have to reinvent the wheel each time. You can go back 

to something that was done five, ten, fifteen years ago, read the 

report, and understand the whole story.” 

He developed the PWR Technical Excellence Conference, 

where engineers from throughout the company can showcase their 

disciplines. It starts by having engineers from PWR’s five sites submit 

technical abstracts. A review committee selects the abstracts for 

presentation and notifies the authors, who then prepare the papers, 

each of which can be anywhere from ten to fifty pages long. The 

authors present their papers at the conference, where they speak for 

twenty-five minutes, discussing the latest technical achievements, 

including proprietary information, and showing peers what they 

have accomplished. Topics have ranged from high-strength copper 

alloys for rocket engines to concentrated photovoltaic technology 

for space power. All the presentations are audio recorded with the 

slides and posted on an intranet site, together with the papers for 

current and future engineers. 

The participating sites include PWR’s facilities in Canoga 

Park; West Palm Beach; Huntsville, Alabama; Kennedy Space 

Flight Center, Florida; and Stennis Space Center, Mississippi; as 

well as other United Technologies Corporation business units. 

Government employees from Edwards Air Force Research 

Laboratory and various NASA offices have also been invited. 

“We can leverage each other’s capabilities by creating the 

environment for sharing meaningful summaries of research and 

development histories,” said Jensen. “We can preserve for the 

next generation the details of what was done so that when future 

technologies are available, we can build on what has already 

been accomplished. When somebody looks at the research again 

in the future, they will find a very complete summary of what 

went on, and that’s vital.” ●

Carri karuHn works as a communications specialist 

at Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne. 
Engaged Workers Boost 

the bottom line at Ames 

44 | ASK MAGAZINE | STORy

BY NANCY MANgINI 

In spring of 2008, midlevel managers with different professional skills working in different 

divisions at Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, participated in a sixmonth Strategic Leadership Boot Camp management training program. As part of the 

course, attendees self-organized into interest groups to further study a particular aspect 

of curriculum. This is the story of the six Ames managers who formed what came to be 

known as the Engagement Team and how the work of that team resulted in a proposal that 

could support the case for bringing more agency work to Ames. 
ASK MAGAZINE | 45

Six Individuals, one Common Experience

The six Ames managers who formed the Engagement Team 

found that despite vastly different skills and professional work 

environments, they had each experienced what they later 

described as a “wow” moment—a point in time when they were 

inspired, excited, and emotionally fulfilled to be doing their 

NASA work. For four team members, those moments took place 

in the mid- to late nineties at Ames and were sufficiently powerful 

to fuel their careers into positions of increased responsibility at 

the center. For two others, the moments took place during the 

Engagement Team work. For all of them, though, it was the 

Engagement Team experience that drew them together and 

led to the discovery that such moments could form the basis 

of what management science calls “employee engagement”—a 

human element in a technology-based work environment that 

can be directly linked to real-world, hard-dollar value and is an 

acknowledged predictor of mission and organization success.

Creative, Collaborative, 

Challenging “Wow” Moments

John Robinson and Todd Farley, who both hold MS degrees 

in aeronautics and astronautics and work as associate 

principal investigators in the Aviation Systems Division on the 

NextGen Airspace project at Ames, described their moments as 

stemming from different creative experiences that had similar 

personal impacts. 

Robinson remembered the shared sense of excitement he 

felt in 1996 working on a “start-up-like” Ames project team that 

was developing a decision-support software tool for air traffic 

controllers to help them assign landing runways and sequences 

(the Passive Final Approach Spacing Tool, or pFAST). He 

credited an exceptionally flexible, management-supported 

work environment for the creative productivity of the team that 

resulted in a successful demonstration of the tool at Dallas–

Forth Worth International Airport.

“When leaders support person-to-person collaboration 

among colleagues with a shared interest in solving hard problems, 

the workgroup environments that emerge are so productive 

and personally satisfying that people want to put in the extra 

time and effort to be successful,” said Robinson. “In fact, one 

of the people from the FAA who was involved in that ’90s 

test demonstration recently asked me to look into whether the 

maturity of our current research into unexpected compression 

of aircraft on final approach could be used to predict short-term 

conflicts in terminal traffic. So I pulled together a subteam 

like the one we had a decade ago to work the problem, and the 

positive feedback from person-to-person contact with a customer 

that needs the output of our product is once again driving an 

elevated level of engagement and productivity. Looking forward, 

I really hope that more people working at Ames will have the 

chance to experience the thrill that comes with being part of 

this kind of group.”

Although Farley knew that moving from industry to working 

in research at NASA would give him a greater opportunity to 

pursue his long-held fascination with flight science, he was 

“blown away” to discover how multifaceted and creatively 

accomplished his coworkers at Ames were. 

“I am someone who is inspired by ‘ordinary’ people who 

pursue their creative side,” said Farley. “So when I met a 

senior scientist who turned out to be an amazing virtuoso on 

the trumpet, a management class colleague who wrote and 

performed his own songs on guitar, and peers on project teams 

who routinely stepped out of their professional personas to do 

some inspired improvisational holiday skit work, I was inspired 

to be in among them and became a much more engaged 

employee because of that experience.” 

Dr. Aga Goodsell preparing a 

prototype model of supersonic 

transport for wind-tunnel tests.

Photo Credit: NASA Ames Research Center
46 | ASK MAGAZINE

Todd Farley (on trombone) joined other 

NASA scientists and engineers in 2004 

when the Ames Jazz Band performed 

at the San Jose Jazz Festival. 

Dr. Aga Goodsell, chief of the Reacting Flow Environments 

Branch in the Space Technology Division at Ames, remembered 

a time in the mid-1990s when a branch chief at Ames gave her 

an opportunity to tackle wind-tunnel-based modeling and 

testing of new supersonic transport designs that required her to 

collaborate with a group of new people and approach problems 

in new ways. Experienced in a primarily computational 

approach to problem solving, Goodsell needed support from her 

new colleagues to build real-world prototypes to specifications 

on tight testing timelines. When the test outcomes challenged 

working assumptions, Goodsell’s team pulled together to 

conduct a second testing program that resulted in a major change 

in the way future wind-tunnel testing would be conducted. 

Although personally and technically challenging, Goodsell 

found the experience to be uniquely fulfilling and felt that the 

supportive work environment created by her manager helped 

her to be successful. 

“Now that I am a first-line supervisor in my own branch, I 

know that the health of my organization can depend upon the 

quality of workgroup relationships where team members not only 

respect each other’s professional talent, but also care about each 

other as people,” said Goodsell. “I try to foster this kind of work 

environment by encouraging after-hours social events, public 

celebrations of personal achievements, and structuring workrelated travel as a group experience whenever possible. Also, I’ve 

identified team building, collaboration, and communication as 

critical elements in my employee performance reviews and try to 

help my people achieve high marks in these areas.” 

Dr. Jeffrey McCandless, deputy chief of the Human Systems 

Integration Division at Ames, remembered being inspired by 

the seamless collaboration he observed in Mission Control at 

Johnson Space Center during a Space Shuttle mission. He wanted 

to help colleagues at Ames be more open to the new experiences 

and work environments that support such collaboration. 

“When I visited the Mission Control Center, I saw dedicated 

people coherently interacting to achieve a common goal of 

flight mission safety and success, and it was quite impressive,” 

said McCandless. “No matter what came up, they handled it 

smoothly, like a choreographed dance. If employee engagement 

programs can help forge similar relationships, I believe our 

center and Agency will benefit.” 

Pat Hudson, procurement management IS team lead at 

Ames, signed up for the Strategic Leadership Boot Camp to 

accept the challenge of learning how to become a better manager 

and found that the experience of rising to that challenge could 

result in a “wow” moment that left her inspired and more 

engaged in the work she was doing. 

“Engagement tends to be contagious,” Hudson observed. 

“When someone is fired up about the work they do and the 

people they do it with, it spreads. When that happens, more 

people take the long view of their work investment in the agency 

and it’s a win–win all around.” 

Antoinette Price, assistant chief of the Entrepreneurial 

Initiatives Division at Ames, saw joining the Engagement 

Team as a way to address the ever-present challenge of helping 

Ames communicate NASA values to employees who may then 

become more effective internal and external cheerleaders for 

the Agency. 

“The more I worked with this group and learned how 

employees who feel valued, connected, and productive in their 

PEoPlE CoME To NASA foR THE 

oPPoRTuNITy To do ExTRAoRdINARy 

THINGS ANd CoNTRIbuTE THEIR 

TAlENTS To INVENTING NEW WAyS 

of doING THINGS ANd PuSHING 

bACK THE THRESHold of MAN’S 

KNoWlEdGE. 
ASK MAGAZINE | 47 

Photo courtesy Nancy Mangini 

work environments can contribute to the bottom-line success 

of an organization, the more determined I became to overcome 

the perspective differences that often separate people into 

profession-based groups,” said Price. “By rising to that challenge 

and advocating for improved employee engagement at Ames, 

I felt my own ‘wow’ moment of appreciation for the positive 

impact NASA has on our world as a whole and for my own 

contribution toward that impact.” 

The Case for Improved Employee Engagement 

Beginning with an intuitive sense that their common 

inspirational experiences could form the basis for a strategy 

to improve the general level of productivity and efficiency at 

Ames, the Engagement Team conducted a survey of comparable 

organizations, both government-based and in the private sector, 

to determine if the benefits attributed to employee engagement 

in the management science literature were verifiable and relevant 

for Ames. 

After six months of research using industry-standard, 

quantifiable metrics and backed by findings of the September 

2008 U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board report, “The Power 

of Federal Employee Engagement,” the team discovered that 

organizations adopting vetted, professionally managed employeeengagement programs realized an average first-year increase 

in productivity of 6.5 percent. For a 2,500-person workforce 

similar in size to Ames, this improvement in productivity would 

be like having 160 more full-time employees on staff for little or 

no additional cost. 

To exploit this previously untapped resource, the Engagement 

Team developed a two-phase proposal for center management to 

consider starting a professionally managed employee engagement 

program at Ames. In the proposal, team members recommended 

using Robinson and Farley’s Aviation Systems Division for a 

phase-one, twelve-month pilot program to validate anticipated 

improvements in productivity because the division is primarily 

a team-based work environment, and the division chief actively 

supports the project. If the division is judged to be successful, 

center management would have the option to use the experience to 

develop a centerwide program that could give Ames an advantage 

when NASA Headquarters considers which centers would be the 

most cost-effective choice for delivering on mission goals. 

Dan Bufton, deputy director of Programs and Projects Office 

at Ames and senior management mentor for the Engagement 

Team, sees the team’s proposal as an opportunity to enhance the 

already-inspiring work environment at Ames while serving the 

business needs of the Agency in challenging economic times. 

“People come to NASA for the opportunity to do 

extraordinary things and contribute their talents to inventing 

new ways of doing things and pushing back the threshold of 

man’s knowledge. At this level of management, though, it’s easy 

to get a bit jaundiced and lose sight of the thrill that brought us 

all together in the first place. If managers can help employees 

increase their level of engagement through the kind of programs 

this team is proposing,” said Bufton, “it will be a win–win–win 

all the way around—for employees, managers, Ames, NASA, 

and the human community we all serve.” 

While the logistics of implementing the proposed pilot 

plan are currently under review by human resources, center 

management has made it clear that Ames is committed to 

finding new ways to do more with current resources. As a 

result, the concept of inspiring greater employee engagement 

to achieve greater productivity is gaining ground as a low-cost 

investment that could realize a substantial return for NASA 

while simultaneously boosting the bottom line at Ames. ●

NANCy MANGINI is a senior communications specialist for 

ELORET Corporation in Sunnyvale, California. She holds a BS in 

pharmaceutical sciences, an MBA in executive management, and 

has more than twenty years’ experience writing for the business 

and scientific communities in Silicon Valley. 
48 | ASK MAGAZINE | STORy

bidding 

your way

to the 

Launch Pad 

BY RANDII R. WESSEN AND DAvID PORTER Photo Credit: NASA/JPL/Kennedy Space Center 

A Titan IVB/Centaur carrying the Cassini orbiter and its attached 

Huygens probe launches October 15, 1997. An international 

effort involving NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA), and 

the Italian Space Agency, Agenzia Spaziale Italiana (ASI), the 

Cassini mission successfully used a market based system to 

manage resources. 
ASK MAGAZINE | 49 

One of the many challenges of growing up as an identical twin, as one of us (Wessen) did, is 

learning how to share. My twin and I tried many approaches to this age-old problem, some 

successful and some not. One of our more innovative approaches was “whoever cuts the cake, the 

other chooses.” Unbeknownst to us, this technique has been used for centuries and provides an 

incentive for the “divider” to cut the pieces as fairly as possible. After all, if one slice is larger than 

the other, the “chooser” will pick the larger piece. We inadvertently stumbled on the fact that 

incentives powerfully affect human behavior. 

Today, incentives are often used to move society in positive 

directions. One common example is the use of deposits on cans 

and bottles to remove them from our streets. Incentives are 

used to reduce atmospheric pollution and to establish migration 

routes and estuaries. Successful incentive-based systems need to 

be designed to attain the desired results and to minimize the 

impact of unintended consequences. It is the job of “market” 

engineers to create the proper incentives to harness society’s 

interests for efficient outcomes. 

As a system engineer for NASA, I (Wessen) became 

interested in using incentive-based systems to allocate space 

system resources. I didn’t realize that economic researchers were 

already working on this class of problems. As a matter of fact, 

economists from the California Institute of Technology had been 

called in by NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Cassini program 

to solve an allocation problem involving the development of the 

program’s science payload.1 

To understand if incentives could indeed be a more efficient 

way for allocating resources, we first have to understand how 

allocation usually happens. There are basically two approaches. 

The first is the “benevolent dictator” approach. One individual 

(for instance, the project manager, flight system manager, or 

ground system manager) is given a set of resources to distribute 

to a group of users. The success of this approach depends on the 

information provided to the decision maker, his knowledge, and 

his ability to allocate resources and adjudicate conflicts to get 

the most out of the mission. 

Unfortunately, the only recourse available to a user who 

doesn’t like his allocation is to make his case to the manager 

or the manager’s manager. This appeal process happens all 

the time, since those not getting their entire request are often 

unhappy with their allocation. Other than some time and the 

effort to produce a few viewgraphs, they have nothing to lose. If 

the appeal is rejected, the petitioner is no worse off than before. 

This approach has another liability. Individuals know that 

they’re going to get less than what they want in an oversubscribed 

system so they “over-request” resources. This makes a bad 

situation worse. Since the manager has limited information, he 

will probably either try to give everything to everybody or “hurt 

everyone” equally. Neither strategy works very well. 

The other technique for allocating resources is a committeedrivenapproach.Aboardof knowledgeable individuals (typically 

the ones requesting the resources) are asked to work together to 

solve the problem in a collegial manner. It is usually a difficult 

process to watch and even more difficult to be involved in. 

Everyone describes their “needs” and explains why they are more 

important than everyone else’s. These discussions usually go on 

until a predetermined deadline rears its ugly head, at which 

point the dominant participants try to force their solution onto 

the committee. Here again, the only recourse is to appeal to a 

higher authority and hope for the best. 

Market-based systems, sometimes called incentive-based 

systems, have several advantages. A big one is that they do not 

require a third party to solve resource conflicts because individual 

participants make these decisions through their bids. 

Market-based systems come in two flavors: property right 

(sometimes called primary markets) and aftermarkets (also 

known as secondary markets). In property right markets, 

participants begin by bidding to express demand for needed 

resources. Resources in high demand get more and more 

expensive; those in low demand remain less dear. Users’ bids 

signal which resources are the most desirable. This gives users 

an incentive to find alternate approaches using less expensive 

resources for solving their problems. 

Of course, they first must have something to bid with. 

The solution is to allocate “tokens” to all users. One potential 

issue is how to allocate them. There are no perfect answers, 

but some sensible guidelines have emerged. Tokens can be 

given out equally to all participants; allocations can be based 

on the budgets from past years; or allocations can be based on 

past-year allocation of a particular resource. Each project is 

different and requires its own assessment of how to distribute 

initial budgets. But it is much better to solve one problem 

(the initial bid budget allocation) early rather than multiple 
50 | ASK MAGAZINE

problems (conflicting demands for limited resources) later on 

in the process. 

Once users have their budget of tokens, they bid for the 

resources they want. They can bid as often as they like and 

continue until no other bids are made. Then the trading 

(aftermarket) begins. Participants trade among themselves to 

improve their situations, offering what they have in excess in 

return for resources they require. Since trades are only executed 

when both parties agree, all trades are “win–win,” and there is 

no need for time-consuming appeals to a higher authority. 

A typical trade might be a straight swap (for instance, 

investigation A gives 15 minutes on orbit 1 to investigation B for 

25 minutes on orbit 2 plus 100 kilobits of data storage). Or they 

can be more complicated “chain” bids (instrument builder A 

might trade mass to instrument builder B who trades dollars 

to instrument builder C who trades power back to instrument 

builder A). The Cassini program used this aftermarket approach. 

A Web-based aftermarket tool removes the tedious task of users 

having to find these trades. All the user has to do is request a 

certain amount of resource X in exchange for resource Y and the 

tool does the rest. If no takers are found, the initiator can either 

put up more of resource X or request less of resource Y. Projects 

can use either a property rights market or an aftermarket system, 

but market-based systems work best when both are employed. 

Market-based systems have been used for eons. The first 

individuals who gave thirty shells for an arrowhead or maybe 

a goat for a calf were doing market-based trades. Today 

market-based systems are used everywhere. They’re used by 

the Chicago School of Business to set up graduate interviews 

with prospective employers,2 by the FCC to allocate frequency 

spectra to broadcast companies,3 and as cap-and-trade systems 

for controlling pollution emissions all across the world.4 

What’s new is their slow yet steady migration into the world 

of space exploration. Like every application of a tool to a new 

area, first attempts are met with some skepticism and hesitation. 

The earliest attempts included using proposals to use markets to 

determine prices for International Space Station payloads in the 

Artist Michael Carroll s concept of 

the Jupiter Europa Orbiter, part of 

the Europa Jupiter System mission, 

one of two Outer Planet Flagship 

missions currently planning to use 

market based systems to build their 

science instruments. 

late 1980s and to allocate antenna time on NASA’s Deep Space 

Network. In both cases the approach may have been ready but 

the environment was not. Individuals saw how it could work but 

believed the consequences of it not working would just be too 

great. The first successful application of a market-based system 

to a space exploration problem was on the Cassini program in 

1995 (see ASK, fall 2007, “The Cassini Resource Exchange”). 

The program’s twelve science-instrument development teams 

lIKE EVERy APPlICATIoN of A Tool To 

A NEW AREA, fIRST ATTEMPTS ARE MET 

WITH SoME SKEPTICISM ANd HESITATIoN. 

used an aftermarket system to build their science “boxes.” This 

approach controlled costs to less than 1 percent of the initial 

estimates and the payload mass growth actually decreased by 

7 percent from what was initially proposed by the investigators. 

Many NASA projects have experimented with the idea of 

using market-based systems to solve their resource-allocation 

problems. Some managers decided the time was not yet right for 

such a system. In other cases, loss of an earlier spacecraft resulted 

in the cancellation of the project considering this approach, or 

a change in NASA priorities (changing an active project to one 

that remains a study) reduced their interest in using a marketbased system. But market-based systems are here to stay. The 

Earth Observing System (EOS AM-1) used a market-based 

Image Credit: NASA/JPL 
ASK MAGAZINE | 51 

Photo Credit: NASA/Jacques Descloitres 

Terra (EOS AM 1) used a market based 

system to build its instruments, including 

the Moderate Resolution Imaging 

Spectroradiometer (MODIS). MODIS 

captured this image of Alaska on 

June 15, 2000. 
52 | ASK MAGAZINE

[MARKET-bASEd SySTEMS] MoVE THE dECISIoN-MAKING PRoCESS bACK To THoSE 

WHo HAVE THE INfoRMATIoN; REMoVE THE NEEd foR TIME-CoNSuMING MEETINGS 

ANd APPEAlS; ANd, If IMPlEMENTEd WITH A WEb-bASEd Tool, CAN bE GlobAlly 

dISTRIbuTEd To AlloW INTERNATIoNAl PARTICIPATIoN. 

system to build its instruments. Again the results were extremely 

positive.5 All instruments were built successfully and delivered 

on time. Currently, both Outer Planet Flagship missions plan 

on using these methods to build their science instruments. 

Market-based systems are not for everyone, and it’s difficult 

to prove in advance that a decentralized system will work for 

a particular problem. A project would have to judge whether 

results from an experimental environment accurately represent 

how the system will work in “real life.” But market-based systems 

have too many benefits to be ignored. They move the decisionmaking process back to those who have the information; remove 

the need for time-consuming meetings and appeals; and, if 

implemented with a Web-based tool, can be globally distributed 

to allow international participation. 

In fairness, it should be said that market-based systems, if 

not well thought out, produce some scary results. For instance, 

trying to reduce the number of mid-air airplane near misses 

by giving air traffic controllers a mandatory week off with pay 

if three incursions occur in any one-month period creates the 

wrong kind of incentive. Market-based systems must be designed 

carefully and include experiments to validate their design. 

All cultures tend to fall in love with their current approach 

to solving problems and resist change. Innovation can come 

from anywhere, but it takes leadership to put innovative ideas 

into practice. A decision to change, which includes risk of 

failure, is not for the faint-hearted. There also will be resistance 

from all those who are skilled at using the current approach 

and don’t want to change to a new system, even if it is a better 

one. Five hundred years ago, in The Prince, Machiavelli wrote, 

It ought to be remembered that there is nothing more 

difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or 

more uncertain in its success than to take the lead in 

the introduction of a new order of things. Because the 

innovator has for enemies all those who have done well 

under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in 

those who may do well under the new. 

Whether you’re trying to allocate spacecraft resources, 

manifest Space Shuttle middeck lockers, or just trying to divide 

a piece of cake for two hungry twins, people should always keep 

an open mind about new ideas for solving old problems. After 

all, innovation is what’s needed to move society forward. ●

The research described in this paper was carried out by the Jet 

Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a 

contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. 

ranDii r. Wessen joined the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 

1984. He has worked on Voyager, Galileo, Cassini, and the Mars 

Exploration Rover projects. He has teamed with David Porter on 

market-based systems research for the past thirteen years. 

DaviD POrter is the Donna and David Janes endowed 

chair in experimental economics and a professor of economics 

and mathematics at Chapman University. He received his MS 

in mathematics and a PhD in economics from the University 

of Arizona. 

1. See, for example, j. ledyard, d. Porter, and A. Rnagel, “using Computerized Exchange System to Solve a Project 

Management Problem,” Journal of organizational Computing (November 1994). 

2. R. Graves, l. Schrage, and j. Sankaran, 	 “Placement bidding System at the u of Chicago School of business,” 

informs (1993). 

3. j. banks, M. olson, d. Porter, S. Rassenti, and V. Smith, “Theory, Experiment, and the federal Communications 

Commission Spectrum Auctions,” Journal of economic Behavior and organization (2003). 

4. T. Ishikida, j. ledyard, M. olson, and d. Porter, “The design of a Pollution Trading System for Southern California’s 

REClAIM Emission Trading Program,” research in experimental economics (2001). 

5. Telephone conversation with Raynor Taylor, EoS-AM1 Instrument Accommodation Manager, March 2007. 
Title

By

Intro

Rising from the ashes.

ecToJ SONRMEIM

Pr . JH TEPOS JANDY RLEU

n.”

T K. H

a io

EROB

e l t lf r canc

Y RB

d oareprepe o bd t

STORY | ASK MAGAZINE | 53
When projects are closed on time, on budget, and within 

scope, and they meet or exceed stakeholder expectations, the 

process of closing out contracts, handing over deliverables, 

and releasing project resources is a rewarding conclusion to 

a successful project. Even when projects are closed under less 

than ideal conditions (maybe overbudget or late), closure can 

be rewarding, especially for large projects or those of historic 

significance. Many projects end before they reach fruition, 

however. In fact, project cancellation is common. An April 2009 

Project Management Institute (PMI) survey indicates that the 

number of companies canceling or delaying projects continues 

to grow as the economy struggles to recover. More than half the 

1,000 randomly sampled PMI members and credential holders 

reported that their companies had canceled or delayed projects 

during the previous four months. 

NASA’s history offers plenty of examples of projects that 

have been canceled or significantly delayed. NASA Procedural 

Requirement (NPR) 7120.5D lists factors for canceling a project, 

including anticipated inability of the program or project to meet 

its commitments, unanticipated change in Agency strategic 

goals, and unanticipated budget changes. Recently, the NASA 

Presidential Transition Team asked Agency officials to provide the 

latest information on Ares I, Orion, and the planned Ares V heavylift cargo launcher, and to calculate the near-term closeout costs 

and longer-term savings associated with canceling those programs. 

Even if project managers and team members are doing everything 

right, it is important to remember that no project is completely 

safe from cancellation, but project teams are often so focused on 

completing projects that the cancellation announcement comes as 

a shock. Cancellation is often out of the hands of a project manager 

and is usually externally initiated, but that does not relieve the 

project manager of the responsibility to manage the closure of the 

terminated project effectively. Proper project management and 

senior stakeholder involvement can minimize the negative effects 

on employees and the organization.

Information on the emotional impact of project cancellation 

on individuals and the organization is limited for two main 

reasons. Whatever the reason for project cancellation, employees 

often hesitate to share their experiences. Also, organizations do 

not pay sufficient attention to the impact of cancellation on 

employees. But the effect can be great and damaging. According 

to project management authorities Mantel, Meredith, Shafer, 

and Sutton, the “cancellation of a project, particularly a long and 

difficult one, is akin to the breakup of a family and may well be 

stressful, even to the point of grieving.”1

 Project cancellation is 

often traumatic. 

Jerry B. Harvey, Professor Emeritus of Management at 

George Washington University, found that project managers 

and team members are susceptible to experiencing anaclitic 

depression, a particular, circumscribed form of melancholy that 

we often experience when the individuals, organizations, or belief 

systems that we lean on for emotional support are withdrawn 

from us.2

 The severity of this depression is likely linked to the 

length of time spent on the project, and the personal sacrifices 

made. As John Muratore recollects, for instance, “Seven years of 

my life were devoted to the X-38 Crew Return Vehicle project, 

and when it was canceled, it was a major grieving process.” 

Many project managers and team members also suffer from 

feelings of separation and abandonment. “I literally did not feel 

like going to work for three weeks, and I did not after receiving 

word that the Solar Electric Propulsion (SEP) Stage project had 

been canceled in 1976,” said Gene Austin, SEP team member 

and future X-33 Space Plane program manager. The range of 

emotions can vary from anger to grief. “There are hundreds 

of people in this country and Europe who have worked on the 

Dawn project for four years and had committed another decade 

to it, and now it is dropped. What can I say, it makes me cry," 

said Lucy McFadden, Dawn team member.3

The widespread effects of cancellation can damage the 

organization as a whole. Michael Boomer and Victor Pease, 

“THERE ARE HuNdRE

Wo

dS

RK

 o

E

f 

d o

PEo

N 

Pl

TH

E 

E

IN

d

 T

A

HIS C

dE

W

o

C

N

u

A

 P

N

d

R

T

E

ojEC

R

 T

y 

o 

T f

A

I

o

N

T, A

R f

d E

N

o

u

d 

u

R

N

R

o

oW IT I

 y

PE

EAR

WH

S d

S

o H

oPP

d 

A

R

 AN

VE 

Ed. W

HAd 

H

C

A

o

T C

MM

A

IT

N

T

 I 

E

S

d 

Ay

A

, I

N

T M

oTH

A

E

K

R

ES ME CRy.” 

54 | ASK MAGAZINE
professors of management at Clarkson University, researched 

the impact of project termination on productivity and found a 

significant loss of productivity for months beyond termination. 

Steve Cook, current manager of the Ares Projects Office and 

former acting program manager for Next Generation Launch 

Technology (NGLT), agrees with their findings and feels four 

to six months of employee productivity was lost after projects 

under the NGLT program were terminated. 

Nonproductive time has a significant economic impact on 

the entire organization. Improved management during project 

closure can reduce the financial impact and increase productivity 

of team members. Dr. Harvey also found that an unhealed 

employee may never work with the same sense of enthusiasm, 

loyalty, and commitment.2

 When terminations are perceived as 

a negative experience, employee commitment may never return 

to pretermination levels.4

 This not only affects the productivity 

of the individual whose project was canceled, but also those 

they work with. An anonymous Stennis Space Center employee 

says that every time they work on a project, one of their team 

members tells them not to get too connected and reminds them 

of the canceled Advanced Solid Rocket Motor project. Steve 

Cook felt it took two years for team members to buy into the 

Ares program after being taken to the edge of the abyss after 

projects under the NGLT program were terminated. 

Project termination sometimes also creates a negative work 

environment. Project managers or team members of canceled 

projects inevitably serve as a visible reminder of what could 

happen to other projects.2

 “You’re considered radioactive when 

you’re leading a project or program that is terminated. Colleagues 

think they will get infected and don’t want to be near you,” said 

John Muratore. Meir Statman and David Caldwell, professors 

at Santa Clara University, reported that though companies 

acknowledge that project termination causes employee pain, 

they ignore the pain of employees who are retained while their 

projects are terminated. 

Mishandled project termination also negatively affects the 

perception of the organization from the outside. Terminated 

government projects create a perception that taxpayer dollars 

have been wasted. Technical capabilities and leadership 

are also questioned when programs are terminated. These 

misperceptions can all be better controlled through proper 

closeout of the terminated project, which would include lessons 

learned and reports demonstrating the knowledge gained from 

the project, despite the cancellation, in addition to capturing 

the cost savings over the long term. 

Project closeout processes are well documented in project 

management references, but they focus on completed projects, 

not terminated ones. Closing out a terminated project requires 

more finesse and talent on the part of the project manager. 

In fact, successfully closing out a terminated project could be 

viewed as a greater achievement than closing out a successful one. 

There are several factors to focus on during this process. The 

most important one is to include the team in the termination 

decision process. 

The Termination Review specified in NPR 7120.5D 

can produce a positive effect for future projects. X-38 team 

members, for instance, were given additional time to learn 

from hands-on experience after the project was canceled. The 

valuable experience they gained by continuing some work for an 

extra year on that project is now being put to use in leadership 

roles on Constellation. 

The team should be made aware of the rationale behind 

the termination well before the official announcement. The 

team (and project manager) should be reminded that project 

termination does not always indicate project mismanagement. 

Because NASA mission projects are explorative and often 

unique, requirements (and consequently schedule and cost) 

may grow beyond the resources available to support them. 

As Ed Weiler, associate administrator of the Science Mission 

Directorate, stated, “These science missions are not the 

ASK MAGAZINE | 55
one millionth copy of a Toyota.”5

 Nevertheless, there is always 

something to be learned. The scores of terminated projects in 

NASA’s history probably have lost a wealth of information that 

could have helped future projects.6

To capture valuable knowledge and demonstrate the 

benefits of even terminated projects, team members should be 

allowed and encouraged to document accomplishments and 

status. Boomer and Pease’s research found the accomplishments 

of terminated projects were generally not recognized. The 

project manager should identify how the work completed 

will contribute to future projects and hold a celebration of 

the team’s achievements. Recognizing everyone’s efforts and 

accomplishments helps leave the project team ready to continue 

to do good work, not despondent that they somehow failed and 

may be doomed to do so again.

Despite a project manager’s best efforts to capture the 

successes of a terminated project and assure their team that 

the project cancellation does not signify failure, some project 

members will still take the news hard. These members should 

be offered employee assistance program services. These services 

can help them cope with the range of emotions they experience. 

Gene Austin points out that “project cancellation is a risk that 

we all take in this business, and seeking out and obtaining new 

project assignments is what gave me closure after serving on 

projects that were canceled.” The project manager should work 

with functional managers to reassign personnel to new projects 

and present team members’ plans for future assignments. These 

reassignments should be into comparable or higher positions, to 

eliminate the notion that the canceled project reflects on their 

capabilities. The managers may also take this time between 

projects to offer training opportunities as a step to more 

important roles on bigger projects. 

Closure of a terminated project requires more effort than 

closure of a completed project. To aid in the process, this phase 

may be thought of and executed as a project in itself. The project 

manager must secure senior management’s involvement and 

support and may decide to appoint a termination manager. Since 

there is little time to plan when termination happens, planning for 

this phase deserves to be incorporated into the project planning 

cycle in the event that it becomes reality. Planning should 

produce clearly defined tasks, agreed-upon responsibilities, 

closeout schedules, a budget, and a list of outstanding or available 

deliverable items. The closeout must ensure that all contractual 

requirements are satisfied and all records properly stored. Finally, 

project resources must be released in a well-coordinated manner. 

The project manager owes it to the project team to deliver a final 

report detailing the project’s history, successes, discoveries, process 

improvements, applications to future projects, accomplishments, 

and lessons learned. 

It is never easy to let go of a project, and even more difficult 

to have one pulled away, but by following the recommendations 

outlined in this article, project managers can turn a terminated 

project into a success story and prepare team members for even 

higher achievements. ●

ROBERT K. HURLEy is the Research Range services manager at 

Goddard Space Flight Center’s Wallops Flight Facility. He ensures 

reliable ground instrumentation services for NASA, Department 

of Defense, and commercial launch and flight projects at the 

Wallops Research Range and other locations worldwide.

JOSEPH T. JIMMERSON is a systems engineer at Goddard Space 

Flight Center’s Wallops Flight Facility. He helps advance ground 

instrumentation service capabilities for NASA, Department 

of Defense, and commercial launch and flight projects at the 

Wallops Research Range and other locations worldwide.

1. S . j. Mantel, j. R. Meredith, S. Shafer, and M. Sutton, Project management in Practice, Second Edition (Hoboken, Nj: 

john Wiley & Sons, 2005).

2. j. Harvey, how Come every time i Get stabbed in the Back my fingerprints are on the knife?: and other mediations 

on management (San francisco: jossey-bass, 1999).

3. l. david, “NASA's dawn Asteroid Mission Cancelled,” space.com, March 2006, http://www.space.com/news/060303_

dawn_cancelled.html.

4. M . boomer and V. Pease, “Mitigating the Impact of Project Cancellations on Productivity,” national Productivity review (1991).

5. b. berger, “obama to Review Costs of Shuttle Replacement Vehicle,” space news (2008).

6. E . Hedman, “Why Technology Projects fail,” the space review, May 2005, http://www.thespacereview.com/article/372/1.

56 | ASK MAGAZINE
INSIGHT | ASK MAGAZINE | 57 

Process Improvement 


for Space Flight Safety
 

BY FAYSSAL M. SAFIE 

After the Columbia accident, I was asked to lead the statistical data analysis team for the external 

tank foam in support of the Space Shuttle external tank return-to-flight team. Two weeks later I 

gave my first presentation to one of the external tank return-to-flight engineering boards. My initial 

findings clearly indicated that the manual foam spray process had inadequate process control. As 

a result, an astonishing number of defects (such as voids) existed at many critical locations on the 

external tank. The frequency and size of the defects were hard to characterize statistically because 

of the extreme variability of the process. The results shocked me and the engineering community. 

It was even more shocking to hear one of the lead engineers say to me, “Dr. Safie, it looks like you 

are not going to be able to help us.” My quick response was, “No, I am here to help you, and I am 

helping you as we speak.” After some discussion, I did get the message across. Everybody understood 

that a process control problem existed, that more data needed to be collected, and that a safe return 

to flight would depend on process-control improvements. 

Engineers use a template and protective sheets to carefully begin 

dissection of the bipod ramp foam after the Columbia accident. 

CAIB Photo by Rick Stiles 2003 
58 | ASK MAGAZINE 

The redesigned external tank for the Return-to-Flight 

mission is raised above its transporter in the Vehicle 

Assembly Building at Kennedy Space Center. 

AdEquATE PRoCESS uNIfoRMITy IS CRITICAl foR AdEquATE 

ANd VAlId CHARACTERIZATIoN of THE PRoTECTIoN SySTEM 

MATERIAl, ANd HIGH PRoCESS CAPAbIlITy IS CRITICAl To 

PRoduCE THE MATERIAl THAT CAN MEET THE SPECIfICATIoNS. 
ASK MAGAZINE | 59 

The difficulties and sensitivities of the manual spray process for 

the Space Shuttle external tank thermal protection system that 

contributed to the Columbia accident are a dramatic and tragic 

example of the potential negative impact of inadequate process 

control on component reliability and system safety. The thermal 

protection system is a foam-type material applied to the external 

tank to maintain cryogenic propellant quality, minimize ice and 

frost formation, and protect the structure from ascent, plume, 

and reentry heating. (Although the tank is not reused, the 

thermal protection system is important during reentry because 

structural overheating after separation from the orbiter could 

result in a premature tank breakup with debris landing outside 

the predicted footprint.) 

Integrated Process Control 

The reliability of the thermal protection system is broadly 

defined as its strength versus the stress put on it in flight. High 

reliability in the thermal protection system means less debris 

released and fewer hits to the orbiter, reducing system risk. 

Process control is a critical factor in achieving high reliability 

and low system risk. In simple terms, the aim of process control 

is process uniformity and process capability. Adequate process 

uniformity is critical for adequate and valid characterization of 

the protection system material, and high process capability is 

critical to produce the material that can meet the specifications. 

Good process uniformity and high process capability yield 

fewer process defects, smaller defect sizes, and good material 

properties that meet the engineering specifications—the critical 

ingredients of high reliability. 

Engineers frequently think about process control only 

in terms of statistical process control, which mainly involves 

control charts with upper and lower limits intended to maintain 

process within those parameters, but that is only part of what 

is needed to ensure process quality and reliability. In response 

to the Columbia accident, the external tank project team 

formulated an integrated process control plan for the tank’s 

thermal protection system to ensure that consistent processes 

would be employed. In addition to statistical process control, the 

plan involved manufacturing-material control, contamination 

control, supplier process control, process-change verification 

control, process monitoring, training and operator certification, 

and configuration management control. The aims of the plan 

included standardization of spray techniques, early detection 

of changes in materials, video reviews, process parameters (for 

example, for temperature and humidity), data recording, qualitycontrol inspection, and comprehensive training for technicians, 

operators, and quality-control engineers and technicians. 

Implementation of the integrated process control plan was 

not an easy task for the external tank project. No contractual 

requirements for the plan were in place at that time, additional 

Photo Credit: NASA 
60 | ASK MAGAZINE 

skills and resources would be required to execute the plan, 

and many external tanks had been built and sprayed prior to 

the plan’s creation. Even with these challenges, however, the 

external tank project successfully implemented the plan, to the 

extent possible. 

Redesigned foam applications were performed within more 

tightly controlled process environments. Process validation and 

verification activities determined the optimal temperature and 

humidity ranges that would produce foam that minimized 

both the size and number of voids. Thermal protection system 

spray technicians and quality inspectors performing all complex 

geometric redesigned thermal protection system operations 

were trained and certified for spray applications to specific parts 

and locations. Quality-control inspections were increased to 

ensure independent verification of critical process steps. Quality 

personnel either witnessed or verified that an operation had been 

proficiently performed within a specified time prior to applying 

foam on a flight article. 

As a result of the external tank project implementing the 

integrated process control plan to redesigned foam areas, the 

sprayed foam quality was significantly improved. The applied foam 

had fewer and smaller voids and greater strength and density. 

Broader Implications: A Systems Approach 

After spending two years analyzing external tank thermal 

protection system foam data and working with the return-toflight engineering community, I realized that, in addition to the 

impact on reliability and system safety, lack of adequate process 

control could have a devastating impact on our engineering 

understanding of the failure physics and the validity of our 

engineering analyses across the board. Engineering models 

and engineering analyses based on highly variable and unstable 

data (that is, high sample-to-sample variability) due to lack of 

adequate controls could lead to erroneous conclusions and poor 

decisions. Lack of process control could also reduce engineers’ 

ability to characterize their engineering parameters with a high 

probability of accuracy to validate their requirements. On many 

occasions during my support of the external tank thermal 

protection system return-to-flight team, engineering models 

did not hold, engineering data could not be characterized, and 

engineering specs could not be evaluated. A significant source 

of these difficulties was the inadequate process control of the 

external tank thermal protection system foam. We simply did 

not have the consistent, reliable data needed to make these 

analyses and judgments. 

The clearest lesson of the Columbia accident and the 

external tank thermal protection system foam experience is 

that understanding the relationship between process control, 

component reliability, and system safety is critical. This systemic 

approach needs to be taken at the beginning of the design 

process, ensuring that we are designing for manufacturability— 

that the vehicle can be built with the required level of quality 

and consistency. 

Our experience with external tank foam issues has provided 

critical lessons for the Ares I design community. The Ares I 

Upper Stage project team has given extensive attention to process 

design and process control and has involved quality engineers in 

the early phases of the design process. 

THE CoLumBia ACCIdENT SHoWEd 

THE IMPoRTANCE of INTEGRATEd 

SySTEM fAIluRE ANAlySIS. 

It is equally critical to understand potential integrated system 

failures that start at the component level with no immediate 

catastrophic or even critical consequences, but propagate 

through the system across subsystem interfaces to cause a 

system failure. The Columbia accident showed the importance 

of integrated system failure analysis. Ares I has been expending 

significant effort on identifying and evaluating potential 

integrated system failures using physics-based modeling early in 

design and development. The thrust oscillation study and the 

first stage–second stage separation study that provided critical 

information for management to seek optimum design solutions 

are examples. 

The Columbia accident is a devastating instance of a design 

problem made worse by a process control problem, ill-defined 

requirements, and lack of understanding of the external tank 

foam failure mechanism. Having a good and well-defined set 

of requirements, understanding the system capabilities and 

system interactions, understanding the failure physics, and— 

most importantly—putting in place the process controls that 

are relevant to the failure physics are critical for designing and 

manufacturing reliable and safe launch vehicles. Learning the 

lessons of Columbia is essential to making sure that our future 

launch vehicles and spacecraft are as safe as we can make them. ●

Fayssal M. saFie is a senior technical lead engineer at 

Marshall Space Flight Center and an adjunct professor at the 

University of Alabama in Huntsville, Alabama. He has written 

more than forty papers on reliability and maintainability 

engineering, documenting his space launch vehicle experience 

and the lessons learned during the past twenty-three years. 
ASK Bookshelf 

Here is a description of a book that we believe will interest ASK readers. 

ASK MAGAZINE | 61 

Managing Flow: A Process Theory of the 

Knowledge-Based Firm, by Ikujiro Nonaka, 

Ryoko Yoyama, and Toru Hirata (New York: 

Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) 

Ikujiro Nonaka is the most famous management theorist 

you have probably never heard of. He played a (or the) most 

important role in developing and propagating the idea of the 

knowledge management movement and served as an expert 

guide and “sensei” to many who have worked in the field for the 

past few decades. Because he is Japanese and not surprisingly 

has an affinity for Eastern formal philosophy as well as Western 

ideas, his books are not as popular in the United States and 

Europe as they should be. Nevertheless—to give just one small 

example—many of the ideas focused in the past decade or so 

on the tacit nature of knowledge have been strongly influenced, 

when not actually inspired, by the writings of Professor Nonaka 

and several of his colleagues. 

In this new book, published last year, Nonaka and his 

colleagues provide some new insights into the nature of 

knowledge and how it works in organizations. Rather than offer 

a full-blown review, it might be best in this short space to focus 

on just two points that are to some degree the central focus of 

this new work. 

One is the emphasis on phronesis. This is a classical Greek 

term, used prominently by Aristotle and recently brought back 

to life by commentators on knowledge and organizations. 

Most commonly translated as “practical wisdom,” it is often 

used to refer to the skill of successful politicians and other 

leaders who can make quick, accurate assessments of situations. 

This is a form of knowledge that cannot be codified or even 

really taught, but only gained through experience. Another 

characteristic of phronesis is the ability to sum up the essence 

of a situation and share it with others. While some have called 

this a communication skill, it is really more complex than that. 

It entails a deep and rich understanding, closer to intuition than 

reasoning, of how things work in this world. Winston Churchill 

and Franklin Roosevelt used it to lead their countries through 

crises. We could use more phronesis in these difficult days. 

Another, perhaps more familiar, term to those who follow 

current thinking in the realms of knowledge is the concept that 

lies behind the Japanese word baa. This complex concept has no 

direct English equivalent. It essentially means creating a space 

where common meaning can be built. That does not necessarily 

have to be a physical space. The authors discuss cyberspace and 

social spaces as well as open areas and other physical spaces. 

But baa invariably has a social element. It always refers to at 

least two people working together toward a goal of creating a 

commonality. This word, with all its rich connotations, is very 

useful in figuring out how to work effectively with knowledge 

in organizations. This concept was scarcely mentioned in any 

language before Nonaka introduced it to Western readers. It has 

become one of the most innovative and interesting conceptual 

tools in the knowledge managers’ toolkit. 

We hope this brief review inspires ASK readers to look at this 

and other works by the “Peter Drucker of Japan,” a man who is 

surely and deservedly one of the most influential management 

thinkers in the world today. ●
62 | ASK MAGAZINE 

The Knowledge Notebook
 

Knowledge and Judgment 

BY LAURENCE PRUSAK 

During the recent financial crisis, many people 

asked how such well-educated and highly trained 

traders, analysts, and brokers could have made 

such awful decisions. After all, they were the 

“best and the brightest”—often recruited from 

the best schools, where they majored in difficult 

and sometimes incomprehensible subjects and still 

graduated at the top of their classes. They were 

brilliant, so how could they have been so wrong? 

What happened? 

Well, those of you as old or nearly as old as I 

am know that we last heard about the “best and the 

brightest” during the final years of the Vietnam 

War, when a great reporter, David Halberstam, 

wrote a book with that title. In it, Halberstam 

described how some exceptionally smart people 

brought about that failed war and its terrible 

aftermath. They were smart, but their judgment 

was faulty. 

No doubt you have your own favorite examples 

of failures of judgment by people who, it seems, 

should have known better. But that assumes a 

causal link between knowledge and judgment—a 

link that is by no means automatic, simple, or everpresent. In fact, many social scientists now question 

the relationship between the two and wonder out 

loud if they are connected at all. 

Of course they are; good judgment requires 

knowledge. But the quality of judgment is strongly 

tied to how one chooses what knowledge to use in 

particular circumstances. Judgment is very much 

a mix of knowledge, context, and circumstances. 

I would also add history to this mix, perhaps 

because of my own predilections. The late, great, 

Ernest May pointed out that thinking of things “in 

time” often leads to good outcomes. 

Many, many books have been published that 

purporttotellushowtomakegooddecisions.Many 

of them are partisan, though, in that they advocate 

for what they consider the one best way to make 

decisions in virtually all circumstances. I think the 

only road to success in making good judgments 

against the odds of complexity, ambiguity, entropy, 

and one’s own biases is to selectively and flexibly use 

the entire range of your available knowledge. This 

includes instincts, “gut reactions,” tacit and explicit 

rules one has used successfully in the past, your 

own and others’ know-how, intellectual capital 

stored in documents and videos, analytics of all 

sorts and shapes, and examples offered by history. 

The trick is knowing when and where to use what 

knowledge and testing types of knowledge against 

each other. This isn’t always an easy thing to do, to 

say the least. 

Part of the problem is that our professional 

schools often give us one model for action—a 

kind of reductionist analytic structure that hasn’t 

changed much since it was developed in the 

seventeenth century. While this way of thinking 

has had great success in many areas, it lacks the 

subtlety and flexibility needed to deal with highly 

complex issues that depend on understanding 

human motivations that are often impossible to 

predict or analyze fully. If you have ever managed 

a complex technical task that is being carried 

out by a group of those rascally, unpredictable 

humans, you probably know that you need all 

the tools that you can get to do this sort of work 

well—to make the right decisions when judgment 

is called for. Depending on just one kind of 

analysis or managing people in one, unchanging 

way (solely using a reward system, for example) 
ASK MAGAZINE | 63 

is no more likely to succeed than trying to build a house with 

just a hammer. 

Another sad reason for our failures in exercising judgment 

is that little or no history is taught in our professional schools. 

Problems and issues are all addressed as if they had never 

happened before. How can we understand management issues 

or any issues in a historical vacuum? How can we understand 

what to do without knowing what was done before in similar 

circumstances and what the results were? Yet the history of 

management thought and action is a non-starter in MBA 

programs. I suspect the same is true in engineering schools, with 

every project seen as an orphan, without parents or offspring. 

One day all this will be different. Critical failures caused by 

poor judgment, some on a global scale, will continue and will 

eventually force schools, management gurus, and organizations 

to recognize the varied knowledge, skills, and perspectives that 

contribute to good judgment. They will eventually understand 

that there is no one right way to make decisions, that a key to 

good judgment is judging how to approach a particular task or 

situation. Teaching judgment and teaching the knowledge that 

supports judgment will be the norm. I only hope we don’t suffer 

too much more in the course of learning that lesson. ●

I THINK THE oNly RoAd To SuCCESS 

IN MAKING Good judGMENTS AGAINST 

THE oddS of CoMPlExITy, AMbIGuITy, 

ENTRoPy, ANd oNE’S oWN bIASES IS 

To SElECTIVEly ANd flExIbly uSE THE 

ENTIRE RANGE of youR AVAIlAblE 

KNoWlEdGE. 
64 | ASK MAGAZINE 

ASKinteractive
 

NASA in the News 

To celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the Apollo program s achievements, 

including the first moon landing, NASA has put together a collection of 

historic images, videos, personal stories and recollections, and more 

interactive features at www.nasa.gov/mission pages/apollo/40th/index.html. 

Several events will also be held to honor the Apollo program, with a full list 

available at www.nasa.gov/pdf/318218main 40thAnniversaryAgencyEvent 

s%20_6 22 09.pdf. 

Experience the challenge and victory of the great moon race once again, 

see what technology Apollo contributed along the way (www.sti.nasa. 

gov/tto/apollo.htm), or discover what NASA has in store for future lunar 

exploration in 3 D (www.nasa.gov/externalflash/exn3d/index.html). 

going green 

With climate change and the efforts to reduce our carbon footprint receiving much 

attention these days, many in industry, academia, and government agencies are striving 

to innovate sustainable practices. NASA Ames Research Center’s “greenspace Initiative” 

provides strategy, integration, and implementation support for alternative energy and 

environmental projects (www.nasa.gov/centers/ames/greenspace). Yale University has 

created a center dedicated to advancing green chemistry and engineering practices 

(www.greenchemistry.yale.edu) and partnered with several organizations to help increase 

greener practices, including the Environmental Protection Agency, which has developed 

its own green chemistry effort: www.epa.gov/greenchemistry/index.html. 

Web of Knowledge 

Are stunning photos from space not enough to satisfy your curiosity about NASA? Find 

videos, podcasts, blogs, RSS feeds, and other interactive features that expand your ability 

to explore what NASA is working on now and in the future: www.nasa.gov/multimedia/ 

index.html. If you haven’t had your fill of amazing NASA photography, be sure to check out 

nasaimages.org as well. 

For More on 

Our Stories 

Additional information 

pertaining to articles 

featured in this issue can 

be found by visiting the 

following Web sites: 

• Ikhana: www.nasa.gov/ 

centers/dryden/aircraft/ 

Ikhana/index.html 

• Earth Observing System:

eospso.gsfc.nasa.gov 

• European Organization 

for Nuclear Research 

(cERN): public.web.cern. 

ch/public 

feedback 

We welcome your comments on what you ve read in this issue of ASK and your suggestions for articles you 

would like to see in future issues. Share your thoughts with us at askmagazine.nasa.gov/about/write.php. 
Not yet receiving your own copy of ASK? 

To subscribe, send your full name and preferred mailing address 

(including mail stop, if applicable) to ASKmagazine@asrcms.com. 

If you like ASK Magazine, 

check out ASK the Academy 

ASK the Academy is an e-newsletter that offers timely news, updates, 

and features about best practices, lessons learned, and professional 

development. Learn more at askacademy.nasa.gov/. 
National Aeronautics and Space Administration 

NASA Headquarters 

300 E Street SW 

Washington, DC 20546 

www.nasa.gov 

NP-2009-07-596-HQ