Academy Sharing Knowledge

The NASA Source for Project Management and Engineering Excellence | APPEL SPRING | 2006

National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Inside

WHAT MAKES AN EFFECTIVE PROJECT MANAGER?

INTERVIEW WITH MICHAEL COATS

WERNHER VON BRAUN: LESSONS TAUGHT AND LEARNED
ON THE COVER

This artist’s concept shows the Crew Exploration Vehicle docking with a lunar lander and departure 

stage before heading for the moon. NASA’s next-generation spacecraft will use an improved, blunt-body 

capsule with an outside diameter of approximately 5.5 meters—more than three times the volume of the 

Apollo capsules. The spacecraft will have a total mass of 25 metric tons and will be able to dock with 

the International Space Station and other exploration elements.
5 27 9

DEPARTMENTS

3 

In This Issue 

4 

From the Director

52

Knowledge in Brief

53

ASK Bookshelf

54

The Knowledge Notebook

56

ASK Interactive

INSIGHTS

5

What Makes an Effective 

NASA Project Manager?

BY VERN WEYERS Refl ecting on a 40-year 

career, a NASA veteran describes 

qualities shared by the outstanding 

project managers he has known.

9 

Interview with Michael Coats

BY DON COHEN The Director of Johnson 

Space Center talks about the perspective 

he gained from his astronaut experience 

and the challenge of traveling to Mars.

21 

The View from Space 

BY BEN BRUNEAU AND KERRY ELLIS A 

few examples of the many images 

from space that have increased our 

knowledge about Earth and changed 

how we think about our planet.

35 

Improving Lessons Learned

BY DAVID OBERHETTINGER The chairman of 

the JPL Lessons Learned Committee 

describes a process designed to ensure 

that important lessons are not only 

captured but put into practice.

41 

Collaborative Community 

BY PAUL ADLER AND CHARLES HECKSCHER 

The authors discuss a new, fl exible kind 

of organizational community based on 

shared work, shared goals, and shared 

values.

46 

Challenging Complacency 

BY STEPHEN DENNING Organizations can 

employ a range of strategies to reduce 

the chances that past success will blind 

them to future risks. 

STORIES

14

Stardust: Commitment, 

Care, and Communication 

BY KEN ATKINS Persistence, communication, 

and commitment to an inspiring goal helped 

make the Stardust mission a success.

18 

Genesis: Learning from Mistakes

BY KERRY ELLIS The Genesis crash landing 

revealed the need to test even systems 

that have been used before and provided 

hard-earned lessons for other missions. 

25

Featured Invention: 

Cabin Pressure Monitor

BY CAROL ANNE DUNN The Personal Cabin 

Pressure Altitude Monitor and Warning 

System, winner of the NASA Commercial 

Invention of the Year and Government 

Invention of the Year awards for 2003, 

grew out of a project to create a vacuum 

chamber that would simulate lunar and 

Mars environments.

27 

Wernher von Braun: 

Lessons Taught and Learned

BY BOB WARD The biographer of the eminent 

space pioneer considers von Braun as a 

scientist, teacher, leader, spokesman for 

the space program—and as a man.

32 

Cancelled Project, 

Continuing Relationships

The HyTEx hypersonic re-entry vehicle 

never fl ew, but the project was a model 

of cooperation that has created lasting 

relationships that will benefi t other 

collaborative work.

38 

From Chaos to Order

BY MIKE ZAMBRUSKI AND DON COHEN 

A conversational process guided by 

a software tool that makes tasks and 

resources explicit puts a fl oundering 

portal development project on track.

Contents

ASK MAGAZINE | 1
The Academy of Program/Project & Engineering Leadership (APPEL) and ASK 

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

meet tomorrow’s challenges by providing performance enhancement services and 

tools, supporting career development programs, sponsoring knowledge sharing events 

and publications, and creating opportunities for project management and engineering 

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

government agencies.

ASK Magazine grew out of APPEL’s Knowledge Sharing Initiative. 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 and industries. These 

stories contain knowledge and wisdom that are transferable across projects. 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.

Please direct all inquiries about ASK Magazine editorial policy to Don Cohen, 

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

For inquiries about other APPEL Knowledge Sharing programs and products, 

please contact the Knowledge Sharing Project Manager, Tina Chindgren, at 

ASRC Management Services, 6303 Ivy Lane, Suite 800, Greenbelt, MD 20770; 

tina.chindgren@asrcms.com; or 301-837-9069.

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

TECHNICAL EDITOR

Kerry Ellis

kerry.ellis@asrcms.com

KNOWLEDGE SHARING MANAGER

Tina Chindgren

tina.chindgren@asrcms.com

KNOWLEDGE SHARING ANALYST

Ben Bruneau

ben.bruneau@asrcms.com

DESIGN

Hirshorn Zuckerman 

Design Group, Inc.

www.hzdg.com

SENIOR PRINTING SPECIALIST

Jeffrey McLean

jmclean@hq.nasa.gov

PRINTING

GraphTec
Ed Hoffman’s Director’s column (“Thinking About 

Excellence”) and Laurence Prusak’s Knowledge Notebook 

piece (“How Does a Learning Organization Learn?”) make 

related points that defi ne key themes of this issue of ASK. 

Hoffman notes that excellence comes from paying attention 

to the experience of real work—learning from refl ection on 

successes and mistakes. He suggests that learning and 

excellence tend to be the product of group, not individual, 

effort. Prusak also emphasizes the social and experiential 

nature of learning. People learn with and from each other; 

the learning that “sticks” is what they need to know to do 

their jobs well.

Many of the articles here touch on the value of learning 

from experience and the importance of being open and 

attentive to what experience teaches. In the interview, 

Michael Coats talks about applying lessons he learned 

as an astronaut to his work as Director of Johnson Space 

Center and also about learning from veterans of the Apollo 

era by inviting them back for conversation and consultation. 

David Oberhettinger describes a process developed at 

Jet Propulsion Laboratory to ensure that the lessons of 

experience are not only recognized but infl uence future 

behaviors. Recognizing that making use of the wisdom of 

experience is often a tougher problem than capturing it, 

his Lessons Learned Committee emphasizes “infusing” 

valuable lessons into practices to make them part of how 

people work.

One of the barriers to learning is people’s understandable 

reluctance to admit mistakes (compounded by an even 

stronger disinclination to talk about them). But mistakes 

are great teachers, and effective project teams and 

learning organizations fi nd ways to make examining them 

acceptable. Wernher von Braun biographer Bob Ward says 

that von Braun gave a bottle of champagne to an engineer 

who revealed that he had made the mistake that destroyed 

a Redstone rocket. This reward—and, even more, the 

absence of punishment—was an important signal that 

encouraged others to be open about errors. Von Braun 

attributed his German scientists’ expertise to the fact that 

they had more years to make mistakes than their American 

counterparts. So it is not surprising that Vern Weyers’ 

analysis of the characteristics of outstanding project 

managers includes openness and a determination to 

recognize and deal with problems as soon as they become 

evident. Ignored problems never go away; they get worse. 

Stephen Denning’s “Challenging Complacency” is a more 

systemic look at strategies that can help organizations look 

at uncomfortable truths and risks that successful, resultsoriented organizations tend to ignore.

Learning is an aspect of most of the project stories 

in this issue. The Genesis team made sure that what 

they learned about the causes of the crash landing of 

their vehicle was communicated to the Stardust team 

(where it infl uenced their re-entry preparations). The 

Stardust project itself was characterized by openness and 

communication that fostered group learning and problemsolving. (HyTEx showed a similar spirit, with clarity about 

roles and responsibilities contributing to cooperation.) 

Clarity and openness foster trust, which, as Prusak notes, 

also contributes to an effective learning environment.

Don Cohen

Managing Editor

In This Issue

ASK MAGAZINE | 3
We talk a lot about “excellence” at NASA. That’s 

no surprise. Our mission calls on us to create and 

manage complex, innovative technologies with 

little margin for error. Failure can mean the loss of 

missions costing years of work and many millions 

of dollars and sometimes the devastating loss of life. 

So excellence in what we do is not just desirable; 

it’s required. I’d like to reflect a little here on what 

excellence is and how it develops.

Most of us believe we recognize excellence when 

we see it. We can probably agree on a definition, 

something along the lines of “superior quality or 

performance produced by outstanding knowledge 

and skill.” That’s a good start, but I think looking 

further can provide clues about how to achieve and 

maintain excellence in our work at NASA.

People who excel usually start out with a basic 

aptitude for whatever it is they become expert in, 

but a lot of learning goes into achieving excellence. 

Initially, that means formal education, studying 

the basics and then the depth and subtleties 

of a field. Schooling alone doesn’t produce 

excellence, though. Even the most promising 

newcomers need the learning that comes from 

long experience before they become experts 

who excel in their work. In fact, “expert” and 

“experience” (and “experiment”) come from the 

same Latin word, experiri, which means “to put 

to the test.” Excellence can only be achieved by 

testing, extending, and refining “book learning” 

day by day through the experience of real work.

Having experience is not enough, of course. 

You have to learn from it, and learning from 

experience depends on a couple of things. First, 

you have to be willing to recognize and admit 

mistakes quickly, to learn from what goes wrong. 

(To make that happen, your organization also 

needs to treat mistakes as learning opportunities 

rather than opportunities for punishment.) 

Second, you have to reflect on experience. Some 

of that reflection is personal; excellence means 

continuously striving to understand what your 

work experience is telling you. Some is more 

public. At NASA, this magazine and APPEL’s 

Masters Forums are among the ways that people 

share what they learn from experience. Possibly 

the most valuable reflection happens in teams 

and groups that work together. That is why some 

organizations have adopted the Army’s afteraction review process, which gives groups an 

opportunity to compare what they expected to 

happen to what really happened in an event or 

project and talk about what they learned. NASA’s 

demanding schedules and tight budget make it 

hard to find time for group reflection, but I think 

there is no denying its importance.

We sometimes associate excellence with 

individuals—the talented surgeon, the outstanding 

engineer—but when work is complicated and 

collaborative, excellence depends more on how well 

a group works together than on the skill of any 

one person. In a study of surgeons who perform 

coronary bypass operations, Robert Huckman and 

Gary Pisano of Harvard Business School found that 

the success rate of surgeons who divided their time 

between two hospitals was significantly higher in the 

hospital where they performed more surgeries—that 

is, where they and their operating room team had 

the most shared experience. Their conclusion—that 

excellence depends more on the quality of teamwork 

than the talents of an individual “star”—is an 

important one for NASA. ●

From the Director

Thinking About Excellence

BY ED HOFFMAN 

4 | ASK MAGAZINE
What Makes an 

Effective NASA 

Project Manager?

BY VERN WEYERS

The varied responsibilities of NASA project managers include technical, cost, schedule, and team 

management aspects of their projects. The PM must deal with people and problems continuously 

and must evaluate the risk involved with each decision. Some project managers consistently meet 

these challenges more effectively than others. In my thirty-fi ve years at NASA and nine years of 

consulting for NASA and commercial aerospace companies, I consider myself fortunate to have 

participated in more than fi fty space fl ight projects that ranged from $100,000 studies to multibillion dollar projects such as the Hubble Space Telescope. As a project manager myself and then as 

the Director of Space Flight Projects at Glenn Research Center and Goddard Space Flight Center, 

and as a member of independent review teams for Goddard, Langley, and Jet Propulsion Laboratory 

missions, I have had the opportunity to observe, work with, advise, and learn from many excellent 

NASA project managers. 

INSIGHT | ASK MAGAZINE | 5
There is no standard recipe for outstanding project management, 

but the twenty or so project managers I consider among 

the most effective I have seen have had important traits in 

common. Without exception, they were capable, respected, and 

charismatic. Here are some examples from my experience and 

observations that show why these traits matter.

Being Capable

In addition to being at least reasonably well-organized, the 

capable project manager is knowledgeable, decisive, persistent, 

and a good risk manager.

The PM must understand all aspects of the project, its goals, 

requirements, challenges, and risks. That is not to say that she 

must be an expert in every area. Rather, she needs to have a broad 

understanding of the technical subsystems involved in order to 

understand their functions, interfaces, and risks. She must be 

sufficiently knowledgeable about technical aspects, financial 

management, and scheduling to ask the right questions, evaluate 

the risks, and make valid trade-offs and decisions. Virtually all 

the effective aerospace PMs I have known have considerable 

expertise in at least one technical area, most often the area 

in which they worked prior to becoming a PM or an area in 

which they previously resolved a major problem. Most PMs 

will admit that, from early in their careers, they were interested 

in the broader picture of the entire spacecraft, launch vehicle, 

or system and not only in their particular field of expertise. 

This desire to understand the overall system serves the project 

manager well. The effective PM is a fast learner who can quickly 

gather enough information about any system to be 

able to make prompt and reasonable decisions 

in response to challenges or problems.

Secondly, the effective PM must be 

decisive. One of the most effective PMs in 

my experience often said, “There is no such 

thing as a bad decision, except one which is not 

made promptly. The important thing is to make 

the decision and move on. If it is not the best course of action, 

that will soon become obvious and then another decision must 

be made to change direction.”

Unless there is more relevant information pending, a test 

to be completed, or another credible opinion to be solicited, 

delaying a decision has only disadvantages. Many decisions 

involve choosing the best among two or more options. Often 

the very fact that the decision comes to the PM indicates that 

all the options are feasible and none will be catastrophic. Some 

of the most difficult decisions involve contractors who are not 

performing well. In those cases, the PM must lead the effort to 

fix the problem. If working with the contractor’s team and its 

management to improve the situation is not successful, then key 

people need to be changed or the contract terminated and the 

work transferred elsewhere.

Early in my career as a director, I was involved in the decision 

to terminate a major contractor on an important project whose 

primary source of profit was its work on classified programs. 

The contractor personnel assigned to our project were mostly 

new hires who had not yet received security clearances. Once 

their clearances came through, the better performers would be 

quickly transferred to a classified project and replaced on our 

team by another inexperienced person who needed to be trained. 

Terminating this contractor was a big decision but the right one 

because we could not be confident that the contractor’s assigned 

team could do the job. Delaying the decision would only have 

harmed the project. Several of the contractor’s vice presidents 

visited us and pleaded for one more chance. It was too late. 

Any decision is likely to be questioned and challenged, 

but even questions from well-meaning, dedicated stakeholders 

should be raised and resolved before a decision is made. 

Afterward, it is important for all parties to accept the decision 

and for the PM to remain firm and not second-guess himself. 

Good ideas always arise during a project that would make it 

better—more reliable, more capable, more robust—but, as has 

often been said, “better is the enemy of good enough.” The PM 

6 | ASK MAGAZINE
must hold the line on requirements and keep the 

work moving forward on the accepted design. 

During development of one of the Great 

Observatories, it became obvious that a 

filter on one of the major instruments 

had partially delaminated during ground 

testing. The science community wanted to remove 

the instrument from its cryogenic container, replace the 

damaged filter, reinstall the instrument, and retest the 

observatory. After determining that the instrument could 

meet all its requirements in its existing condition and that the 

filter replacement would cost around $50 million and cause a 

six-month launch delay, the project manager stood firm and 

obtained Headquarters’ approval of his decision to launch 

with the degraded filter. Excellent performance after launch 

confirmed the decision as correct.

Often, an effective PM must be persistent. One project I 

directed for a number of years required extraordinary persistence 

on the part of the PM who reported to me. Every year, NASA 

zeroed the budget for the half-billion-dollar technology project. 

Just as reliably (although not quickly enough), Congress 

reinstated the funds needed for the next fiscal year. Every 

year, the project was in limbo. By expressing his optimism and 

confidence that the money would be forthcoming, the PM 

managed to keep his team in place, motivated, and enthusiastic. 

Each year, he would ensure that enough funds remained from 

the previous fiscal year to allow the work to proceed, albeit at 

a reduced level, during the months of uncertainty. The launch 

date slipped a number of years as a result, but eventually the 

project met its cost cap, flew, far outlived its planned lifetime, 

and succeeded beyond expectations.

An effective PM is also a risk manager. I have heard good 

project managers say that project management is nothing more 

than risk management. All projects involve risk. Many of them—

often technical risks due to the use of unproven technology or 

a technology in a new application or environment—can be 

identified early. Insufficient reserves and major 

technical problems cause financial and schedule 

risk. Weakness or a key vacancy in the project team 

are sources of risk. The hardest risks to deal with are 

those that are unknown at the start of the project; when 

they eventually do become apparent, there is little time to 

understand and mitigate them. An effective project manager 

will identify, plan for, and mitigate risk in all areas. The risks 

must be tracked, reported, and addressed on a continual basis 

throughout the project. Brainstorming among the project team 

is often effective in identifying mitigation steps. 

Being Respected

Unless most of the people comprising a team respect the project 

manager, he will have a difficult time motivating the kind of 

coordinated and cooperative effort needed to achieve success. 

To be respected, a project manager must be 

capable, but there is more to earning 

respect than competence.

After hearing a former supervisor 

address a NASA Project Manager 

training session, I remember telling 

some of my classmates, “I would 

follow him anywhere.” He knew his 

project, its challenges, and its goals 

and had a clear vision of how to 

accomplish them. He was enthusiastic 

about its eventual success but realistic in evaluating the challenges 

that stood in the way of achieving it. He was convinced it was a 

valuable undertaking and that he could lead the effort to make 

it happen. He inspired his team and made each individual proud 

to be included. And he respected his team members.

Respect is reciprocal. A project manager who desires respect 

from his team must treat team members fairly and with respect. 

That does not mean always agreeing with them. It means being 

willing to listen to what each stakeholder has to say, honestly 

THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A BAD DECISION, EXCEPT ONE WHICH IS NOT MADE 

PROMPTLY. THE IMPORTANT THING IS TO MAKE THE DECISION AND MOVE ON. IF IT 

IS NOT THE BEST COURSE OF ACTION, THAT WILL SOON BECOME OBVIOUS AND 

THEN ANOTHER DECISION MUST BE MADE TO CHANGE DIRECTION.

ASK MAGAZINE | 7
VERN WEYERS spent 35 years with NASA at Lewis (now 

Glenn), Headquarters, and Goddard. He was Director of Flight 

Projects at Goddard during the Hubble Space Telescope repair 

mission, launch of the GOES-I weather satellite, and numerous 

other fl ight projects.

considering that input in making 

his decision, and then conveying his 

reasons for choosing the selected approach. 

A person whose ideas are sometimes rejected 

but who knows that he has been heard and has 

been treated fairly will continue to respect the 

decision maker and perform well. 

Being Charismatic

Webster defines charisma as “a special, inspiring quality of 

leadership.” A charismatic project manager makes the team 

not only willing but excited to have her as its leader. Some 

elements of charisma are hard to define, but others are fairly 

clear. Probably the most important trait contributing to a PM’s 

charisma is being a good communicator. As the spokesperson 

for the project, she must be able to articulate her position, 

decisions, and expectations. It is critical for a PM to be able to 

communicate clearly, succinctly, persuasively, and openly.

A positive (but realistic) attitude is also important. NASA is 

known as a “can do” organization, and the history of NASA is 

rich with examples of successful outcomes of projects that faced 

daunting challenges. 

In the first months after discovering the spherical aberration 

in the lens of the Hubble Space Telescope, it was difficult 

to feel positive about the likelihood of recovering planned 

performance. But the PM assigned to lead preparations for the 

repair mission was greatly respected based on his leadership of 

a previous successful in-space repair mission. He eloquently 

communicated his certainty that such a mission would succeed. 

He expressed nothing but full confidence in his team members 

and their abilities. He encouraged a broad solicitation of ideas 

on how to approach the task and led the effort to carry out the 

selected approach. The flawless repair mission resulted in betterthan-design performance and the most productive telescope in 

the history of mankind.

Last, but probably not least, most of the many effective PMs I 

have known have had a sense of humor. All projects are challenging 

and face low points. Being able to step back, take a broad perspective, 

and share a laugh with the rest of the team is important. If a project 

is fun to work on, the team’s enthusiasm and performance will 

reflect that, to the benefit of the overall effort.

Part way through a two-stage launch vehicle project, 

someone from another part of the managing center was assigned 

as project manager. He was a virtual unknown to the team and 

some members doubted his ability to lead the project. When a 

critical decision was required and the participants were clearly 

grim and doubtful, the new PM would ask, “Now tell me again, 

which of the stages goes on top?” That would invariably break 

the tension and lead to substantive discussion and a decision. 

Within a very short time, the team felt comfortable with the 

new PM and worked hard to help him succeed.

The Complete Project Manager

I have described a broad and impressive range of traits that 

make some project managers especially capable, respected, and 

charismatic. Not all successful project managers possess all 

those qualities and abilities in equal measure, but the challenge 

and complexity of most NASA projects requires their managers 

to call on most of them in the course of their work. That is 

why effective project management is so demanding and why it 

is important to observe the best project managers in action and 

learn from their examples. ●

THE HARDEST RISKS TO DEAL WITH ARE 

THOSE THAT ARE UNKNOWN AT THE 

START OF THE PROJECT; WHEN THEY 

EVENTUALLY DO BECOME APPARENT, 

THERE IS LITTLE TIME TO UNDERSTAND 

AND MITIGATE THEM. AN EFFECTIVE 

PROJECT MANAGER WILL IDENTIFY, PLAN 

FOR, AND MITIGATE RISK IN ALL AREAS.

8 | ASK MAGAZINE
Former astronaut Michael Coats joined NASA 

in 1984 and fl ew three shuttle missions before 

leaving the Agency for Lockheed Martin in 

1991. He was appointed Center Director of 

Johnson Space Center in November 2005. 

He talked with Don Cohen in February 2006.

INTERVIEW WITH

COHEN: Johnson has major responsibility 

for the Crew Exploration Vehicle [CEV] 

and related work. What is your role in 

making these things happen?

COATS: Our first priority is to fly out the 

shuttle safely. When that last one rolls to 

a stop, I’ll feel good if I can look back 

and say I had something to do with that. 

Operating the space station is important 

to us. We’d like to finish building it 

and start the real science with a much 

larger crew up there. Now we’re starting 

the Constellation program, which is 

the future of NASA. The exploration 

program is exciting for us because for the 

first time in maybe forty-five years we’ve 

got clear direction from the president 

and administration and Congress about 

where we’re trying to go. Just to know 

that we need to go back to the Moon 

and learn to use it as a test bed to get 

ready to go to Mars is exciting. My job 

at the Johnson Space Center is to make 

sure that we—3,000-plus civil servants 

and 10,000 contractors—can support 

the programs here and learn from each 

other. I hate the word “synergy,” but 

that’s what we’re looking for. How do we 

take lessons learned from the shuttle and 

station and forty-five years of experience 

and apply it to Constellation? 

COHEN: How do you make sure people 

learn what they need to know from the 

people who have important knowledge?

Michael 

Coats

BY DON COHEN

INSIGHT | ASK MAGAZINE | 9
COATS: One big challenge is making 

sure that the experience that we have 

accumulated doesn’t walk out the door 

as people retire. Fortunately, the people 

who have worked in this business for 

decades love it. I’ve had most of the former 

center directors in here so I can pick their 

brains. Every one of them is dedicated 

to the space program and proud of 

what’s been accomplished. They’ve had 

very productive and satisfying careers. 

Starting from scratch and landing 

people on the Moon in eight years—the 

blink of an eye—was amazing. And 

they had no infrastructure. They had an 

open checkbook, but they had to invent 

everything as they went along.

COHEN: Their Apollo experience is 

going to be useful for the CEV.

COATS: Mike Griffin calls the CEV 

“Apollo on steroids.” We’re taking the 

lessons learned from Apollo as well as 

the Soyuz program and applying them 

along with our operational experience 

on the shuttle and the station. I need the 

shuttle folks to work on the shuttle right 

up to the last flight, but I also need to 

draw on their experience as we design and 

build the CEV. So I’m going to co-locate 

those folks. My support organizations, 

like finance and procurement, are going 

to support both programs so that they’re 

married as much as possible. We’ve also 

got a fantastic mentoring program here 

with over 400 mentors and 600 protégés 

signed up over the last couple of years. 

It’s working very well.

COHEN: The mentors are actively 

engaged in program work as well 

as mentoring?

COATS: Yes, they’ve got their regular jobs. 

We send them through some training so 

they know what to expect. I’ve got people 

who are both mentors and protégés. 

Contractors are doing the same thing. 

The whole aerospace industry is getting 

pretty senior, so we’re worried about the 

knowledge walking out the door.

COHEN: My sense is that mentoring 

usually works better than documents 

at passing on that knowledge.

COATS: One frustration is that we do 

a good job of documenting lessons 

learned—we’ve developed fantastic 

WHEN YOU’VE BEEN up there, YOU START thinking MORE 

LIKE A member of the human race THAN AN AMERICAN...

10 | ASK MAGAZINE
books of lessons learned that we put on 

a shelf, and no one uses.

COHEN: That’s an almost universal story 

in organizations; it’s easier to collect 

information than have people use those 

documents.

COATS: And they tend to disappear over 

time. I lived through the Challenger 

tragedy. We learned a lot then and tried 

to document it, but after Columbia 

folks had a hard time finding that 

information. We’re trying to figure out 

a way to make sure that the final reports 

on the Columbia accident will be readily 

accessible to somebody down the line—

hopefully a lot of years down the line. 

With the Internet, all you need to do 

is Google a few words and print out all 

the information you want. We ought to 

have a similar database available for the 

space program, but how you go back 

and capture what was done for the last 

forty-five years is a challenge. If you’re 

an engineer designing a reaction control 

system for the CEV or the lunar lander, 

wouldn’t it be nice to type in “reaction 

control systems” and call up the history 

of all the space programs, including 

Russian vehicles, so you don’t have to 

reinvent the wheel? It breaks my heart 

that something like the Apollo fire 

happened to the Russians several years 

before it happened to us. It would have 

been good to learn those lessons before 

we paid such a steep price.

COHEN: You can capture important 

data in a system, but what about the 

subtler stuff that maybe mentoring and 

experience teach more effectively?

COATS: I think both government and 

industry do a good job of training 

and educating people through formal 

programs. The government has excellent 

program management classes, but we 

don’t do as good a job making sure they 

have the breadth of experience they need 

to step into a program-managing job. If 

a person is in engineering or operations 

or safety or finances, they tend to spend 

their career there. There’s nothing wrong 

with an engineer who just wants to be an 

engineer, but he shouldn’t be a program 

manager. But if they’re successful and 

talented, we say, “This guy is a shooting 

star!” and make him a program manager. 

Program managers need to understand 

all the disciplines and challenges they 

are going to face. We want to identify 

people who have the inclination and 

desire to move back and forth between 

programs, and we need to do a better 

job of rotating people around to get the 

breadth of experience they need to speak 

the language of each of the disciplines. 

Ninety percent of any job is knowing the 

right questions to ask at the right time 

and how to ask them. You need to read 

between the lines of what people tell you. 

You need to know about the potholes in 

the road. That comes from experience.

COHEN: How has your astronaut 

experience affected the way you see 

the challenges ahead?

COATS: Everybody that’s flown in space 

looks back at the Earth and realizes what 

a tiny little spaceship Earth we have. One 

of my strongest impressions when I got 

up there on my first shuttle mission was, 

“Holy cow, it’s a little bitty Earth; it’s 

beautiful, and it’s going through a great 

big black void of nothing.” We’ll explore, 

but billions of people will never leave 

the Earth, so we’ve got to learn to take 

care of it. When you’ve been up there, 

you start thinking more like a member 

of the human race than an American or 

Texan, which means you’ve got a lot in 

common with other people who have 

worked in this business. I believe any big 

venture in the future will be international. 

The space station is setting the precedent. 

Space is expensive; it’s better to share that 

cost. It’s also a tremendous way to open 

up communications between countries. 

Communication between scientists, 

engineers, astronauts, and cosmonauts 

can be a foundation for countries working 

together. Even during the cold war we 

shared information with the Russians 

and their program—a lot of medical 

information, for instance. Right now, India 

and China are producing many times the 

scientists and engineers than we are, but 

the space program is one area that attracts 

young people into thinking about math 

and science. The kids in the national 

technical honor society group I talked 

to last night are excited about the 

exploration program. I also talked 

about nanotechnology that will have a 

tremendous impact on our lives. If I have a 

frustration in life, it’s that I can only expect 

to live another twenty to twenty-five years, 

and I want to live longer so I can see this 

stuff we’ll discover. I told the kids last night 

that I envy every one of them. I said, “You 

were born at a great time. You’re going to 

see things that we can’t even imagine.”

COHEN: Is the Constellation work going 

to involve all the NASA centers?

ASK MAGAZINE | 11
COATS: We have to use all the strengths 

of the NASA team wherever they are. I 

would like Johnson Space Center to lead 

the team as much as possible. I want the 

first word to be spoken from the surface 

of Mars to be “Houston” just like it was 

from the surface of the Moon. To make 

that happen, we’ve got a lot of work to 

do. We’ve got to get expertise and team 

up with the expertise we don’t have, 

because missions to Mars are going to be 

deep-space operations involving robotics 

as well as humans. We don’t have that 

deep-space and robotics expertise, JPL 

[Jet Propulsion Laboratory] does. I’ve 

been working with Charles Elachi out 

there. We obviously work very closely 

with Marshall and Kennedy. We need 

to continue to build on that, but we also 

need to take advantage of the strengths 

of Ames and Langley and Glenn. I 

agree with Mike Griffin: to be a strong 

Agency, we need ten healthy centers. 

Four centers have focused primarily on 

aeronautics work, but the budget is not 

there for aeronautics. We need to help 

those centers keep the aeronautics work 

alive but also need to keep them strong 

helping us with space flight. We have to 

find the work packages that can move to 

the centers that are hurting right now to 

make them healthy. We are challenged 

to do long-term, self-sustaining human 

space flight, which we’ve never done 

before. The furthest we’ve ever been from 

mother Earth is two and a half days. Now 

we’re talking about two and a half years. 

When you fire those engines to head off 

to Mars, you’re on your own and you’re 

not turning around. How can you be 

truly self-sustaining? How do you recycle 

everything that can be recycled? How do 

you take along the pharmacology you 

might need? How do you protect from 

radiation? There are a lot of medical 

questions that need to be answered, and 

we’ve got a lot of work to do before we’re 

ready to be truly self-sustaining. 

COHEN: So there’s a lot of need for 

communication and coordination 

among centers.

COATS: Mike has a monthly senior 

management council where all the center 

directors and associate administrators 

get together. We move it around to 

different centers, so we see each other 

face to face at least once a month. I’m 

still a believer in meeting face to face on 

a regular basis. Communication is about 

ten percent verbal and the rest is body 

language. I knew most of the center 

directors already.

COHEN: Are there other aspects of your 

astronaut experience that are especially 

useful now?

COATS: I’ve seen the science side of 

NASA as well as the operation space flight 

side, so I hope I’ve got a balance, but I 

look at things from an operator’s point 

of view. How can we design our vehicles, 

robotic or human, to be operator friendly? 

I think that’s especially important when 

we’re talking about longer and longer 

flights. Mass is always going to be a 

challenge; having to lift everything out 

of Earth’s gravity well is expensive. How 

can we design a vehicle that’s as efficient, 

lightweight, safe, and operator-friendly as 

we need? I’m interested in how to design 

a spacecraft that is both functional 

and comfortable for the crews that are 

going to spend a long time on them. I 

have an appreciation from my shuttle 

flights, which were only seven or eight 

days long, of what’s important when 

you’re trying to live and work in that 

environment. And part of the operator’s 

mentality is always thinking, what’s 

my backup, what’s my out? It’s a way 

of thinking you develop as a military pilot, 

a test pilot, and an astronaut. As you’re 

flying airplanes, you’re always thinking, 

if the engine quits, where am I landing? 

You do it automatically. We’ve got to 

keep that in mind as we’re designing the 

series of vehicles we’re going to need for 

Constellation. How can we make them 

as safe as we can afford to make them? 

That’s the operational mentality at work. 

Different perspectives are important. I 

learned to respect scientists, engineers, 

and medical doctors who have a different 

way of thinking, but we astronauts had to 

teach them to think operationally. You’d 

ask a scientist, “How long is it going 

to take you to perform this procedure 

with the mechanical arm?” “Oh, twenty 

minutes,” they would say. Then we would 

say, “How about two hours?” We knew it 

takes a while to do things.

COHEN: I think in the Mercury and 

Apollo days there was a good bit of 

friction between pilots, engineers, 

and scientists.

COATS: Healthy tension is good. You 

need debate. Somebody may say, “That’s 

stupid, you ought to do it this way.” 

Then you think, we can do it even better 

this other way. I’ve seen it happen many 

times. It’s beautiful to watch; you come 

12 | ASK MAGAZINE
up with some elegant solutions when you 

have the openness and freedom to say, 

“That’s really stupid.”

COHEN: Have you had any surprises in 

the months you’ve been center director?

COATS: Surprise may not be the right 

word, but I’ve been impressed by how 

much talent and dedication there is.

COHEN: I’m struck by how positive 

people are about working for NASA.

COATS: In the space business, you have 

tremendous highs and tremendous lows. 

When a mission succeeds, whether it’s 

the shuttle or a crew coming back from 

the station, or Stardust, everyone is on 

cloud nine. You work for years to pull 

off something challenging and you 

do. It makes you feel you’ve done 

something special in this world. On the 

other hand, when we have a Columbia, 

it doesn’t get any worse than that. It’s 

never, never boring. People love working 

here. When I ask a question or say I’d 

like to research a certain area, people 

make things happen, to the point where 

I’ve got to be careful about thinking 

out loud.

COHEN: What kinds of things are they 

researching?

COATS: I’ve asked them to do some 

long-term planning. In the government, 

we have a five-year plan and nobody 

looks past that. Now that we’ve got 

direction about where we’re going to be 

going for the next twenty-five, thirty, 

or fifty years, we need to do long-term 

planning to understand what facilities, 

core competencies, and skills we’ll need.

COHEN: There’s a real contrast between 

the excitement within NASA about 

Constellation and some of the public 

who are complaining that the Agency is 

doing the same old thing over again.

COATS: I think the public is so unaware 

of what we’re doing, they don’t even know 

what questions to ask. The results of focus 

groups we’ve conducted were depressing. 

We asked people what they think of 

the space program; the answer is, they 

don’t. Not one person had heard about 

exploration. After we told them about it, 

they thought it was great. At NASA, we 

live in our own little world. Occasionally 

we make headlines, but the general public 

doesn’t know what we do. The Space 

Act of 1958 requires us to disseminate 

information on our activities to the general 

public, but we don’t do it well.

COHEN: Do you see a lack of public 

understanding of the grand plans and 

the achievements that benefi t people 

directly?

COATS: We’ve got partnerships with 

medical institutions for medical research 

we need for long-term space flights—

research on bone loss, radiation, early 

diagnostics. I try to use medical examples 

when I’m talking to the public because 

everybody has got someone in the family 

who has osteoporosis or cancer. I’ll say, 

how many of you have had Lasik eye 

surgery? Maybe half raise their hands. 

I say, “You’re welcome. We use NASA’s 

tracking to develop that technology.” 

We’re doing a lot of things for bone loss 

that applies to the general public. The 

list of direct applications is huge. We’ve 

got to make the public aware that they’re 

getting something for their space dollar. 

You can argue all day long about whether 

we should be going to the Moon and 

Mars. All I want is a chance to discuss 

it, because John Q. Public doesn’t know 

what we do. ●

I’M STILL a believer IN MEETING face to face ON A REGULAR 

BASIS. Communication IS ABOUT TEN PERCENT VERBAL and 

the rest IS BODY LANGUAGE.

ASK MAGAZINE | 13
Stardust

The Rewards of Commitment, 

Care, and Communication

BY KEN ATKINS

Stardust Capsule Return as seen from NASA’s DC-8 Airborne Laboratory with a mission to explore the conditions during re-entry from the light 

emitted by the fireball caused when the capsule streaked through the sky. The aircraft was located near the end of the trajectory, just outside 

the Utah Test and Training Range.

Photo by NASA/Ames Research Center

14 | ASK MAGAZINE | STORY
Of course, there had been problems on the way. Fault protection 

software placed the spacecraft into “safe mode” ten times and 

nearly forty-two software patches were transmitted and installed 

to handle needed repairs and upgrades. The most spectacular 

safing occurred when a massive solar flare hit the spacecraft on 

November 8, 2000, “confusing” the star cameras and causing 

the computers to reboot five times in approximately six minutes, 

eventually taking the ship all the way to terminal safe mode. 

However, the machine was performing as planned, and the 

flight team patiently waited until the storm passed and then 

commanded a recovery to full flight capability, still on course 

for its January 15, 2006, delivery. 

The parachute-deployment failure Genesis suffered led 

us to reconfirm that Stardust’s deployment system had been 

adequately tested and did not share the Genesis design flaw. 

Even so, the team planned and trained for unlikely but possible 

return and recovery contingencies.

Sources of Success

Looking back across ten years, this long, technically and 

organizationally challenging project had succeeded brilliantly. I 

attribute its success to the unifying power of an inspiring goal, 

an effective results-driven organizing structure, and clear and 

open communication.

Stardust’s inspiring goal unified the team and helped even 

the grumpiest of us get beyond disagreements instead of letting 

technical issues, schedule, or cost—those three horses of project 

apocalypse—get out of control. Members shared a commitment 

to control all three to achieve the goal everyone relished 

explaining to friends, families, and anyone who would listen. 

Pursuit of that goal made people selfless. Engineers worked 

hard in their own subsystems to conserve reserves for others. 

Principal Investigator Don Brownlee was a master at conveying 

his enthusiasm for getting at comets, those ghosts of the solar 

system. I’d known Don and many of his colleagues from my 

early days at Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), when we worked 

together to try and get a U.S mission to fly to comet Halley. 

He was an excellent “missionary” for this adventure. With an 

engineering degree supplementing his scientific résumé, he 

understood what engineers could and could not do. Together 

we became cheerleaders for our team. 

In large measure, I credit the NASA Discovery Program 

Manager, Mark Saunders, and his selection criteria for 

Discovery 4 with creating the foundation for a results-driven 

action structure that didn’t force me to be the budget bad guy 

(and force others to hide bad news). In fact, I was able to release 

reserves to preemptively counter threats and risk. Looking for 

ways to attack risk before it attacked us, we spent about a million 

dollars on risk-reduction before launch. Nothing earns trust like 

being able to go to the people in the trenches and say, “How 

about if we add some money to your cost account so you have a 

higher probability of making those milestones at high quality?” 

In the wee hours of Sunday morning, January 15, 2006, a 105-lb. entry vehicle carrying 

samples of dust from comet Wild 2 and interstellar particles from outside our solar 

system whizzed into our atmosphere at 29,000 mph. It had been on a seven-year, threebillion-mile odyssey around our solar system and, on the way, had punched through the 

comet’s dust cloud at about 13,000 mph, just 149 miles above the jagged surface, its 

tennis-racket-sized Aerogel array collecting dust from the particle stream. This carriercapsule combo had flown halfway to Jupiter, more than 250,000,000 miles from the sun, 

with electrical systems powered only by sunlight. Over the course from Earth to comet 

and back, Stardust performed thirty-seven thrusting maneuvers for calibrations and 

trajectory corrections. 

ASK MAGAZINE | 15
A host of team players orchestrated the action structure to 

get the job done with focus and efficiency. In development, Rick 

Grammier, our Project Engineer (who moved on after launch to 

manage Deep Impact) led a strong systems-oriented group to 

document all our processes, sweep for risks, and get our flight 

system produced, tested, and delivered to a successful launch in 

February 1999. 

None of this would have happened without effective 

communication. Clear communication translates to a highperforming team. It is true that knowledge is power, but only if 

that knowledge is fully shared.

Openness builds a culture of trust and counters the “us 

versus them” attitude organizations trying to work together 

often fall prey to. In addition to providing an accurate measure 

of where we stood, our performance management system and 

earned-value metrics shed “sunlight” on facts. Rick’s team 

used an innovative virtual meeting structure, engineered by 

JPL’s Lori Carr and her information technology counterparts 

at Lockheed Martin Space Systems (LMSS), that included the 

phone network (including the just emerging, but still “iffy” 

cellular phone), collaborative servers for near-real-time data 

access, pagers to summon folks to the network, and secretaries 

and administrative people who could, as a last resort, quickly 

track them down to ensure communications were timely and 

decisions were made and logged without delay. I remember 

attendees calling into the meetings using seat-back phones on 

commercial airliners, presentations being made from phone 

booths, and timely technical answers provided by cellular phone 

from a car en route to LMSS’s Denver plant. The language was 

goal-directed, not ego-driven or rules-driven. Everybody wanted 

to know what was happening. Data were open and available. 

And “What do you think?” was a common inclusive query to 

keep everyone contributing. I relied on General Bill Creech’s 

insight, in The Five Pillars of TQM, that a key communication 

ingredient is listening. He says, “Listen for the echoes to learn if 

it’s all getting through.”

The Moment of Truth

The Stardust team was flooded with emotion Saturday evening, 

January 14, 2006, as we realized that the final flight chapter 

of our ten-year effort was about to begin. I was confident in 

our team and their work, but there are always unknowns. No 

vehicle had ever entered the atmosphere as fast as the Stardust 

sample return capsule. It had a new (in 1997) high-technology 

heat shield. The chute system had never been operationally used, 

since Genesis’s did not deploy. The recovery team might have a 

challenge in finding the small capsule if the beacon on the chute 

risers didn’t work or if weather kept the helicopters from flying. 

At four hours before atmosphere entry, Stardust successfully 

“dropped” the sample return capsule right on schedule and, 

fifteen minutes later, maneuvered to avoid following it into 

the atmospheric cauldron. My successor, Tom Duxbury, Flight 

Phase Project Manager, and his Flight and Recovery Team at 

LMSS, JPL, and the Utah Test and Training Range had done 

a superb job of flying the spacecraft the Development Team 

turned over to them almost seven years ago.

Everything went our way: weather clearing so the helicopters 

could fly, entry at 400,000 feet and 29,000 mph, pick-up by the 

radars, excellent navigation predictions on touchdown point and 

time. Then the moment of truth when the small drogue chute was 

to deploy at mach 1.4 and 105,000 feet. Bingo! Exactly on time, 

the small, white blip on the infrared tracking jumped upward 

off the screen. The drogue had deployed to stabilize the capsule 

through the transonic zone and prevent tumbling. The tracking 

camera reacquired the white blip of the capsule, and it glowed 

steadily, without the blinking that would indicate tumbling. 

Everyone erupted in joy as drogue deployment was confirmed. 

Then, standing in anticipation, we waited for the 10,000-

foot mark where the main chute would deploy as the drogue was 

jettisoned. We were euphoric as the call came confirming we were 

on the main chute, and we could see the ghostly black-and-white 

image of the 27-foot canopy’s reflectors and the tiny sample return 

capsule swinging below. It was floating down almost exactly as 

depicted in the pre-launch animation film I’d shown a thousand 

IT IS TRUE THAT KNOWLEDGE IS 

POWER, BUT ONLY IF THAT KNOWLEDGE 

IS FULLY SHARED.

16 | ASK MAGAZINE
times in presentations I’d given. The pick-up helicopters locked 

on to the beacon. Touchdown was at nine mph and two minutes 

early, only four miles northeast of the target landing point due 

to wind drift. My feelings? Indescribable joy: gratitude for the 

first-class engineering team from Lockheed-Martin Astronautics 

that produced and flew the spacecraft and Boeing’s tried-andtrue Delta II team that blasted us off the Earth February 7, 1999; 

awe at the skills of the JPL navigators, the operators of the deepspace tracking network, and the recovery team of the Air Force 

and LMSS in Utah; and giddiness that Don Brownlee and his 

science team—and eventually teams from all over the world—

would indeed get their hands on primeval material unchanged 

over 4.5 billion years.

There had been many moments in Stardust’s ten years when 

the abyss seemed to open and design issues, scope pressures, test 

failures, parts, cash flow, contract issues, personal conflicts, 

unknowns, and loss of signal threatened to end the project. But 

commitment to the goal, trust, communication, and a resultsdriven action structure gave us a robust ship that sailed the 

sea of space, captured the treasure, and returned home to tell 

the tale. ●

“More Kudos” 

Tom Duxbury, the Mission Design and Engineering Manager 

who took over as Project Manager during the Flight Phase 

with Ed Hirst and Bob Ryan of JPL, and Joe Vellinga, Allan 

Cheuvront, and Mike McGee from LMSS put together a 

Flight and Recovery Team that did a brilliant job of piloting 

Stardust through three billion miles of adventure to a perfect 

touchdown. Tom and his team became masters of patience 

as they fl ew Stardust through tense times when its signal 

“disappeared.” However, the ship always “called home,” and 

they ultimately trusted that the spacecraft would perform 

exactly as planned. 

Joe Vellinga, our LMSS manager for development and fl ight, 

ensured that the fl ight system met “design-to-cost, test as 

you fl y, fl y as you test” goals. With Rick Wanner, our LMSS 

Assembly, Test, and Launch Ops Manager, Joe fostered the 

open and selfl ess engineering that built trust between LMSS 

and the team at JPL. 

Finally, the Project Control Team ensured discipline through 

the performance management system with a fast, honest 

collection of earned-value data. They quickly turned data 

into metrics on receivables, deliverables, events completed, 

and, most importantly, reserves on cost-to-go. Bredt Martin, 

Ralph Bartera, and Walt Boyd of JPL teamed with Rick Price, 

Brian Overman, and their LMSS EV specialists in an open 

fi le-sharing approach to earned-value management (EVM) that 

had enough discipline to be timely and to maintain baseline 

and data integrity without the unnecessary restrictions typical 

of a tri-service-validated system. Operationally, all signifi cant 

variances were investigated by the team and then addressed 

by the cost-account owners as necessary to explain variations. 

This tailored approach to EVM made it a legitimate tool to 

keep the apocalyptic horses in harness. We got a valuable, 

trustworthy indicator of performance against the baseline plan. 

While EVM is not applicable to fl ight phase activity, the cultural 

discipline from the development phase transferred to Duxbury 

and Vellinga’s Flight Team with excellent results. Stardust 

achieved a solid reputation for meeting its technical, cost, 

and schedule commitments.

LEFT: The Stardust sample return capsule was transported by helicopter from 

its landing site at the U.S. Air Force Utah Test and Training Range. This image 

shows the return capsule inside a protective covering. 

RIGHT: The aerogel dust collector, an instrument aboard the Stardust spacecraft. 

Photo by NASA Photo by NASA/JPL 

ASK MAGAZINE | 17

From June 1995 to August 2000, KEN ATKINS was manager 

of NASA’s Stardust Project. He retired from NASA/Caltech’s Jet 

Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in February 2002 after 32 years. As 

a retiree, he works part time providing mentoring and education 

for JPL project managers. Before joining JPL in 1969, he served 

nine years in the U.S. Air Force as an offi cer and pilot.
On the morning of September 8, 2004, in a desert 

in the middle of Utah, two helicopters waited to 

pluck Genesis gently from the air and return it safely 

to the ground. When the capsule hurtled into the 

Earth’s atmosphere and crashed into the desert at 

193 miles per hour, it was clear something had gone 

wrong. Genesis’s drogue, parachute, and parafoil 

were supposed to slow the 500-lb. capsule enough 

to allow the helicopters to capture it. Their failure to 

deploy was the obvious cause for the hard landing. 

Discovering the root cause of that failure—why

those parachutes did not deploy—was what Mike 

Ryschkewitsch and John Klein set out to do as part 

of the mishap investigation.

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GENESIS:

Learning from Mistakes

BY KERRY ELLIS

18 | ASK MAGAZINE | STORY
The process of landing Genesis was not a simple one. First, 

the capsule had to be directed to a tiny spot in Utah, the Utah 

Testing and Training Range. Then, gravity-switch devices 

inside the capsule had to sense the braking caused by high-speed 

entry into Earth’s atmosphere and initiate the timing sequence 

that led to deployment of the drogue parachute and parafoil, 

approximately nineteen miles above ground. Moments later, 

when the sample return capsule (SRC) was nearly one and a half 

miles above ground, a larger rectangular-shaped parafoil—much 

like a hang glider—would allow the capsule to glide downward 

at approximately ten miles per hour. The Genesis team had 

carefully designed, coordinated, and tested the recovery process 

in order to minimize the risk involved in retrieving the solarwind samples unscathed and uncontaminated.

After Genesis was recovered and the remnants analyzed, 

the Mishap Investigation Board discovered that the gravityswitch devices’ (or g-switches) installation had been designed 

incorrectly. The switches flipped, but they were in the wrong 

position inside the electronic configuration; they could not 

make the connection needed to start the timing process for 

parachute deployment. Once the immediate cause for the 

parachute failure had been identified, Ryschkewitsch and Klein 

investigated further to discover why the switches had been 

installed incorrectly.

“You can’t just say, ‘don’t install g-switches upside down,’ 

as a lesson learned from Genesis,” said Ryschkewitsch, who was 

Director of Engineering at Goddard Space Flight Center at 

the time and chair of the Genesis Mishap Investigation Board. 

Now Deputy Center Director at Goddard, one of his goals is 

to share what they discovered about Genesis after its crash and 

help other projects avoid the same pitfalls. NASA management 

called together a large group of NASA experts to discover the 

cause of the mishap. 

Many people were surprised when Genesis returned the way 

it did. The project’s design was inherited from Stardust, which 

had launched successfully in February 1999, two years before 

Genesis. Stardust’s systems had been thoroughly tested, so the 

problem of drogue deployment evident with Genesis had been 

unexpected. Those involved with the Stardust project suddenly 

feared the same problem might happen when Stardust returned 

a little more than one year after Genesis’s arrival.

Upon further investigation, the Mishap Investigation Board 

discovered that while the design had been inherited from Stardust, 

it had also been altered. The box that held the g-switches for 

Genesis was different than the one for Stardust, so the electronics 

had to be placed in a different configuration to make them fit. 

The new design for Genesis was analyzed and tested to ensure the 

switches still flipped, but it was not tested to ensure the switches 

would start the process for parachute deployment.

“There was confusion around what testing needed to be 

done and what the tests meant,” Ryschkewitsch said. “One part 

of the team understood that repackaging the electronics meant 

losing the ‘heritage’ from Stardust. Other parts never clearly 

understood that, and it was never clearly communicated between 

those teams.” So when one team verified that the switches did 

what they were supposed to—which to them meant flipping 

from one orientation to another—another team thought full 

testing had been done, ensuring the switches flipped and made 

the correct connections.

This lack of communication and assumption about heritage 

design are not unique to Genesis. “I hear in proposals all the 

time that ‘I don’t have to test because it’s heritage,’ which is a 

dangerous thing to say,” said Ryschkewitsch. “It’s rare you will 

build something exactly the same way every time. Things aren’t 

coming off a production line at NASA; everything is one of a 

kind. It’s good to reuse hardware, but not to assume it will work 

the same way every time.”

Ryschkewitsch and Klein have been sharing the tough 

lessons learned from Genesis in a variety of ways. At the time 

of Genesis’s return, several new missions were currently in 

development at NASA, including Swift, Deep Impact, and New 

Horizons. “Mike and I have given individual briefings to various 

ASK MAGAZINE | 19

Comet Collector Cell

A scientist holds up the Genesis collector array 

in a NASA Johnson Space Center cleanroom. 

Photo by NASA/JPL
projects in various stages—even before the Mishap Investigation 

Board report was released—so lessons learned from Genesis are 

carried on to the new projects,” said Klein, who was Manager of 

Autonomous Spacecraft Division at Jet Propulsion Laboratory 

during Genesis and is now Deputy Project Manager for the 

Mars Science Laboratory. “We’ve also given presentations to 

new project managers so the lessons learned are incorporated 

at the beginning of their new projects, such as the proposed 

Discovery, Scout, and Explorer missions,” he added.

They share the lessons learned more broadly as well by 

having training sessions that discuss in detail the traps Genesis 

fell into and how to avoid them. These lessons have been shared 

at systems engineering seminars as well.

In addition, they have been addressing formal changes to 

NASA processes. Genesis was built during the same time as 

the Mars ’98 failures, so the Genesis recommendations are an 

amplification and sharpening of the lessons that came from Mars 

’98. “What it comes down to is making sure you understand 

requirements, having the requirements written down clearly, 

and ensuring there is enough dialogue going on between all 

levels so they all understand what they should be doing and 

what the risks are,” Ryschkewitsch explained.

Evidence of their success in communicating how mission 

teams can improve their processes and likelihood of success 

is in Stardust’s safe return and landing in January 2006. The 

lessons from Genesis had an immediate impact on the Stardust 

team’s ability to mitigate and prepare for risk in bringing their 

sample return capsule home. Though nothing could be done 

about Stardust’s hardware since it was already in space after 

Genesis crashed, the Stardust team started training early for 

their capsule’s return. They reviewed additional risk scenarios 

and created emergency action plans that clearly outlined who 

needed to make decisions and when should a problem occur 

with the SRC landing. 

The Genesis mission has also been labeled a success, 

despite mistakes made on the project. In April 2005, scientists 

announced they were able to recover samples intact from 

Genesis’s solar-wind collectors. Scientists will analyze the 

samples to measure solar-oxygen isotopic composition, the 

highest-priority measurement objective for Genesis. The data 

may hold clues to increase understanding about how the solar 

system formed. ●

20 | ASK MAGAZINE

Genesis on the Ground

The impact of the Genesis sample return capsule occurred near 

Granite Peak on a remote portion of the Utah Test and Training Range. 

I HEAR IN PROPOSALS ALL THE TIME THAT “I DON’T HAVE TO TEST BECAUSE IT’S 

HERITAGE,” WHICH IS A DANGEROUS THING TO SAY. IT’S RARE YOU WILL BUILD 

SOMETHING EXACTLY THE SAME WAY EVERY TIME. THINGS AREN’T COMING OFF A 

PRODUCTION LINE AT NASA; EVERYTHING IS ONE OF A KIND. IT’S GOOD TO REUSE 

HARDWARE, BUT NOT TO ASSUME IT WILL WORK THE SAME WAY EVERY TIME.

Photo by USAF 388th Range Sqd
The View from Space

BY BEN BRUNEAU AND KERRY ELLIS

NASA’s fi rst “blue marble” pictures of our Earth, brought back from a new frontier of 

exploration, opened a new frontier of imagination and understanding. They have been 

reproduced again and again because they give us a more vivid image of Earth’s beauty, 

fragility, and oneness than we had ever had before. These and other pictures from space 

have changed what we knew or had assumed about our planet. In addition to helping us see 

the world as a whole in a different way, National Aeronautics and Space Administration 

images provide useful, thought-provoking, and sometimes startling information about 

many aspects of life on Earth. 

INSIGHT | ASK MAGAZINE | 21
Photographs help us preserve memories, but they also help us 

shape opinions, make decisions, question what we know, and 

gain new knowledge. From choosing a hotel room to learning 

about conditions in other countries, photographs have long 

been used to teach us about other people, places, and things we 

may not have experienced directly. And some photographs—

like those from NASA—allow us to glimpse things we 

would never be able to see or imagine for ourselves. Here are a 

few examples.

For more than thirty years, scientists have used satellite imagery of the Amazon to seek answers about Earth’s diverse ecosystem and the patterns and processes 

of land cover change.1

 Shown here is the Amazon Rainforest in northern Brazil as captured by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on 

July 1, 2002. At bottom right and bottom center, deforestation and cultivation are evident by the regular, rectangular shapes that delineate plots.

22 | ASK MAGAZINE
Maps taken from space are invaluable to city 

planners and state agencies monitoring water quality 

in urban areas as they provide information about city 

growth and how rainfall runoff over paved surfaces 

affects regional water quality.2

 This image, taken by 

the IKONOS satellite, shows one of the most densely 

populated cities in the world: Rio de Janeiro, located 

on the Guanabara Bay in southern Brazil. 

Thanks to radar technology on satellites and shuttles 

that can penetrate tree canopies, vegetation, clouds, 

and the dark of night,3

 archaeologists can study the 

city of Angkor in Cambodia. The Angkor complex is 

hidden beneath a dense rainforest canopy, making 

it difficult for researchers on the ground to study 

the ancient city. The ancient Angkor Wat temple 

shown here is considered one of the most valuable 

architectural sites in Asia. Angkor Wat, built by 

Suryavarman II between 1113 and 1150 AD, is the 

pinnacle of the city of Angkor, capital of the oncepowerful Khmer Empire of Southeast Asia. 

The view from space has allowed NASA to map the terrain of Earth, which has important safety implications 

for the aviation industry; poor visibility combined with uncertainty about terrain causes more than fifty percent 

of fatal aviation accidents.4

 This view of the Crater Highlands along the East African Rift in Tanzania, obtained 

from NASA’s Shuttle Topography Mission, shows landforms using color and shading. Color indicates height, 

with lowest elevations in green and highest elevations in white, and shading shows the slope. 

ASK MAGAZINE | 23
1. “NASA Satellite Data Provides Rapid Analysis of Amazon Deforestation,” ScienceDaily, September 14, 2005, http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/09/050914105508.htm.

2. Lynn Chandler and David E. Steitz, “New Satellite Maps Provide Planners Improved Urban Sprawl Insight,” NASA News (May 30, 2001).

3. “Archaeologists Dig Space,” Jet Propulsion Laboratory Feature Story, January 29, 2001, http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/features.cfm?feature=3.

4. Eric Berryman, Carolina Martinez, and David E. Steitz, “Seeing Clearly Now: Sharp New NASA Maps to Improve Lives Everywhere,” NASA News (July 11, 2002).

5. Rob Gutro, Mary Rekas, Holli Riebeek, and David E. Steitz, “NASA Satellites Improve Response to Global Agricultural Change,” NASA News, January 20, 2004, http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2004/jan/HQ_04025_agriculture.html.

Images of Earth provide key data to the U.S. Department of Agriculture Foreign 

Agricultural Service (FAS), data that can be used to predict the amount of crop 

damage that might have been caused by natural disasters, such as flooding and 

volcanic eruptions.5

 In late summer 2002, heavy monsoon rains led to massive 

flooding in eastern India, Nepal, and Bangladesh. This combined true- and falsecolor image acquired by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer 

(MODIS) aboard NASA’s Terra spacecraft shows the extent of this flooding.

On December 15, 2002, IKONOS captured this image of the remains of Mayan 

structures in Guatemala. In a natural-color image, the changes caused by the 

ruins would be hard to distinguish from the natural variation in the green forest 

canopy. The best way to find them is to look at the visible and near-infrared 

spectra, shown in this false-color photograph. In this type of image, the forest 

covering the ruin sites appears yellowish, because the Mayan monuments, built 

from limestone, affected the chemical make-up of the soil as they deteriorated.

24 | ASK MAGAZINE
Featured Invention:

Cabin Pressure Monitor

BY CAROL ANNE DUNN 

For fiscal year 2005, the Inventions and Contributions Board 

presented 2,917 NASA employees and contractors with more 

than $1,951,000 in Space Act Awards. In this issue of ASK, we 

will focus on the Personal Cabin Pressure Altitude Monitor and 

Warning System, an invention from Jan Zysko at Kennedy Space 

Center. The cabin pressure monitor may some day be instrumental 

in providing a safe environment on small planes and commuter jets 

where oxygen levels can plunge insidiously and dangerously in a 

very short time. 

–Roger Forsgren, Director of the Inventions 

and Contributions Board

When pilot Steve Fossett began his historic, solo, nonstop 

flights around the world in the Virgin Atlantic GlobalFlyer 

aircraft on February 28, 2005, and February 8, 2006, an 

upgraded version of Kennedy Space Center’s personal cabin 

pressure monitor went with him. The device recognizes 

potentially dangerous or deteriorating cabin pressure conditions 

and alerts the pilot of the need for supplemental oxygen.

The Personal Cabin Pressure Altitude Monitor and 

Warning System, which won the NASA Commercial Invention 

of the Year and Government Invention of the Year awards for 

2003, grew out of a project to create a vacuum chamber that 

would allow astronauts to work in simulated lunar and Mars 

environments. Jan Zysko, the inventor of the award-winning 

device, and his team were concerned about air evacuating the 

chamber while people were still inside. Depressurization of this 

kind can cause hypoxia, which is a state of oxygen deficiency in 

the blood, tissues, and cells sufficient to impair functions of the 

brain and other organs.

Hypoxia is also a concern to flight crews when flying 

above 10,000 feet because the partial pressure of oxygen—and 

therefore the oxygen available to breathe—is reduced as altitude 

increases. The problem is particularly treacherous because 

oxygen starvation quickly affects the brain, diminishing the 

ability to recognize and respond to the crisis. Throughout 

aviation history, there have been numerous incidents where 

aircraft crewmembers and passengers have been incapacitated 

by hypoxia. 

In fact, two events involving depressurization happened 

while Zysko’s team was investigating how to alert occupants that 

a “pump down” was occurring in their chamber and revealed 

the need for a solution elsewhere as well. In June 1997, a cargo 

craft called Progress collided with the Russian Mir space station, 

which had three astronauts on board. The cargo craft damaged 

one of Mir’s six modules and caused a loss in air pressure. The 

crew hurriedly sealed off the module to prevent a further drop 

in pressure in the rest of the station.

About two years later, in October 1999, a Lear 35 jet veered 

off course and flew aimlessly until it ran out of fuel and crashed, 

killing both pilots and all four passengers, including professional 

golfer and 1999 U.S. Open winner Payne Stewart. U.S. Air 

Force pilots flying alongside the plane reported that the cockpit 

windows were obscured by frost, a condition consistent with a loss 

of pressurization and a subsequent rapid drop of temperature.

After the Payne Stewart accident, Zysko went home for 

the holidays and began working on a prototype of the cabin 

pressure monitor in his home shop. “Luckily, I had ordered 

some transducers to do some other work, but I integrated them 

into the system just to test the concept and see if we could 

accurately model the atmosphere with a small, portable device,” 

he said. A transducer is a small mechanism that converts one 

kind of energy into another, in this case translating atmospheric 

pressure into voltage. Zysko wanted to see if the transducer 

could be programmed to indicate depressurization, so he created 

a prototype that he brought back to work in January.

He proposed using his new project idea as an avenue for 

exploration in the Multidiscipline Sensors Program, the program 

he worked under for the atmospheric chamber. His request was 

approved, and a small amount of program funding was earmarked 

for his project. Zysko was also able to work with his existing team 

since his project occurred within the same program.

This close-up shows the pager-sized Personal Cabin Pressure Altitude Monitor 

developed by Jan Zysko, chief of the KSC Spaceport Engineering and Technology 

directorate’s data and electronic systems branch.

STORY | ASK MAGAZINE | 25
With funding and a familiar team behind the project, the 

toughest challenge was ensuring the transducer was accurate over 

a wide range of pressures and temperatures. Transducers tend to 

be very temperature sensitive, and the temperature on an airplane 

can fluctuate depending on ground temperature while sitting on 

a runway (be it in Alaska or Arizona) and the cooler temperatures 

at higher altitudes. To test accuracy, the pressure transducers were 

calibrated in a temperature-controlled environmental chamber. 

Zysko’s team allowed the units to stabilize at a target temperature, 

then varied and measured the pressure through their desired range, 

about 1,000 feet below sea level to 45,000 feet above. Their goal 

was to have the unit accurate to about 100 feet, or one percent, 

over a typical aircraft’s altitude range while varying temperature 

from about 32 degrees to 110 degrees Fahrenheit.

Before creating a preproduction model for testing, the 

Applied Technology Office researched cases of depressurization 

in the aviation industry and contacted the National Safety 

Transportation Board (NTSB) to hear what that organization 

thought about the monitor’s development and pilots’ interest 

in such an invention. The board responded positively, then 

asked Zysko’s team to visit and speak to one of their accident 

investigation teams about depressurization. The NTSB team 

turned out to be investigating the Payne Stewart incident.

With encouragement from the NTSB, Zysko’s team 

created a production model. About the size of a large pager, the 

Personal Cabin Pressure Altitude Monitor and Warning System 

operates independently of other aircraft/spacecraft systems and 

tracks the pressure conditions of the local environment. The 

monitor warns, by means of audio, vibratory, and visual alarms, 

of the impending danger of hypoxia when cabin pressure has 

fallen to preprogrammed threshold levels. A lighted digital 

screen displays a text message of the warning and specifies the 

pressurized condition causing the alarm.

Human space operations can also benefit from the innovation 

in Low-Earth Orbit vehicles such as the space shuttle and space 

station, as well as long-duration interplanetary vehicles and future 

planetary habitats. Proposed ground-based applications include 

the Mars Simulation Chamber and the various pressure/vacuum 

chambers at NASA’s space flight and research centers. Applications 

in its existing form, beyond aviation and aerospace, include use as 

an altimeter and thermometer for mountain climbers and as a 

barometer and thermometer for meteorological measurements. 

With the selection of a different pressure transducer and software 

modification, the device could be used to track the pressure, 

depth, and time profiles in human-tended underwater habitats 

and hyperbaric chambers. 

“If this technology can help to avoid even one incident or 

accident, it will have been worth all the effort and resources put 

forth,” Zysko said. 

Zysko recently retired from the National Aeronautics 

and Space Administration, where he worked for more than 

seventeen years, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric 

Administration, where he worked for fourteen years. Among 

his many positions at NASA, Zysko was chief of the Spaceport 

Engineering and Technology directorate’s data and electronic 

systems branch at Kennedy Space Center. ●

Note: NASA’s Kennedy Space Center’s Technology Transfer Office is 

currently seeking a licensee for the Personal Cabin Pressure Monitor. 

Potential licensees should call Jeff Kohler at 321-861-7158. 

Jan Zysko (left) and Rich Mizell (right) test a Personal Cabin Pressure Altitude 

Monitor in an altitude chamber at Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida.

CAROL ANNE DUNN currently works as a Project Specialist 

in the Technology Transfer Offi ce at Kennedy Space Center. 

She is also the Awards Liaison Offi cer for the Inventions and 

Contributions Board.

Photo by NASA

26 | ASK MAGAZINE
WERNHER 

VON 

BRAUN:

LESSONS 

TAUGHT...

AND LEARNED

BY BOB WARD

“ Rocket scientist” Wernher von Braun remains a controversial figure. Even today, thirty-six years 

since his retirement from NASA and almost twenty-nine years after he departed planet Earth at 

the age of just sixty-five, the German-born engineer and physicist—and one-time enemy of the 

United States and its allies—still stands as an intriguing, dynamic, complex human being.

STORY | ASK MAGAZINE | 27
Dr. Wernher Magnus Maximilian von Braun was the 

Superstar of Space of his day. He was rivaled only by some 

of the earliest astronauts and a bit later by a cool customer 

named Neil Armstrong. In von Braun’s case, the adulation was 

not universal.

Still, he had a passion for life along with his passion for 

rocketry and space exploration. It shone through in his work 

and all his communications. He was a communicator—in 

a voluble stream of speeches, conversations, briefings, press 

conferences, testimony, books, articles, technical papers, reports, 

correspondence, and patent applications. He helped turn much 

of his lifelong dream into reality, beginning in Germany, and 

then, for fully half his life, in America. To those who knew him 

well, von Braun was a larger-than-life, near-mythic figure, and 

yet also a fallible, feet-of-clay mortal.

He was the director of NASA’s George C. Marshall Space 

Flight Center for its first ten years of existence, and earlier 

the civilian technical head of the space-history-making Army 

Ballistic Missile Agency, both at Redstone Arsenal. Before that, 

he served for thirteen years as the German Army’s missile R&D 

civilian chief. He closed out his career with a largely frustrating 

two and a half years at NASA Headquarters as the Agency’s 

master long-range planner, and then an upbeat stint with 

Fairchild Industries in Maryland followed by a drawn-out death 

from cancer.

I began getting to know Dr. von Braun casually in 1957, 

the year the space age dawned, as a young and green daily 

newspaper reporter in Huntsville, Alabama. We got somewhat 

better acquainted over the ensuing years in “Rocket City, USA” 

and in his last years with NASA in Washington. I tried hard 

to maintain a journalist’s objectivity about him and keep a 

professional distance, but he was impressive. He became all the 

more imposing to me later, long after his death, through my 

seven years of researching and writing the 2005 biography, Dr. 

Space: The Life of Wernher von Braun.

He was, simply, a genius—as a technology leader, visionary, 

and as an inspiration to his various so-called “teams” in wartime, 

peacetime, and during the Cold War. Former astronaut, 

U.S. senator, and astronaut-again John Glenn told me in a 

1999 interview that his longtime friend ranked as a modern 

renaissance man who possessed a “curiosity about everything

around him.”

Von Braun had a hyperactive, almost compulsive sense 

of humor, and he used it in countless ways. He lightened the 

mood for his “board” meetings of laboratory directors and the 

rest of his management hierarchy with a joke or two. At the 

launch site, he often broke the tension with some witticism. 

He warmed up his 1950s audiences for speeches outside the 

South by apologizing “for my accent,” then grinning and adding, 

“I’m from Alabama.”

28 | ASK MAGAZINE
He would protest, “I’ve never considered myself a genius—

and my wife is always ready to attest to this fact!” And in the 

1950s and 1960s, when others might suggest their rocket-andspace success record showed his team’s German nucleus was 

“smarter” than everybody else, he would demur: “It’s not that 

we’re geniuses. It’s just that we old timers have been working 

on these things so long, we’ve had twelve more years to make 

mistakes and learn from them!”

Von Braun, born in 1912, an instant baron as the middle 

son of aristocratic Prussian parents, was a fast-walking, fasttalking bundle of contradictions. Brilliant as a youth, he became 

distracted and flunked math and physics. Sent off to boarding 

school and turned on academically in his early teens by visions 

of rocket ships in space, he earned degrees in mechanical and 

aeronautical engineering, plus a doctorate in physics, by age 

twenty-two. He had been named the civilian chief of the German 

Army’s rocket program two years earlier, before Adolf Hitler 

gained power. By age twenty-five he was the civilian technical 

director of the Wehrmacht side of the Peenemünde rocket R&D 

base on the Baltic seacoast. (The Luftwaffe ran the other side.)

This paradox of a bold, starry-eyed space cadet was one of 

the most ultra-conservative of engineers. A blend of visionary 

and realist, with a natural optimistic bent, he nonetheless 

inclined to move ahead only in safe, measured, incremental 

steps. He insisted on testing, testing, and testing again, down to 

the last component of the last subsystem.

Admiral Alan Shepard, a von Braun admirer, went to his 

grave believing he would have been the first human—not just 

the first American—in space, if only von Braun had not ordered 

just one more chimpanzee flight-test of Mercury-Redstone. 

That caution allowed the Soviet Union to send cosmonaut Yuri 

Gagarin into space in the spring of 1961, immediately before 

Shepard went up. Yet Shepard did have a safe flight aboard a 

souped-up U.S. Army “Jupiter-C” Redstone missile, as did 

Mercury astronaut “Gus” Grissom soon afterward. (A decade 

later, Project Apollo astronaut Shepard caught another flawless 

ride atop a von Braun launch vehicle—the somewhat larger 

Saturn V—to the lunar surface.) 

Visionary as he was, in the practical world of engineering von 

Braun strongly preferred the tried and proven. His conservatism 

showed also in the matter of rocket propellants. Because of 

liquid hydrogen’s dangerous volatility, he had to be forced to use 

it as fuel in Saturn vehicle upper stages during Apollo. But he 

readily admitted later that it was the right decision, because of 

its greater propulsive punch to the pound. Likewise, he had to 

be ordered into an “all-up” launch mode for Saturn V—starting 

with the first unmanned test flight—if Apollo was to meet 

its deadline. That meant, of course, that all stages had to be 

flown “live” on every flight. Von Braun later acknowledged the 

rightness of that decision, too. 

Von Braun’s deliberate, step-by-step approach resulted 

also in the successful orbiting of America’s first space satellite, 

Explorer 1, on the last day of January 1958. An insistence on 

perfection led to an unprecedented thirty-two successful Saturn 

heavy-lift vehicle launches out of thirty-two attempts between 

1961 and 1975. Von Braun preached perfection and demanded 

perfection. Long years of experience had taught him that 

anything less spelled disaster. 

When the relatively apolitical German Army’s revolutionary, 

46-foot-tall, 200-mile-range V-2 missile was ordered prematurely 

into mass-production by the Hitler regime in autumn of 1943, 

six of every ten flight-test missiles exploded on the launch pad 

or failed in mid-flight. The V-2 was not fired operationally by 

German troops until September 1944—after the Allies’ D-Day 

invasion at Normandy.

Under the fascist dictatorship, Wernher von Braun was 

a member of the Nazi party, having waited almost five years 

after Hitler came to power before signing up. Under heavy 

pressure, he later accepted an officer’s commission—essentially 

honorary—in Heinrich Himmler’s brutal SS corps. Without 

question, von Braun was a prominent member of the Third 

Reich at least peripherally connected with the underground, 

SS-run, forced-labor, main V-2 factory, with its atrociously high 

mortality rate. Yet this living, breathing paradox soon became 

America’s perennial “Patriot of the Year” and “Scientist of the 

Year,” although certainly not in everyone’s minds.

It had not hurt von Braun’s case, after he and about 120 of 

his fellow German rocketeers transferred to the United States in 

1945–46, that he had been arrested early in 1944 by Himmler’s 

Gestapo secret police, imprisoned on political charges of treason, 

and placed on trial for his life.

Spies had reported the rocket-meister saying he was more 

interested in exploring space than developing weapons; they 

had also overheard him denigrating certain Nazi big-wigs. He 

had further been accused of keeping his fast, four-seat, personal 

Messerschmidt aircraft gassed up at Peenemünde and handy for 

an escape to England with all the V-2 secrets. He was sprung 

in mid-trial by direct order of Hitler, thanks to intercession 

by the rocket Wunderkind’s commanding general, Walter 

Dornberger, and one of his patrons in the Nazi hierarchy, Albert 

Speer, archenemy of Himmler. Hitler acted on the probably 

questionable grounds that the V-2 program would collapse 

without von Braun. 

As with the R&D problems of the V-2 and its predecessor, 

test-bed German rockets, the U.S. Army’s Redstone missile 

endured a less-than-perfect performance record early on in its 

history. This 200-mile, nuclear-capable weapon was the first 

major new development project assigned to the von Braun team 

in this country in the early 1950s. Launch-pad failure followed 

launch-pad failure after three years of work.

ASK MAGAZINE | 29
Witnessing one catastrophic Redstone explosion at Cape 

Canaveral, the scientist’s boss, Major General H.N. Toftoy, 

asked, “Wernher, why did that rocket explode?” Von Braun 

said the answer must await analysis of data. Toftoy persisted, 

finally questioning whether the German had “any idea why it 

exploded?” Von Braun fired back: “Yes. It exploded because the 

s.o.b. blew up!”

Von Braun had learned long before that close-knit teamwork 

and honest communication were the keys to eventual success. A 

classic example occurred with another Redstone mid-flight test 

failure. Telemetry data showed all systems had performed well 

until a precise point. This enabled troubleshooters to localize 

the probable source. The suspected area had been checked and 

rechecked during lab tests. Finally, the likeliest explanation was 

accepted, and corrective action ordered.

Then an engineer with the firing group asked to see him. 

The engineer explained that during pre-launch preps, he had 

tightened a certain connection for good measure. In so doing, he 

had touched a contact and drawn a spark. But since the system 

later checked out well, he had not paid any attention to it. Now 

that everybody was talking about that apparatus, he just wanted 

von Braun to know. A quick study showed that this was indeed 

the answer, and the planned “remedial action” was canceled. 

Von Braun sent a bottle of good champagne to the engineer. He 

wanted everyone to know that honesty pays off, even at the risk 

of incriminating oneself.

In America, aerospace leader von Braun was competitive 

and aggressive in seeking programs, projects, and budget dollars 

for his agency. He tended to seize the moment. The very night 

that Sputnik went up, Eisenhower administration Secretary 

of Defense-designate Neil McElroy was visiting at Redstone 

Arsenal with von Braun, his commanding general, John Bruce 

Medaris, and other Army brass. Within a month, the von Braun 

team and its partners got the go-ahead to prepare and launch 

America’s first satellite. They did so in less than ninety days, 

having earlier made under-the-table preparations.

When NASA was being created, von Braun sought to 

have the lion’s share of responsibilities based in Huntsville. 

And when Agency roles and missions for the space shuttle 

effort were being considered by Headquarters, he proposed 

that Marshall be lead center for almost everything, including 

central program management. 

Two brief stories shed more light on aspects of von Braun’s 

management style and philosophy. One involves Marshall 

Center’s old “neutral buoyancy simulator.” Von Braun had the 

33-by-35-foot water tank built on the sly and on the cheap in 

the 1960s, using in-house welders and funds borrowed from 

various accounts. It had its own “temporary” building. It proved 

a valuable tool for space flight hardware engineering design, 

evaluation, and eventually astronaut EVA training. It was also 

a great public-relations boon—a prime visitor attraction. Von 

Braun had not wanted to go through Congress and endure the 

inevitable restrictions on its use, so he called this huge structure 

a piece of “equipment,” not a “facility.” Eventually he was found 

out, and Congress did apply restrictions. The ploy reflected his 

philosophy of “better to ask forgiveness than permission.” As 

he told his inner circle at Marshall: “You build the facility first, 

then take the slap on the wrist. But you have the facility. They 

are not going to burn it.”

Von Braun tended to be a decisive, action-oriented manager. 

He detested bureaucratic indecision. When Hurricane Camille 

ravaged the Gulf of Mexico Coast and the Marshall-managed 

Mississippi Test Facility in 1969, its manager called urgently for 

help. A Marshall management staffer suggested the center send 

down a team to survey the critical needs. Von Braun said, “They 

don’t need a survey! They know what they need. We’re going to 

get a relief convoy together in the morning, and we are going 

down there and help!” The Marshall Center convoy arrived on 

the scene before the National Guard. 

Von Braun was far from a perfect manager. He tended to hold 

overlong meetings, was considered too compassionate to reprimand 

or discipline wayward staffers (and usually had his chief longtime 

deputy, Eberhard Rees, do it for him), and was loathe to deny his 

management hierarchy unlimited access to him.

At one point, thirty-eight managers at Marshall had direct 

access to him between the weekly “board” meetings. An 

American-born insider finally persuaded him to appoint an 

R&D overlord to whom the majority would routinely report. 

After heated debate, von Braun directed the group to choose one 

from its number as the Uber-boss. The director was going on a 

holiday trip with his wife, and he said, “I won’t come back until 

I see the ‘white smoke’ of agreement.” The team acquiesced, 

selecting Hermann Weidner for the superchief’s role. Thereafter, 

von Braun would introduce him as “my pope,” chosen by his 

cardinals, the lab bosses. 

The engineer-scientist could not, or would not, operate 

a dictation machine or a VCR, or learn how to adjust a color 

television set. A retainer of virtually all the knowledge he was ever 

exposed to, von Braun sometimes had trouble remembering to 

pick up his car-pool riders, buy the groceries his wife Maria told 

him to get at the market, or put on a belt or matching socks. When 

traveling, he never carried money, credit cards, or checks, leaving 

it to others, usually his assistants, to pay the bills and tips.

When the V-2 finally flew successfully on October 3, 1942, 

Hitler made the paradoxical von Braun an honorary “Research 

Professor,” a title he proudly emblazoned on his stationery at 

Peenemünde. He liked his colleagues there to address him as 

“Professor,” yet he never formally taught anywhere, aside from 

occasional guest lectures on campuses in America and abroad. 

But he was a teacher most of his adult life. When a Marshall 

30 | ASK MAGAZINE
Center delegation visited the Palomar Observatory in the late 

1960s, a California university astronomer gave a lecture on 

the subject of white dwarfs. This inspired von Braun later that 

evening to give an all-night lecture on astronomy to his associates 

back in his quarters.

And once in the mid-1960s, a Marshall contingent traveling 

by Lear jet across Kansas at 41,000 feet had to fly around the 

giant meteorological phenomenon known as an anvil cloud. Von 

Braun left the cockpit and proceeded to give a young engineer a 

learned discourse on anvil clouds. 

As a space leader, von Braun was quite the political 

operative, and he had warm relationships with national political 

figures ranging from President John F. Kennedy to NASA 

Administrator Tom Paine to Texas Congressman Olin “Tiger” 

Teague, longtime chair of the House space subcommittee. 

The rocket scientist worked at cultivating personal political 

relationships. He was a willing, popular, enthusiastic, but 

straight-shooting congressional witness. He went on countless 

hunting trips with politicians. He rolled out the red carpet for 

them at Marshall Center.

Given his past in Nazi Germany, it was unknown how 

the image of this human paradox would fare in the twentyfirst century. Aviation Week & Space Technology coordinated 

a worldwide survey in 2003 for the centennial of man’s first 

powered flight, to determine the “Top 100 Stars of Aerospace” 

history. More than a million ballots came in from industry 

professionals in 180 countries. The results put him first among 

world space figures. In the overall category, he came in second, 

behind the Wright brothers. Walter Cronkite compared von 

Braun to Columbus. He said that, just as 500 years afterward 

we remember Columbus’s voyages of discovery as the supreme 

events of that time, so, too, will people 500 years hence 

remember the Apollo missions to the Moon as the crowning 

human achievement of the twentieth century. Cronkite 

observed that, while earthlings of the twenty-fifth century 

will undoubtedly fixate on the daring exploits of Armstrong, 

Aldrin, Collins, and their successor lunarnauts, Apollo’s 

engineers would also be prominently remembered: “[People 

then] will recognize it as an engineering feat. And when they 

do, they will fix on von Braun as certainly one of the greatest 

space engineering pioneers.” ●

A RETAINER OF VIRTUALLY ALL 

THE KNOWLEDGE HE WAS 

EVER EXPOSED TO, VON BRAUN 

SOMETIMES HAD TROUBLE 

REMEMBERING TO PICK UP HIS 

CAR-POOL RIDERS, BUY THE 

GROCERIES HIS WIFE MARIA 

TOLD HIM TO GET AT THE 

MARKET, OR PUT ON A BELT 

OR MATCHING SOCKS. 

BOB WARD, a former managing editor and editor-in-chief of The 

Huntsville (Alabama) Times, is the author of the 2005 biography 

Dr. Space: The Life of Wernher von Braun, published by the Naval 

Press Institute.

Photo by Michael Mercier

ASK MAGAZINE | 31
Cancelled Project, 

Continuing Relationships

BY THE ASK EDITORIAL STAFF

32 | ASK MAGAZINE | STORY

The HyTEx team stands with a llama in southeast Huntsville, Alabama, at a farm owned by Tony O’Neil, a member of the Marshall project management group.
I

n March 2003, a team from five NASA centers, two Air 

Force groups, the Army, and Sandia National Laboratories 

began work on a hypersonic re-entry vehicle intended 

to serve as a flying technology test bed for thermal 

protection systems, flight controls, sensors, communications, 

and other vehicle systems that need to withstand the rigors of 

high-speed re-entry. They developed plans for a 750-lb. vehicle 

that would be launched on a suborbital rocket from Wallops 

Island and achieve speeds ranging from Mach seven in early 

tests to Mach twelve and beyond. It was designed to then be 

slowed by parachutes and retrieved in mid-air by helicopter. The 

project was known as the Hypersonic Technology Experiment, 

or HyTEx. Working quickly, the team had a Preliminary 

Requirements Review in July, just four months after their start 

date, and a successful Preliminary Design Review (PDR) eight 

months later, in March 2004. Almost immediately after that 

PDR, however, the project was cancelled as a result of changing 

NASA priorities and budget pressures.

Despite that disappointment, project participants remain 

extremely positive about the experience, citing outstanding 

cooperation among the multiple centers and organizations 

involved and the speed and quality of the work accomplished. Rich 

Nelson, Kennedy Space Center Advanced System Division Chief, 

a NASA employee for thirty-four years and part of the Kennedy 

Space Center group involved in HyTEx, says, “The PDR was 

one of the best I’ve been through. It went the way things should

go.” Susan Spencer, deputy on the Marshall project management 

team, thinks of HyTEx as the project she is proudest of.

Project manager Jimmy Lee believes that the relationships 

of trust and mutual understanding established during the work 

will persist and have lasting value for NASA and the participants. 

“The success of the project is relationships,” he says. “The sense 

of trust sets you up for future engagements. You’re not making 

a cold call; you’ve got an existing relationship, and people will 

go out of their way to help you.” Nelson agrees, noting that 

the connections he established with colleagues at Wallops 

continue and provide a foundation for future cooperation. He 

says, “HyTEx showed that NASA centers can work in close 

collaboration without competing for resources.”

Ron Walsh, the Wallops project manager for HyTEx, 

attributes that successful collaboration in part to Lee’s clarity 

about the work to be done. “He had a very clear definition of 

system boundaries,” he says. “No one felt other people would 

encroach; they had a space to work in.” Because people were 

confident that these boundaries would be respected, they did 

not feel they had to protect their territories by limiting the 

information they shared or devote attention and energy to 

fending off attempts to grab part of their work. Thanks to what 

Walsh describes as “a sense of safety,” they were open to offering 

and asking for help. 

At least as important as this clarity about boundaries 

and responsibilities was the atmosphere of openness, trust, 

and respect that Lee fostered. Part of that came from leading 

by example. “He’s a straightforward and trustworthy guy,” 

says Nelson, and Ron Walsh remarks that Lee’s positive and 

cooperative spirit was “contagious.” For Lee, an essential 

contributor to developing trust among team members was 

for him to trust them. He did not micromanage the project. 

Instead, he says, “I tried to give the vision and direction and 

let folks go off and do what they did best.” Characteristically, 

he underplays his role, saying, “If you’ve got people engaged in 

doing something they like to do, it’s easy.”

Lee also took concrete steps to build relationships with 

the team. He organized frequent face-to-face meetings with 

project leaders and other team members—as many as thirty 

or forty people at a time at meetings held at different NASA 

centers and at Sandia National Laboratory. Varying the location 

helped create a sense of equality and partnership that would 

have been lacking if meetings had been held only at Marshall, 

where Lee and his project management group were located. 

(Unusually, Marshall had no technical role in the project, only 

management responsibility.) 

ASK MAGAZINE | 33
These work sessions were followed by social times that 

helped team members get to know one another better and 

deepen their sense of connection. Often, the whole group went 

out for dinner together. Once, during the HyTEx Preliminary 

Requirements Review, the team met at the Cozy Cove Farm 

for a cookout. Tony O’Neil, a member of the Marshall project 

management group who owns the farm in Southeast Huntsville, 

graciously hosted the traditional southern cookout. In addition 

to the outstanding food and the opportunity to socialize with 

friends, Tony’s farm gave team members the experience of a 

“petting zoo” within the city limits complete with miniature 

donkeys, horses, llamas, and alpacas. After dinner that night, 

the hosts paraded several of their favorite llamas into the barn to 

mingle with the team and be admired. 

Shortly after the project was cancelled, Jimmy presented a 

framed certificate with a group photo with one of the llamas to 

each person in recognition of their individual contributions to 

the team. The photo remains a prized souvenir of the project 

and exemplifies the team’s chemistry and unity. This was a fasttrack project with a demanding work schedule, but Lee and his 

colleagues understood that taking time for social connection 

could help produce good results faster, not delay them.

Along with these meetings, frequent teleconferences kept 

team members in contact. Walsh remembers the calls as notably 

inclusive, saying, “Jimmy invited everyone in.” One result, 

says Nelson, was “enjoyable and knowledgeable” discussions 

and productive outcomes. He cites the example of work on 

the Experiment Management Unit that would be designed 

to transmit data from the flight experiments on board, one 

of the Kennedy Space Center responsibilities. Sandia had 

developed a similar system but one built for a specific, different 

payload. Rather than getting caught up in rivalry between 

Sandia and Kennedy, Nelson experienced a cooperative sharing 

of expertise.

None of this diminishes the real disappointment team 

members felt when HyTEx was cancelled. While they 

recognize that such changes in direction are a fact of life at 

NASA, they continue to believe in the value of the work. 

Their belief in the importance of the project—their shared 

sense of mission—was one of the things that supported their 

outstanding collaboration in the first place. (Some related 

work continues at Sandia.) Still, they see HyTEx as a model of 

how collaborations among multiple centers and organizations 

should happen. The approaches used, the spirit of the project, 

and the relationships that have survived it are all part of the 

lasting legacy of that intense year of work. ●

34 | ASK MAGAZINE

HyTEx Team

AFRL

MSFC AMCOM

KSC

WFF LRC

AMES RESEARCH CENTER

Thermal Protection 

System Experiments

Vehicle Health 

Management Technology

SANDIA NATIONAL 

LABORATORIES

Re-Entry Vehicle

AIR FORCE 

RESEARCH LAB 

(NEW MEXICO HQ)

Re-Entry Structures Experiment

ARMY AVIATION 

AND MISSLE COMMAND

Aerothermal Analysis

Ground Testing

MARSHALL SPACE FLIGHT CENTER

Mission Management

AIR FORCE RESEARCH LAB

(OHIO HQ)

Thermal Protection 

System Technology

GODDARD SPACE FLIGHT CENTER/

WALLOPS FLIGHT FACILITY

Booster

Range and Launch Operations

Recovery

LANGLEY RESEARCH CENTER

Aeroscience

Thermal Protection System

Wind Tunnel Testing

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER

Experiment Management System

Experiment Processing

Vehicle Health Management Technology

PATRICK AIR FORCE BASE

Recovery Operations

ARC

SNL AFRL

PAFB

GSFC
Improving Lessons Learned 

BY DAVID OBERHETTINGER 

The engineering and operation of extremely complex and technically advanced systems pose 

signifi cant risks, and we must accept the likelihood of design errors throughout the life cycle. 

Expensive mistakes and lost opportunities become less acceptable, however, when it is discovered 

that the enterprise already knew how to avoid them. Lessons learned can be an effective medium 

for communicating proven mission success factors and warning of especially risky engineering and 

procurement practices. 

Establishing a Formal NASA 

Lessons Learned Process

The NASA Office of the Chief Engineer is taking steps to 

establish a formal lessons learned process to supplant largely 

ad hoc efforts by the field centers. The impetus for process 

improvements stems from findings by the General Accounting 

Office that NASA lessons learned were not being effectively used 

and findings from the Columbia Accident Investigation Board 

report that NASA “has not demonstrated the characteristics of 

a learning organization.” NASA is turning to a formal lessons 

learned process that has been used by the NASA/Caltech Jet 

Propulsion Laboratory for twenty years. Based on this model, 

NASA issued NPR 7120.6, The NASA Lessons Learned Process,

in March 2005. It calls for each NASA field center to establish 

a Lessons Learned Committee and infuse lesson learned 

recommendations into center business practices.

Jet Propulsion Laboratory Experience

In 1984 Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) demonstrated 

enterprise-wide commitment to a formal lessons learned 

process through the establishment of the JPL Lessons Learned 

Committee (LLC). The JPL LLC includes representatives of 

the major technical and mission assurance organizations and 

is charged with real-time “wordsmithing” of draft lessons. 

The LLC meets weekly to review anomaly reports, mishap 

investigation reports, and informal communications to identify 

lesson learned candidates, and to rank the candidates according 

to the following criteria:

■ Potential impact on mission success

■ Applicability to other current and planned space 

flight projects 

■ Lack of coverage of the underlying issues in 

previous lessons

Authors are assigned to high-priority topics. When a draft is 

received, the LLC revalidates the topic as a suitable lesson learned, 

verifies the stated facts, and edits the draft during one of its regular 

meetings. The committee gives particular attention to ensuring 

that the lesson learned recommendation is readily “actionable” 

within the JPL engineering culture. An “actionable” lesson learned 

recommendation is neither too broad to be applied nor so detailed 

that it tells an expert how to do his or her job.

The LLC-approved lesson is then sent to the NASA 

Headquarters Data Manager for review and posting. This formal 

JPL process has been resource intensive, and it does not generate 

large numbers of lessons learned, but it provides credible alerts of 

proven threats to mission success.

Lessons Learned Infusion

Verifying space flight project compliance with the published 

lesson learned recommendations has grown to be a daunting task 

due to the sheer size of the NASA lesson learned compendium. 

With more than 1,500 lessons learned in the NASA system, 

INSIGHT | ASK MAGAZINE | 35
iterative review by project personnel at major project milestones 

may be impractical. Nor can JPL rely on a passive system in 

which technical specialists within the JPL line organization 

elect to consult lessons learned for alerts. 

In 2002, JPL opted to end its passive reliance on having 

engineers consult the lessons learned compendium and to move 

toward a closed-loop system. Unless active measures are taken 

to infuse recommendations into enterprise-wide practices, an 

extensive and well-validated set of guidelines may degenerate into 

a “data morgue.” Each JPL lesson learned recommendation was 

assigned to one or more JPL process owners for action—more 

than 600 assignments—via the closed-loop JPL Corrective Action 

Notice (CAN) system. When a process owner demonstrates that a 

recommendation has been fully incorporated into JPL procedures 

and training, the infusion is complete and the CAN is closed. 

A JPL lesson learned published in March 2006 (http://www.

nasa.gov/offices/oce/llis/imported_content/lesson_1712.html) 

pointed out the need for substantial design margin to encompass a 

poorly understood environment. Mars Exploration Rover designers 

had responded to a high level of uncertainty regarding Martian 

winds by providing the lander with a set of small, sideways-pointing 

(transverse) rockets and adding a small camera to directly sense 

horizontal drift. This redesign to reduce the risk that the descending 

lander would graze Martian terrain was implemented only eighteen 

months before launch. 

A video simulation available at http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.

gov/gallery/video/movies/spirit/AMA_Hi_Res_Animation.mpg 

is based on actual Mars landing data; it looks north and shows 

the main rockets decelerating the craft, and the transverse rockets 

canceling the ground drift from a westerly wind. Without this 

capability from the redesign, the lateral motion across the rugged 

incline of the Gusev Crater would likely have damaged the nowoperating Spirit rover. To infuse this lesson, JPL design guidelines 

for future planetary missions will call for countering significant 

environmental risks at the upper bounds of their probable severity, 

with substantial margin.

Due to the backlog of published lessons extending back to the 

Voyager era, only half the JPL contributions to the NASA system 

have been fully infused. But after an independent assessment 

confirms the adequacy of the disposition of a given lesson learned, 

JPL will no longer have to fully depend on periodic review of 

that lesson.

THE JPL LLC INCLUDES REPRESENTATIVES 

OF THE MAJOR TECHNICAL AND 

MISSION ASSURANCE ORGANIZATIONS 

AND IS CHARGED WITH REAL-TIME 

“WORDSMITHING” OF DRAFT LESSONS.

AN “ACTIONABLE” LESSON LEARNED 

RECOMMENDATION IS NEITHER TOO 

BROAD TO BE APPLIED NOR SO DETAILED 

THAT IT TELLS AN EXPERT HOW TO DO 

HIS OR HER JOB.

Frames from the Mars Exploration Rover landing video simulation.

36 | ASK MAGAZINE
Status of the NASA Initiative

The NASA field centers have responded positively to the 

Headquarters lessons learned initiative. The NASA Office of 

the Chief Engineer has conducted rollouts of NPR 7120.6 at 

each of the field centers, and the centers are organizing their 

Lessons Learned Committees and infusion processes.

To complement these efforts, NASA has recently transferred 

its collection of lessons learned from the previous Lessons Learned 

Information System to the NASA Engineering Network (NEN). 

The NEN offers expanded search capabilities, and planned 

enhancements will include advanced data mining capabilities. ●

DAVID OBERHETTINGER works for the Chief Engineer of 

the NASA/Caltech Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), and he 

chairs the JPL Lessons Learned Committee. He also serves 

as a vice-chair of the annual Reliability and Maintainability 

Symposium (http://www.rams.org) and on an AIAA Committee 

on Standards.

UNLESS ACTIVE MEASURES ARE TAKEN 

TO INFUSE RECOMMENDATIONS INTO 

ENTERPRISE-WIDE PRACTICES, AN 

EXTENSIVE AND WELL-VALIDATED SET 

OF GUIDELINES MAY DEGENERATE INTO 

A “DATA MORGUE.”

“ An expert is someone who 

knows some of the worst mistakes 

that can be made in his subject 

and how to avoid them.” 

WERNER KARL HEISENBERG

AWARDED NOBEL PRIZE 

FOR PHYSICS FOR 1932

“ We don’t invent new mistakes; 

we just repeat the old ones.” 

BILL BALLHAUS

PRESIDENT AND CEO OF THE 

AEROSPACE CORPORATION

ASK MAGAZINE | 37
38 | ASK MAGAZINE | STORY

From Chaos to Order

BY MIKE ZAMBRUSKI AND DON COHEN
In 2005, I was asked to assume project management responsibilities for an Internet portal project designed to 

improve relationships between a large company and its customers by giving customers convenient electronic access 

to company services. Compared with most NASA projects, the work and the resources needed to accomplish it 

were modest. Technicians, leads, and project managers from ten organizations responsible for design, construction, 

testing, and implementation contributed a total of fifty-seven staff-months of labor. The scope and relatively short 

duration of the project—six months—did not, however, save it from uncertainty that verged on chaos. When I was 

called in, there was no project team in place and the statement of business requirements consisted only of vague 

ideas and anecdotes, the product of some informal meetings and e-mail exchanges. To further complicate matters, 

the project had only a high-level promise of funding to cover the anticipated scope and a completion date that could 

not be postponed.

ASK MAGAZINE | 39
My first and primary job was to replace vagueness with 

clarity, to confront the chaos that threatened the success of the 

project and begin to establish order. I achieved those goals with 

the help of a simple project management tool that served as an 

essential part of a deliberative, collaborative process to clarify 

goals, tasks, resources, and responsibilities.

The tool itself is in Microsoft Excel and therefore readily 

available to all project participants. It provides a place to define 

and communicate project phases and tasks, to match tasks with 

the groups that would be responsible for them, to calculate 

needed resources of time and money, and to make explicit the 

assumptions underlying the plans and budgets.

I began development of the tool by defining the key 

phases of the project, using recommended practices from the 

Project Management Institute, my book The Business Analyzer 

& Planner, and prevalent Systems Development Life Cycle 

protocols. The phases are as follows:

1. Gathering, documenting, and validating 

business requirements

2. Establishing technical design and system requirements

3. Construction and individual module testing 

4. Systems testing

5. Business acceptance and end-to-end testing

6. Production coordination

Phases one and five were then assigned to the business 

unit; the others were the responsibility of the technology unit. 

Although this overall work distribution was familiar to the 

project team, it was complicated by the number of contributing 

organizations that we had to involve for each phase. Many 

coordination and negotiation sessions with various technical 

units were required to coordinate our needs with their existing 

priorities and arrive at a balance that was equitable but still 

supported the project scope.

Populating the tool with accurate information was an 

iterative, collaborative process. Over the course of the first 

month, several two-hour meetings with the technical leads and 

project managers were held to clarify the project’s statement of 

work and build shared commitment to achieving it. Specific 

task descriptions, responsibilities, and resources were subject to 

discussion, debate, and revision. 

Some version of this discussion process is or should be part 

of the planning for any project. The tool provided a structured, 

consistent way for the team to develop successively deeper and 

more detailed insight into the project scope and confirm the 

time and labor that would be needed. It makes the project’s 

requirements, tasks, and expectations clear and definite, 

replacing the vagueness and uncertainty of conversation with 

explicit, visible, unambiguous statement. Vagueness about 

requirements, resources, responsibilities, or schedules is the 

enemy of project success. The tool helps participants move 

from a subjective “sense” of what needs to be done to a set of 

objective statements that can be discussed, debated, modified, 

and agreed on. The purpose of the tool and a major part of 

my job as project manager is to replace an “analog” view of the 

project (a continuous and therefore ambiguous range of values 

or choices), which can persist for a long time if all you have 

is discussion, with a “digital” or binary one—a clear either/or 

choice that shows precisely what is expected and committed to.

In many project management engagements where I use 

this process and tool, clients are at first impatient about what 

they see as “a lot of process” (by which they mean “too much 

process”). Especially when projects are on tight schedules or late 

getting started—which, of course, describes most of them—the 

teams that watch the clock tick toward the project deadline as 

we meet repeatedly to discuss requirements and responsibilities 

often ask, “Why aren’t we getting down to work?” The answer 

is that we are doing essential work. Taking time to eliminate 

misunderstanding about the project and establish commitment 

to carrying out unambiguous tasks increases the chances of 

meeting our target date. Once this becomes clear, the complaints 

about too much process stop. In fact, many of the skeptics have 

adopted the process and tool for use in their other project work.

Project management is typically done in a cross-functional 

or matrix environment, so it is no accident that the tool I 

developed makes it possible to see those connections. In the 

case of the portal project, it helped all participating disciplines 

plan and monitor staffing levels, interdependencies, and final 

deliverables in a closely coordinated fashion. It also enabled 

us to respond quickly to the ever-changing dynamics of a 

highly technical environment, and thus helped ensure that the 

final project was deployed when it was needed at a cost that 

was acceptable. ●

40 | ASK MAGAZINE

MIKE ZAMBRUSKI is Project Management Offi ce Director 

for UMass Memorial Medical Center in Worcester, MA. He is 

an adjunct assistant professor at Quinnipiac University and a 

senior instructor in project management with ESI International. 

His book, The Business Analyzer & Planner, has been published 

through the American Management Association.
Collaborative Community

BY PAUL ADLER AND CHARLES HECKSCHER 

Work is increasingly a matter of knowledgeable experts 

cooperating on projects in rapidly changing environments. Our 

research has attempted to identify the form of organization best 

equipped to support such work. We have reached two conclusions. 

First, this kind of work requires a strong sense of community 

that allows contributors to trust each other. The two other main 

“tools” of organization, financial incentives and bureaucratic 

authority and procedures, are useful but ineffectual without a 

backdrop of community. Second, the kind of community needed 

today is very different from the traditional community based on 

loyalty; it takes a new form we call “collaborative.”

Throughout human history people have cooperated with 

others who were like them and were part of shared long-term 

communities where personal reputations were well known. 

For many decades, many of our most effective organizations 

fostered this kind of community, clothing the skeleton provided 

by the formal bureaucratic structure in a tissue of strong loyalty. 

Loyalty similarly added robustness to market relations with key 

suppliers and customers.

Recent trends have seriously compromised the effectiveness 

of these arrangements. Within organizations, people are asked 

constantly to cross boundaries—to work with people they 

don’t know well and who are very different from themselves. 

Increasingly, work requires flexible cooperation across 

functions, divisions, and levels within organizations. Moreover, 

the network of inter-organizational ties is changing ever more 

rapidly and broadening to encompass new organizations often 

based in different national cultures.

Many business organizations in recent years have reacted to 

these challenges by ignoring or casting aside community. They 

have tried to meet their performance challenges by restructuring 

to strengthen bureaucratic controls and by sharpening financial 

incentives. In the process, they have destroyed trust. These 

approaches tend to generate fear and competition rather than 

cooperation and openness. When such organizations attempt 

to bring different kinds of knowledge and skill together to solve 

problems, the absence of trust undercuts the knowledge sharing 

that the work demands.

Our research suggests that successful businesses meet 

these new challenges not by abandoning community but by 

reconstructing it along more “collaborative” lines. This new 

form is more flexible and less insular than loyalty-based 

INSIGHT | ASK MAGAZINE | 41
community, and trust is established more quickly. This new 

form is distinguished by its organization, which supports 

horizontal interdependence rather than relying on top-down 

control or autonomous self-interest guided by financial 

incentives; by its values, which emphasize interdependent 

contribution to a collective purpose rather than loyalty or 

reliability; and by the social character of its members, which 

is tolerant of ambiguity and conflict rather than comfortable 

with fixed roles and status.

IBM Creates a Collaborative Community* 

An interesting case in point is IBM’s effort to overcome its 

bureaucratic past in order to create a flexible services capability. 

By the late 1970s, it became apparent to many in the company 

that the long tradition of proprietary mainframe products—

“big iron”—was losing ground. Many leaders tried to spur 

innovation by attacking the traditional IBM culture based 

on strong expectations of loyalty and conformity to company 

values (right down to the IBM dress code). The IBM PC was 

thus developed in an autonomous division set up in Florida, 

far from headquarters, and kept separate from the rest of the 

company. The PC was a great product, but the price of the 

division’s autonomy was that it never overcame the resistance 

of other divisions and power bases, and as a result IBM lost the 

opportunity to dominate a new market.

By the early 1990s insiders knew that a crisis was coming. 

John Akers, the first CEO brought in from outside the 

company, tried hard to break down traditional loyalties and 

shake up the company, relying mainly on stronger lines of 

authority and sharper financial incentives. He restructured, 

created new divisions, and instituted tough performance 

standards. These efforts hit a wall of incomprehension and 

resistance. When their failure became obvious, Akers went 

into a tirade at a senior management meeting: “Everyone is 

too damn comfortable. [We have] too many people standing 

around the water cooler waiting to be told what to do.” He 

was gone shortly afterwards, and the company nearly went 

bankrupt within a year.

Like many top managers in troubled companies, Akers 

put the blame on “the frozen middle” as the principal 

obstacle to change. This diagnosis hid the inability of top 

leadership to create a sense of shared community around 

a new direction, as it does in many other organizations 

we have studied. In pushing for change, Akers created 

uncertainty and fear rather than unified commitment. For 

people to go beyond their narrow jobs and embrace the new 

challenges and opportunities, they need to have a vision 

of a positive future, to believe that others will respond 

positively, and to be convinced that by contributing to a 

larger whole they will be part of something meaningful. 

IBM in this first phase destroyed the stifling bonds of 

traditional loyalties but did little to build a new, more 

effective community.

The solution for IBM—and, we believe, for many 

other organizations—was not simply to return to a familiar 

community, to re-knit broken bonds of loyalty. The old 

community of twentieth-century corporations was secure and 

stable, but it was also hierarchical, conformist, and conflictaverse. Trust relied on the assumption—now obsolete—that 

employees felt they shared a common identity and that their 

roles were basically stable. The traditional form of community 

had many strengths but one big flaw: it was insular. The new 

context requires a new form of trust that fosters open discussion 

and debate, that not only tolerates but also encourages diversity 

of views and capabilities.

Collaborative Community: Structure

The new collaborative form of community requires a new 

structure built around horizontal processes—supplementing, 

though not replacing, traditional vertical controls. People need 

to orient their actions not just to what the boss wants and 

thinks but also to process mechanisms that cross divisional 

42 | ASK MAGAZINE
boundaries and are constantly updated and adapted to changing 

circumstances. We call this structural element of collaboration 

“interdependent process management.”

IBM has worked hard to create effective processes. Current 

CEO Sam Palmisano has defined his goal as “an enterprise whose 

business processes—integrated end-to-end across the company 

and with key partners, suppliers, and customers—can respond 

with speed to any customer demand, market opportunity, or 

external threat.” As a result, we see within the company fewer 

traditional organization charts of hierarchical boxes and more 

process maps that define roles and responsibilities in horizontal 

flows. Whereas the traditional organization chart focuses on 

upward responsibility and downward authority, these processfocused representations are tools that help people coordinate 

horizontally with their peers.

IBM has gradually built processes that link parts of the 

company horizontally toward the customer, crossing from 

technology development and manufacturing to sales and 

marketing. Employees have had to change their orientation: 

instead of looking for a rule to follow and settling into a 

stable routine taken from their boss or a handbook, they must 

continually redefine roles and responsibilities through discussion 

with their project colleagues. 

A traditional bureaucratic structure creates clarity by 

ensuring that each person has a defined realm of authority 

that matches accountability. The new IBM embodies the 

collaborative approach in breaking this traditional rule: it is 

expected that people will take responsibility for things they 

can’t fully control and that they will move outside the zone 

of their formal accountability. Moreover, in a traditional 

bureaucracy, power and influence flow downward. Procedures 

that specify horizontal processes are typically defined by a 

centralized staff and imposed on the rest of the organization. 

The new IBM embodies the collaborative approach: it still 

relies on standardized, formalized processes, but this 

centralization is combined with high levels of participation, 

because the processes are defined and refined over time by input 

from all levels and units.

Collaborative Community: Values

The second pillar of collaborative community is a set of shared 

values that give priority to interdependent contribution. A 

traditional bureaucracy emphasizes doing a good job; it values 

conscientiousness, reliability, loyalty, and devotion to duty. 

In a collaborative community, this orientation is no longer 

enough: people must look beyond their jobs and take larger 

initiatives. The main question becomes not, “Did you do a 

good job?” but “Did you contribute to the mission?” We call 

this value dimension of collaborative community “the ethic of 

interdependent contribution.”

Lou Gerstner’s first actions when he became CEO in 

1993 advanced just such an ethic. As one of our interviewees 

noted, he immediately took dramatic action to focus everyone 

on the customer: 

“Lou turned the thing way upside down—[he said] the 

most important thing a CEO does, or any executive in this 

company does, is meet with customers. That was like a rocket 

through the company.” 

The move was revolutionary because it shifted attention 

from internal tasks and relationships to “customer solutions” as 

the common objective that united everyone. Contribution to 

that shared, external objective could now serve as the common 

yardstick. IBM has engaged in a major effort to define this 

concept of contribution to make it real for managers and 

employees. A significant portion of variable pay is now based 

on assessments of the individual’s “contribution to IBM,” 

which attempts to account for hard-to-measure dimensions of 

performance like teamwork and helping out a colleague. 

This is a profound shift in orientation. People focused on 

contribution are scornful of bureaucrats, and vice versa. The 

former see the latter as narrow and timid; the latter see the former 

as undisciplined and overly aggressive. Building a true ethic 

SOME PEOPLE ARE JUST CONTENT WITH JUST MANAGING THEIR PIECE OF TURF AND DON’T 

WANT ANYONE MUCKING AROUND IN IT. [HERE YOU NEED] SOMEONE WHO WOULD BE OPEN 

TO CRITICISM OR SUGGESTIONS AS OPPOSED TO SOMEONE WHO WOULD GET DEFENSIVE, 

BE SCARED BY PEOPLE MEDDLING AROUND.

ASK MAGAZINE | 43
of contribution requires a great deal of trial and error, during 

which people learn what kinds of challenges and risks are really 

constructive and which are destructive; which kinds of conflicts 

create stronger results and which divide and weaken. Above all, 

it requires that everyone gain a richly detailed picture of the 

shared purpose toward which they are all working, a shared 

understanding of the strategic challenges and opportunities that 

they are addressing.

Collaborative Community: Character

Finally, there is the dimension of character. People who are 

dependent on authority and seek security and clarity are not 

well adapted to collaborative systems. What is increasingly 

required is the ability to tolerate ambiguity and manage 

multiple conflicting commitments. In a unit of Citibank we 

have studied, collaborative community had become the norm, 

and one of our interviewees described the difference between 

his new organization and the older, more bureaucratic Citibank 

in these terms:

“Some people are just content with just managing their piece 

of turf and don’t want anyone mucking around in it. [Here you 

need] someone who would be open to criticism or suggestions 

as opposed to someone who would get defensive, be scared by 

people meddling around.”

Nor is collaborative community a hospitable environment 

for the “cowboy” types who value autonomy above all. What 

is increasingly required is a more “interdependent” sense of 

one’s self: a habit of caring and heedfulness. In a unit of a large 

software services company that had also made considerable 

headway in forging a collaborative community, one of our 

interviewees described the contrast between the old world of 

cowboy hackers and the new one in these terms:

“It’s a bit like streetball versus NBA basketball. Streetball 

is roughhousing, showing off. You play for yourself rather than 

the team, and you do it for the love of the game. In professional 

basketball, you’re part of a team, and you practice a lot together, 

doing drills and playing practice games. You aren’t doing it just 

for yourself or even just for your team: there are other people 

involved—managers, lawyers, agents, advertisers. It’s a business, 

not just a game. You have to take responsibility for other 

people—your teammates—and for mentoring other players 

coming up.”

Collaborative systems need people with interactive character 

and identities that embrace the complexity of interdependence 

rather than seeking refuge in either dependence or autonomy. 

This capacity requires considerable ego-strength and has roots 

in early socialization and education. We have found that in 

the shift to collaborative community, many people rise to the 

challenge and embrace this new self-concept. However, there 

also seems to be a minority who are incapable of dealing with 

the inevitable lack of clarity or who are frightened by the 

questioning of all-powerful authority. 

Collaborative Community: The Process of Change

So how has IBM navigated this change from ponderous 

bureaucracy to relatively nimble, solutions-oriented company? 

There has certainly been a great deal of internal dissent and 

conflict, but for the most part they have been successfully 

overcome because the company has done some crucial things 

right. Not only have they oriented themselves toward promising, 

distinctively collaborative types of structure, values, and 

character, but IBM’s leadership has shown itself committed to a 

collaborative process for getting from here to there. 

All too often, leaders propound a promising model but then 

pursue that goal with a process that dooms it to failure. For 

example, the last couple of decades have seen numerous CEOs 

propound “empowerment” goals, which they tried to implement 

by autocratic command. By contrast, IBM’s leadership has 

been courageous in adopting a more collaborative path toward 

collaborative community.

Sam Palmisano, who took over from Gerstner, felt 

that IBM’s key problem at that time was a lack of clarity on 

44 | ASK MAGAZINE
PAUL ADLER is a Professor of Management and Organization 

at the University of Southern California Marshall School of 

Business. padler@usc.edu

CHARLES HECKSCHER is a professor in the School of 

Management and Labor Relations at Rutgers University 

and Director of the Center for Workplace Transformation. 

charles@heckscher.us

the core values of the company: the old expectations set by 

the founders were clearly inappropriate to the fast-moving, 

customer-centric business model being developed. Palmisano 

took the extraordinary step of starting a companywide, open 

conversation—a “values jam,” starting with an intranet-based 

free-for-all in 2003 and continuing through more focused 

dialogues in subsequent years. The jam deliberately broke the 

rules of hierarchical deference: top executives participated as 

equals in heated debates with lower-level managers, shop floor 

workers, and clerical staff. At the start, the discussion was 

dominated by expressions of anger and mistrust at the changes 

in the company, so strongly voiced that some top managers 

felt the discussion was getting out of hand and should be 

cut off. But Palmisano persisted, and the tone soon shifted 

to a positive collective effort to build a shared orientation to the 

new environment.

These moves have laid the foundation for a kind of trust that 

is more flexible than in the old IBM community. People relate 

successfully not only within the old IBM boundaries but also 

to the PricewaterhouseCoopers consultants acquired in 2002 

and increasingly to a web of allies and contractors. They work 

together across these boundaries to bring integrated and flexible 

solutions to their customers. There is now wide agreement that 

traditional values that gave such prominence to loyalty are 

untenable, but this has not meant a turn toward individualistic 

cynicism. Commitment to the mission holds people together 

and provides the foundation for internal innovation that would 

have been inconceivable in the past. 

The Challenges Ahead

IBM represents just one case that shows a way out of the 

dilemmas facing many organizations today. But we cannot 

afford naiveté. In the harsh world of business today, there are 

many forces that undermine any form of community and 

that frustrate the emergence of this new, collaborative form. 

Indeed, the dominant tendencies in industry over the past 

couple of decades have been toward reliance on command rather 

than collaboration, and on transient market relations rather 

than partnership.

Nevertheless, we remain optimistic. The old, cozy world 

of loyalty-based bonds seems lost for good, but the harsh world 

of market individualism and hierarchical command cannot 

build the constructive collaboration among different specialties 

that is increasingly essential to business. The only way out is 

to forge a new type of community that encourages people to 

work together toward a shared sense of purpose. Organizations 

that master this new form will have a huge advantage in our 

increasingly knowledge-intensive world. ●

* The following information on IBM is based in large part on Lynda M. Applegate, Charles Heckscher, Boniface Michael, and Elizabeth L Collins, “IBM: Uniting Vision and Values,” Harvard Business School case # N9-805-116 (2006); see also Lynda 

M. Applegate, Rob Austin, and Elizabeth Collins, “IBM’s Decade of Transformation: A Vision for On Demand,” Harvard Business School case # N9-805-018 (July 21, 2004).

IT’S A BIT LIKE STREETBALL VERSUS NBA BASKETBALL. STREETBALL IS ROUGHHOUSING, 

SHOWING OFF. YOU PLAY FOR YOURSELF RATHER THAN THE TEAM, AND YOU DO IT FOR THE 

LOVE OF THE GAME. IN PROFESSIONAL BASKETBALL, YOU’RE PART OF A TEAM, AND YOU 

PRACTICE A LOT TOGETHER, DOING DRILLS AND PLAYING PRACTICE GAMES. YOU AREN’T 

DOING IT JUST FOR YOURSELF OR EVEN JUST FOR YOUR TEAM: THERE ARE OTHER PEOPLE 

INVOLVED—MANAGERS, LAWYERS, AGENTS, ADVERTISERS. IT’S A BUSINESS, NOT JUST A 

GAME. YOU HAVE TO TAKE RESPONSIBILITY FOR OTHER PEOPLE—YOUR TEAMMATES—AND 

FOR MENTORING OTHER PLAYERS COMING UP. 

ASK MAGAZINE | 45
Challenging 

Complacency

BY STEPHEN DENNING

When the minority report of the group monitoring NASA’s progress in making the space shuttle 

fl eet safer after the loss of the Columbia said in August 2005 that NASA “must break [the] cycle 

of smugness substituting for knowledge,” it put its fi nger on a challenge that affl icts all successful 

organizations: how to avoid the complacency that inevitably accompanies success and how to 

use knowledge to reduce the risks that complacency brings with it.1

 Whether or not NASA itself 

suffers from smugness—the majority of the monitoring group didn’t address the question—the 

issue of complacency is endemic in all large organizations. Various strategies have been used by 

organizations wishing to retain their edge. This article reviews the strengths and weaknesses of 

different approaches, including several for dealing with situations where knowledge is no help.

46 | ASK MAGAZINE | INSIGHT
Root Causes of Organizational Complacency

The first step in dealing with the problem is to recognize 

how deep-rooted and intractable it is. Many common 

assumptions and behaviors promote complacency. These are the 

most important:

■ EXCESSIVE RELIANCE ON PRIOR SUCCESS: The more often a 

particular routine achieves a successful outcome, the more 

likely people are to develop an unwarranted belief that success 

is assured.2

 The reality is that the opposite is true where 

random risks are involved: the probability of risk materializing 

increases over time.

■ ARROGANCE OF EXPERTS: Disdain for laymen or for experts in 

other fields is a perennial tendency of the expert. The fact that 

the expert is right more often than the laymen can lead to the 

illusion that he is always right.

■ OVER-ACCENTUATION OF THE POSITIVE: Management is an 

action-oriented activity. The can-do mind-set that is 

necessary for getting things done may discourage listening 

to nay-sayers and skeptics, even when their viewpoints 

have merit. Nevertheless, most high-value knowledge lies 

in negative narratives that reveal the pitfalls, difficulties, 

and obstacles that lie in the way of success.3

 Because such 

narratives can be seen as a threat to management plans and 

objectives, fear of negative career consequences can hamper 

their dissemination. 

■ OVER-RELIANCE ON TECHNOLOGY: Technical specialists have 

a tendency to believe in the infallibility of their technology, 

particularly in areas where they have some knowledge and 

control. This can be a serious problem for computerized safety 

systems, which can generate a false sense of infallibility.4

■ THE “BLACK SWAN” BIAS: People tend to discount the possibility 

of unprecedented risks. Because all the swans they have seen 

are white, they assume black swans do not exist. A blackswan event is beyond the realm of normal expectations and 

tends to be discounted, even by experts. The difficulty of 

learning from black-swan events is compounded by the fact 

that they rarely repeat. Learning from the discovery of one 

black swan that black swans are possible doesn’t prepare us 

for, say, a platypus.5

■ GROUPTHINK: Groupthink occurs when people are deeply 

involved in a cohesive group whose striving for unanimity 

overrides a realistic appraisal of alternative courses of 

action.6

 Large organizations often exhibit symptoms of 

groupthink, including illusions of invulnerability and 

a sense of superiority; collective rationalization and 

stereotyping of outsiders as uninformed; ignoring contrary 

data; suppressing alternative viewpoints; and shielding 

leadership from dissent. 

Strategies for Dealing with Complacency 

Because the root causes of organizational complacency lie 

deep in the human psyche, there is no known cure. Various 

organizational strategies for reducing the impact of complacency 

have been adopted, including changing the organizational 

structure, adjusting the discourse, enhancing organizational 

values, getting ready for the unexpected, and aiming for radical 

innovation. The different approaches have varying strengths 

and weaknesses.

Changing the Organizational Structure

One set of strategies concerns adjusting the organizational 

structure, forcing attention on important issues that are often 

ignored.

■ GIVE ORGANIZATIONAL INDEPENDENCE TO ANALYSTS: One 

approach to resolving the tension between negative knowledge 

and management’s positive can-do attitude is to give analysts 

formal independence from the managers. In the World Bank, 

the Operations Evaluation Department (OED) reports to 

the board of directors rather than to the president of the 

organization. This enables the OED to be fearless in presenting 

its findings. Where the approach results in confrontation, 

however, organizational learning may be retarded. 

ASK MAGAZINE | 47
■ ESTABLISH FORMAL PROCESSES FOR PROFESSIONAL DISSENT:

In high-stakes decisions, such as in the management of 

nuclear energy facilities, where a mistake could mean disaster, 

formal processes are established to allow professionals to 

express “differing professional opinions,” or DPO. The 

hope is that such a channel allows heterodox opinions to be 

shared. The risk is that using the DPO can have the same 

negative career consequences for critics as when no such 

channel exists.

■ INTRODUCE STRUCTURED APPROACHES TO MANAGING RISK:

Recently, risk management programs have become popular. 

They set up systematic processes for describing, cataloging, 

evaluating, and taking measures to prevent, reduce, or 

compensate for risk, with specific accountabilities for 

accomplishing these tasks. Such programs promise to give 

managers a handle on intangible risk factors.7

 They also may 

create costly bureaucracy, giving a semblance of protection 

against risk while stifling the creativity needed to deal with 

significant risk.

■ CREATE OASES OF SAFETY THROUGH COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE:

A more flexible approach, growing out of knowledge 

management, gives communities of practice organizational 

blessing and support. Communities constitute “safe spaces” 

where experts can establish levels of trust needed to discuss 

even difficult, institution-threatening issues. The approach 

is low cost and flexible and builds on the natural tendency of 

experts to learn by sharing experience. But communities can 

be fragile as they depend on the forbearance of hierarchical 

managers. In the absence of active efforts to cross-fertilize 

from other disciplines or groups, they are also vulnerable 

to groupthink.8

Structural solutions are attractive because, apart from 

communities of practice, they can be implemented by managerial 

fiat. They generate explicit and consistent approaches to 

knowledge issues and create clear accountabilities. None of the 

structural solutions is guaranteed to work, however, because 

the results depend on the quality of the discourse taking place 

within the various structures. 

Upgrading the Quality of the Discourse

Explicit efforts can be made to upgrade the quality of the 

discourse that takes place within organizational structures.

■ USE ANALYSIS TO GET THE BEST POSSIBLE HANDLE ON KNOWN 

ISSUES: Statisticians and data can be used to get the best 

rational take on probabilities, based on past experience, while 

recognizing that past experience is not a guaranteed guide to 

the future. Expert judgments can also be supplemented with 

techniques that draw on the “the wisdom of crowds”—large 

numbers of people, acting independently, engaged to assess 

probabilities.9 Managers also need to wrestle with the data, 

continually reassessing its significance and reliability, focusing 

discussion on areas of doubt and uncertainty, and paying 

particular attention to anomalies and dissenting viewpoints. 

It is also important to learn systematically from mistakes. 

Without systematic tracking of risk-related decisions and their 

effectiveness and training to correct for known biases, learning 

is likely to be limited. 

■ USE NARRATIVE TECHNIQUES TO EXPAND THE RANGE OF ISSUES 

TO BE ADDRESSED: While analysis is good for dealing 

with known issues, it is impotent for evaluating issues 

that have not yet been formulated. Narrative techniques can 

help open up previously unimagined risks and reveal the 

nuances and interconnections of apparently unconnected 

risks. One technique is pre-mortems. In a pre-mortem, 

planners are asked to imagine that their plan has been 

carried out and that it has failed and to think about what 

might have caused the failure.10 Where the issues involve 

human behavior, role-playing and simulations can help 

overcome the problem of the time-lag in learning from 

real-life experience in complex situations.11 Research shows 

that role-playing can yield more accurate predictions than 

expert forecasts. 12

48 | ASK MAGAZINE
■ TAKE ACTIVE STEPS TO ENHANCE THE FLOW OF DEBATE:The quality 

of discussion can be improved and the chances of defining 

and mitigating risk can be increased by encouraging open 

discussions, having group leaders solicit and receive feedback 

and criticism from others; ensuring a mix of disciplines, 

and getting outsiders involved in the discussion, so as to 

generate potentially creative tension; taking time out to give 

individuals room to re-think, re-formulate, gather further 

data and re-present; having non-participants explicitly assess 

the group’s dynamics to help flag phenomena that may be 

stifling debate. 

Efforts to upgrade the flow of professional dialogue 

comprise an array of tools and techniques, none of which is “the 

solution,” but all of which can make a contribution. The tools 

are flexible and generally low cost. They are, however, hard to 

institutionalize. Moreover, these approaches will lack robustness 

unless supported by strong organizational values.

Establishing and Disseminating Organizational Values

Neither structural approaches nor steps to enhance dialogue 

are likely to be effective unless they are aligned with 

organizational values. An organization may declare that 

innovation or safety is a top priority, but if the actions of 

the top management show that its real priority is meeting 

short-term production goals, then its declarations will have 

little impact. 

APPROACHES FOR 

FIGHTING ORGANIZATIONAL 

COMPLACENCY STRENGTHS WEAKNESSES

CHANGING THE 

ORGANIZATIONAL STRUCTURE

CAN usually be implemented by organizational 

fi at; generate consistent and explicit exposure of 

the issues with clear accountabilities

CAN be rigid, as the effi cacy depends on the quality 

of the discourse that takes place within the structures

UPGRADING THE QUALITY 

OF THE DISCOURSE FLEXIBLE and generally low cost HARD to institutionalize; effi cacy depends on 

organizational values

ESTABLISHING AND 

DISSEMINATING 

ORGANIZATIONAL VALUES

INCULCATES capability to deal with issues 

throughout the organization

VALUES may no longer be relevant in a radically 

different environment

PREPARING FOR 

THE UNEXPECTED

GENERATES fl exibility and creativity, leading 

to effi cient solutions to seemingly insoluble 

problems

ASSUMES that reliable knowledge is not available; 

may encourage excessive use of improvisation

TRANSFORMATIONAL 

INNOVATION

CAN save an organization from irrelevance and 

death; requires courage, imagination, smarts, 

and strong leadership

RELIABLE knowledge is not available; 

involves high risk

ASK MAGAZINE | 49
Values are usually established in situations where leaders 

have to deal with adversity. For instance, General Electric has a 

detailed set of policies specifying what is meant by unyielding 

integrity and backs them up with energetic managerial action. 

In 1991, for instance, when a single GE employee was found 

to have been involved in bribery related to the sale of airplane 

engines to Israel, GE swiftly disciplined twenty-one otherwiseexcellent executives, including several top managers, whose 

only flaw was that they had not been watchful enough to 

detect and prevent the fraud. This GE story of principles 

and actions sends a clear signal about the value of integrity. 

Repeating the story helps establish integrity as a core value of 

the company.13

Establishing and disseminating organizational values 

is a powerful way of inculcating a capability to deal with 

difficult issues throughout the organization. However, 

some values may no longer be relevant when the totally 

unexpected happens. 

Preparing for the Unexpected

Organizations need to prepare for unanticipated risks. After 

all known risks have been planned for and the right structures, 

discourses, and values put in place, they need to be prepared 

for issues that haven’t been anticipated. Because knowledge of 

such events is by definition lacking, specific plans cannot be 

formulated, but steps can be taken to enhance the capability to 

deal with the unexpected. 

■ DEVELOP A CAPABILITY TO SWARM: The military has learned 

that top-down centralized decision makers can not deal 

as resiliently with uncertain battlefield conditions as 

decentralized units on the ground, which can respond 

to risks and seize opportunities as the situation evolves.14

The same tactic can be applied in non-military settings, as 

NASA showed in response to the Apollo 13 problem and as 

a Toyota group demonstrated when it rebuilt a burned-down 

factory in a week.15

■ INVEST IN REDUNDANCY: Super-efficient, just-in-time game 

plans may be good for getting results in smooth seas, but 

when the going gets rough, survival may depend on having 

extra capacity and backup. In the aftermath of both 9/11 and 

Katrina, cell-phone systems designed to handle normal traffic 

failed, greatly hampering rescue efforts.16

A capacity to improvise can generate flexibility and 

creativity, leading to efficient solutions to seemingly insoluble 

problems, even where advance knowledge is not available. Too 

much reliance on improvisation, however, can encourage ad 

hoc approaches to risks that should have been predicted and 

prepared for. And it is little help when the overall mission of the 

organization is in question.

Transformational Innovation

Management often involves trying doing “more of the same” 

but doing it better, more quickly, and more economically. 

Innovation is about doing something completely different. 

In a sense, innovation is the opposite of management and 

requires dissimilar techniques.17

Thus much of the activity that currently goes by the name 

of innovation hardly warrants the term. Henry Ford once said 

that if he had asked clients what they wanted, they would have 

said “faster horses.” Much so-called innovation in organizations 

is about searching for “faster horses,” that is, tame, incremental 

improvements that don’t fundamentally change the situation, 

when what is really needed is something radically different—

a car.

When organizations face fundamental challenges to their 

mission as a result of shifts in the external environment, they may 

need to innovate radically in order to survive. Digital Equipment 

Corporation had great strengths in minicomputers and kept 

making marginal improvements to them but was unable to 

adjust to a fundamental shift in the external environment—the 

advent of the PC. It did not survive. By contrast, Nokia began 

life as a collection of firms specializing in foresting, rubber, and 

ORGANIZATIONS NEED TO PREPARE FOR 

UNANTICIPATED RISKS. AFTER ALL KNOWN 

RISKS HAVE BEEN PLANNED FOR AND THE 

RIGHT STRUCTURES, DISCOURSES, AND 

VALUES PUT IN PLACE, THEY NEED TO BE 

PREPARED FOR ISSUES THAT HAVEN’T 

BEEN ANTICIPATED.

50 | ASK MAGAZINE
cable manufacture; it successfully transformed itself to become 

a global giant in mobile phones. 

Public sector organizations face similar challenges when 

the external environment changes or when the consensus 

supporting the mission unravels. They may not die abruptly 

like private sector firms if they fail to adjust to the new 

situation and transform themselves, but they will slowly 

decline into irrelevance.

When it comes to transformational innovation, knowledge 

is often the problem, not the solution. All available knowledge 

concerns the past and typically indicates that radical new 

strategies will fail, because there is no market, or existing 

organizational capability, or tested technology, or all of the 

above. Transformational innovation concerns the future about 

which there is no reliable knowledge. When the future is very 

different from the past, courage, imagination, and smarts 

become at least as important as knowledge. 

For organizations that are in synch with their environments, 

transformational innovation is a matter of choice. Where the 

external environment has shifted significantly, transformational 

innovation becomes a necessity. In such cases, complacency 

is not an option, but neither is knowledge. Private sector 

organizations may face the necessity of generating a new market 

with radically different products, services, clients, or business 

models. Public sector organizations may need to face the 

stark reality that unless they can forge a new consensus with 

stakeholders, transformational innovation will be a requirement 

of survival. 

Attacking Complacency on All Fronts

In any large organization, the struggle against complacency is 

an unending battle. All avenues reviewed in this article need 

to be exploited, including structural approaches to enhancing 

the sharing of knowledge, steps to enhance the quality of the 

dialogue that takes place within those structures, strenuous 

efforts to establish and transmit appropriate organizational 

values, explicitly preparing for the unexpected, and creating 

a capability to undertake transformational innovation. 

Organizations cannot entirely eliminate risk or complacency, 

but serious and thoughtful efforts to counter complacency 

can help bring dangers to light and reduce the likelihood 

of failure. ●

 1. J. Schwartz, “Minority Report Faults NASA as Compromising Safety,” New York Times (August 18, 2005).

 2. J. Reason, Human Error (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

 3. S. Denning, The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling, (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2005): Chapter 8.

 4. Psychology & Behavioral Finance, http://www.investorhome.com/psych.htm (accessed September 4, 2005). 

 5. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, “Expecting the Unexpected,” New York Times (April 8, 2004).

 6. I. Janis, Victims of Group-Think: A psychological study of foreign-policy decisions and fi ascoes (Boston: Houghton 

Miffl in, 1972).

 7. A. Slywotzky and J. John Drzik, “Countering the Biggest Risk of All,” Harvard Business Review (April 2005).

 8. S. Denning, The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling, (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2005): Chapter 7.

 9. J. Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom 

Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations (New York: Doubleday, 2004). 

10. G. Klein, Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998): 71.

11. G. Klein, The Power of Intuition: How to Use Gut Feelings to Make Better Decisions at Work (New York: Doubleday, 

2003): 36; J.S. Armstrong, “Forecasting in Confl icts Your Opponent Will Do,” University of Pennsylvania, 2002, 

http://www.upenn.edu/researchatpenn/article.php?141&bus.

12. D. Dorner, The Logic of Failure (New York: Basic Books, 1997).

13. J. Welch, Jack: Straight from the Gut (New York: Warner Books, 2001): 281–283.

14. J. Arquilla and D. Ronfeldt, Swarming and the Future of Confl ict, Rand Corporation, 2005, http://www.rand.org/

publications/DB/DB311/.

15. D. Watts, “Untapped Networks,” MIT Technology Review, March 7, 2003, http://cache.technologyreview.com/

articles/03/03/wo_cameron030703.1.asp.

16. N. Boyce, Why Louisiana Communication Networks Failed, National Public Radio, http://www.npr.org/templates/

story/story.php?storyId=4829404.

 17. T. Kelley, The Ten Faces of Innovation (New York: Doubleday, 2005); S. Denning, The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling 

(San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2005): Chapter 11.

STEPHEN DENNING is the author of The Leader’s Guide 

to Storytelling (Jossey-Bass, 2005). Formerly the Program 

Director, Knowledge Management, at the World Bank, he advises 

organizations on knowledge management and organizational 

storytelling. www.stevedenning.com

ASK MAGAZINE | 51
Knowledge in Brief

Three Refl ections on Meeting Face to Face

E-mail and virtual workspaces are important contributors to knowledge exchange 

in large, dispersed organizations, but faceto-face conversation adds essential depth 

and richness to collaboration, knowledge 

sharing, and trust creation. Here are three 

brief examples of how these conversations 

can be encouraged.

Gathering Under the Marula 

Tree (Courtesy of Rob Weare)

Namdeb Diamond Corporation of 

Namibia supports the creation of a 

knowledge-sharing culture by engaging in 

culturally based activities that encourage 

the flow of experiential knowledge 

and the development of cooperative 

relationships. 

At Namdeb, the operational 

senior management team conducts a 

monthly knowledge-sharing café with 

all managers. They call their meeting 

an “Omugongo.” Commonly known as 

the Marula, the Omugongo tree plays a 

central role in the community. Thanks 

to its thick foliage and cool shade, it has 

long served as the location for important 

community gatherings, where important 

issues are fully and openly discussed.

By choosing the name Omungongo

for this management community gathering 

at Namdeb, and by insisting that the 

meetings be conducted in keeping with 

the deep cultural traditions surrounding 

this tree, the senior management team 

ensures that conversation will be rich 

and candid. Relevant strategic objectives 

and initiatives are shared, and an open 

and free exchange of ideas is encouraged. 

The lively and open discussion helps 

create valuable trust relationships that 

encourage further knowledge exchange 

and collaboration. 

Japanese Talk Rooms

Many Japanese pharmaceutical firms 

have “talk rooms.” These are attractive 

lounges where tea is served all day and 

researchers sit down and discuss their 

projects with fellow scientists in an 

informal, relaxed setting. People speak to 

different people every day, most of them 

strangers to each other’s research. The 

rooms facilitate knowledge exchange and 

invite serendipitous creative blending of 

ideas at very low costs.

These pharmaceutical firms have 

also taken to displaying posters outside 

their laboratory doors that tell passers-by 

what the scientists are working on. This 

is meant to encourage any and all to stop 

by and chat about the work, a technique 

that costs nothing and can have a great 

pay-off.

The Wired Coffee Pot

Believing strongly in the creative value 

of chance conversations, managers 

of Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center 

devised a way to enhance the already 

powerful drawing power of free coffee. 

They connected the center’s coffee pot 

to the center’s computer network so 

researchers would get a message on their 

desktops whenever a fresh pot had been 

brewed. That electronic announcement 

usually brought several of them to the 

coffee lounge, where they often stayed to 

chat about their work.

Managers put white boards around 

the lounge so researchers could jot 

down ideas and calculations. A camera 

automatically captured these sometimesvaluable notes and sketches, and the 

images were made available on the center’s 

intranet, inviting others to comment and 

contribute. ●

52 | ASK MAGAZINE
ASK Bookshelf

The Business of Projects: Managing Innovation in 

Complex Products and Systems, by Andrew Davies 

and Michael Hobday (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge 

University Press, 2006)

It is no secret or surprise that much innovative and collaborative 

work in organizations these days happens through projects. 

What is surprising is just how little has been written about the 

nature, structure, and economics of projects. Much of the best 

work in this area (some by NASA employees) has been cases and 

stories about successful projects. These efforts are invaluable, 

but there is more to be said, especially as projects become more 

and more common in organizations that tackle complex and 

innovative tasks.

Written by academics who have experience working 

outside the academy, The Business of Projects fills this need very, 

very well. One of the book’s appealing distinctions is that it 

is solidly grounded in organizational learning and strategy 

literature of the past few decades that can be summed up as the 

“resource-based theory of the firm.” Simply put, this stream 

of research focuses on organizations’ capabilities, capacities, 

and knowledge and their appropriateness to specific tasks and 

environments. It shows that no organization can do everything, 

or even close to everything, so executives need to focus on what 

needs to be done and the human and social capital required for 

that particular work.

Using examples from high-technology, aerospace, and 

petroleum firms—all relevant to ASK readers—this book 

discusses exactly what project capabilities are and how they are 

to be understood, developed, and accurately measured. 

The Business of Projects includes something too often missing 

in management texts: a chapter on the subject of learning. 

“Learning in the Project Business” is original and important. 

It uses some new-ish constructs from the emerging discipline 

of knowledge management and builds on Stanford Professor 

James March’s distinction between exploitative and explorative 

learning. It would be a fine place for any newcomer to project 

learning systems to start their own adventures in project-land, 

and it would also serve veterans of project wars who have never 

really put in the time to figure out how best to learn from 

successful and failed attempts.

The book concludes with some valuable rules of thumb 

for doing project work. Usually such concluding messages are 

banal, but these are realistic and valuable—another rarity in 

management books!

Moondust: In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth,

by Andrew Smith (New York: Harper Collins, 2005)

Moondust is the story of Andrew Smith’s encounters with the 

Apollo astronauts who are the only human beings who have 

stood on the surface of the Moon. The impetus for the book 

comes from the wonder he felt as an eight-year-old boy when 

Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon in 1969 and his 

disappointment (shared by many of the astronauts) that support 

for human space exploration waned after Apollo.

Smith’s work vividly evokes what going to the Moon was 

like, the skill and courage required, and the sheer exhilaration 

of the experience. And it captures the varied ways the astronauts 

have been affected by their extraordinary adventure. In the 

decades since, some have shunned publicity and some have 

sought it. Some have focused on the facts of their missions, 

while others describe the texture and significance of their 

moonwalks. Alan Bean, for instance, has become a painter 

who tries to capture the look and feel of the Moon in his work, 

and Edgar Mitchell founded the Institute of Noetic Sciences 

as a result of his sense of a connection to the intelligence of 

the universe.

Some readers have complained about technical inaccuracies 

in Moondust. This is certainly not the book to read to learn 

about the nuts and bolts of the space program. (Many such 

books exist.) It is the one to read to glimpse the transformational 

power of space exploration and understand the lure of traveling 

back to the Moon and beyond it. ●

From time to time, the editors will offer brief reviews of books they believe will especially interest 

ASK readers. Here are descriptions of two books, very different from one another, that we admire.

ASK MAGAZINE | 53
The Knowledge Notebook

How Does a Learning Organization Learn?

BY LAURENCE PRUSAK

How comfortable do you feel sitting at your desk 

reading a book related to your job or your area of 

expertise? I mean sitting in plain view, reading 

most of the day, and not answering your phone or 

responding to e-mail or instant messages. If the 

answer is “not very” or “not at all” (which would 

be the answer in almost any organization I know), 

then how can we say you work in a “learning 

organization?” After all, you’re reading that book 

to increase your understanding—to learn. And yet 

many organizations, public and private, that would 

frown on a workday devoted to reading claim that 

they are learning organizations and that their 

employees are learning all the time. How do we 

account for this discrepancy? Does it matter? To 

answer those questions, let’s look at what it might 

really mean to be a learning organization.

The term “learning organization” has been 

around for twenty or thirty years and was given a 

tremendous boost with publication of Peter Senge’s 

The Fifth Discipline in 1990. This book, a surprise 

best-seller, popularized the ideas of organizational 

learning to the extent that chief learning officers 

were appointed in many organizations around the 

world. In particular, human resources departments 

took up Senge’s cause with passion and, more 

relevantly, with large training budgets to try 

to implement a portfolio of learning practices 

and policies. It became a serious management 

movement, and while it isn’t quite as popular now 

as it was a decade ago, the issues it raises are still 

with us. Indeed, many would say that learning and 

related issues are even more important now than 

they were ten or twenty years ago.

So what did this movement stand for? It 

tried to popularize the notion that organizations 

obviously learned new things all the time. If 

they didn’t, they would quickly expire. Just how 

this learning occurred, who it was that learned 

anything, where they learned it, and how learning 

should be measured were the objects of much 

discussion and debate. But the learning processes 

and practices developed in most organizations 

reflected the same set of beliefs: namely, that more 

learning is always better (increasing the value of 

the organization’s human capital), that learning is 

at heart an individual activity, and that the basic 

mechanism for learning is some form of training. 

So what could be wrong with that?

Well, quite a bit. It turns out that most 

important learning occurs not in training sessions 

but on the job, with workers learning from each 

other by participating in and telling stories about 

the actual work and by reflecting afterward on 

what has and hasn’t worked. While some of this 

knowledge can be and often is codified, these 

documented learnings are usually presented 

by a trainer as some form of final truth that can’t 

be questioned—a far cry from the more subtle 

and flexible knowledge acquired on the job.

It also turns out that learning has a significant 

emotional component. People learn more and 

more richly in real-life situations where something is at stake and the process is shared with 

colleagues, circumstances that usually have much 

more emotional content than either a classroom 

or a computer screen. An allied issue is trust 

and psychological safety. One learns best when 

one trusts the teacher and feels safe in questioning 

the material.

These findings support an even more 

important one: that the best and most useful 

54 | ASK MAGAZINE
learning takes place in groups, in shared practices or other 

networks of people. The human-capital perspective, with its 

emphasis on individual learning, is far less valuable than the 

social-capital one. Most measurable changes in knowledge 

and skill can be shown to be social—learned within the 

group by adaptation or some informal mechanism. These 

groups rarely learn in a planned, linear, or even intentional 

way, and their informality—learning in the moment and from 

the moment—often produces the most credible and fully 

assimilated knowledge. Rather than try to absorb a whole 

body of knowledge—some useful, some not—they learn what 

they need to know.

So where does this leave us? The learning organization 

“test” I began with—reading a book at your desk—is clearly 

not the answer to the learning dilemma. Yes, it does reveal the 

level of an organization’s commitment to learning in its many 

and varied forms, and reading the right book can provide some 

important knowledge, but it clearly doesn’t offer the situational 

social learning that has so much value.

We still need to understand more about how organizational 

learning happens and what we can do to ensure that it is a 

continuous part of the work experience. We certainly need 

more sophisticated methods and tools than are offered in 

e-learning environments or in dull training sessions that no one 

looks forward to and few people remember. The true learning 

organization is still a goal to be attained, not an accomplished 

fact. We need organizational leaders who genuinely value 

learning and support wise managerial interventions and 

organizational policies that foster social, work- and practicebased learning. These interventions must be designed to 

strengthen and scale up what are now informal and sometimes 

accidental processes without making them mechanical, 

dull, and not especially relevant to people’s real knowledge 

needs. Finding the right approach is a challenge, but one that 

has to be met to create learning organizations that are worthy 

of the name. ●

IT TURNS OUT THAT MOST 

IMPORTANT LEARNING 

OCCURS NOT IN TRAINING 

SESSIONS BUT ON THE JOB, 

WITH WORKERS LEARNING 

FROM EACH OTHER BY 

PARTICIPATING IN AND TELLING 

STORIES ABOUT THE ACTUAL 

WORK AND BY REFLECTING 

AFTERWARD ON WHAT HAS 

AND HASN’T WORKED.

ASK MAGAZINE | 55
ASKinteractive

NASA in the News

The United States Government Accountability Offi ce recently released a study 

detailing the importance of supporting a knowledge-based acquisition framework 

within the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. 

This report evaluates whether NASA’s policy currently supports a knowledgebased acquisition approach and describes how NASA centers are applying the 

Agency’s acquisition policies and guidance.

Read the full report online at http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d06218.pdf.

Web of Knowledge

The Academy of Program/Project & 

Engineering Leadership (APPEL) has a 

new Web site. Read about new offerings, 

upcoming events, and other APPEL 

news online: http://www.appel.nasa.gov.

Learning and Development

Check out these upcoming opportunities for increasing knowledge. 

For more information, please e-mail APPELcourses@asrcms.com.

IPM 220 Acquisitions and Contracting Workshop

August 21–23, Wallops Flight Facility

This three-day course provides an overview of all phases of contracting, from 

requirements development to closeout. It explores vital issues project managers 

face and highlights your roles and responsibilities to give you greater infl uence over 

how work is performed. You will also discuss actions to help ensure contractors or 

subcontractors perform as required under contract.

ISE 240 Decision Analysis

August 24–25, Wallops Flight Facility

This two-day course will equip you with techniques and strategies for conducting 

factually based decision-making activities in resolving technical issues at NASA. 

You will learn how to evaluate alternative solutions using established criteria and 

selected methods and will experience the value of trade-off analyses, modeling, 

simulation, decision matrices, and other tools used in decision analysis.

IPM 290 Project Management Leadership Laboratory

August 28–31, Wallops Flight Facility

This four-day course is an intensive experience aimed at building capabilities for 

managerial effectiveness to achieve project team objectives and to synthesize the 

project management practices you have learned through practice and study. This 

laboratory provides a unique opportunity to identify, understand, and practice 

effective leadership behaviors in a project team setting.

For More 

on Our Stories

Additional information pertaining 

to articles featured in this issue can 

be found by visiting the following 

Web sites:

Hubble Space Telescope 

http://hubblesite.org

Stardust Comet Samples 

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/

stardust/main/index.html

NASA Lessons Learned 

Information System 

http://www.nasa.gov/offi ces/oce/llis/

home/index.html

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@asrcms.com.

56 | ASK MAGAZINE
To keep your project on schedule, you need 

prompt decisions or approvals from a manager 

who often seems unavailable. 

What would you do?

Do you have a question you want our readers to answer?

Submit it to ASKmagazine@asrcms.com

Submit your answers to ASKmagazine@asrcms.com

Q:
National Aeronautics and Space Administration

NASA Headquarters

300 E Street SW

Washington, DC 20546

www.nasa.gov

NP-2006-04-429-HQ