How NASA Builds Teams

Mission Critical Soft Skills for Scientists, Engineers, and Project Teams

Charles J. Pellerin

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780470502952
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: Business allgemein

Every successful organization needs high-performance teams to compete and succeed. Yet, technical people are often resistant to traditional "touchy-feely" teambuilding.

To improve communication, performance, and morale among NASA's technical teams, former NASA Astrophysicist Dr. Charlie Pellerin developed the teambuilding process described in "How NASA Builds Teams"—an approach that is proven, quantitative, and requires only a fraction of the time and resources of traditional training methods. This "4-D" process has boosted team performance in hundreds of NASA project teams, engineering teams, and management teams, including the people responsible for NASA's most complex systems—the Space Shuttle, space telescopes, robots on Mars, and the mission back to the moon. How NASA Builds Teams explains how the 4-D teambuilding process can be applied in any organization, and includes a fast, free on-line behavioral assessment to help your team and the individual members understand each other and measure the key driver of team performance, the social context.

Moreover, these simple, logical processes appeal strongly to technical teams who eschew "touchy-feely" training. Pellerin applies simple, elegant principles from his physics background to the art teambuilding, such as the use of a coordinate system to analyze the characteristics of team performance into actionable elements.

The author illustrates the teambuilding process with entertaining stories from his decade as NASA's Director for Astrophysics and subsequent 15 years of working closely with NASA and outside business teams. For example, he tells how the processes in the book enabled him to initiate the space mission to fix the Hubble Space Telescope's flawed mirror.

Free downloadable resources will help you:

• Identify your teammates' innate personalities
• Diagram your culture (And compare it to your customer's)
• Measure the coherency of your project's paradigm (Get this wrong and you will be fired!) and
• Learn to meet people's need to feel valued by you.

Further, you can download and use Pellerin's most powerful tool for influencing the outcome of any difficult situation: the Context Shifting Worksheet.

PART I
UNDERSTANDING AND ANALYZING CONTEXT

The next three chapters explore the primary driver of team performance, the context.

• Chapter 1 describes my experience of launching Hubble Space Telescope with a flawed mirror and learning that a flawed social context was the root cause.
• Chapter 2 validates the power of context with research and empirical data.
• Chapter 3 introduces the 4-D System, our primary organizing tool for analyzing context into simpler, manageable components.

CHAPTER 1
Think You Can Ignore Context? Hubble’s Flawed Mirror Might Wake You Up

Hubble Space Telescope—April 23, 1990

It was late in the evening at the Kennedy Space Center. A TV camera technician was taping a large cable onto my leg. I had just returned from a final look at the Hubble Space Telescope in the Space Shuttle’s cargo bay. It was an awesome sight—the gleaming telescope surrounded by the shiny cargo bay doors of the Space Shuttle. After 15 years, $1.7 billion, and the hard work of thousands of people, the time had come. Tomorrow morning, Hubble would launch into space.

I was the featured guest on “Nightline,” the nationally televised news show with Ted Koppel. Not being much of a TV watcher, I had never seen the program. The local producer had me stare into glaring lights for more than 30 minutes before the show. I suppose that tired, unnerved (and scared) people made good late-night television guests. They promised that questions would be polite and easy. They were neither. After all the usual stuff about whether NASA money would be better spent on social programs, I was asked the big one, “Will it work?” I expressed strong confidence in our team, talked about the thoroughness of the test program. and said squarely, “It will!”

Actually, I had my doubts, but that was the only rational response. If difficult times were to come, I needed my Hubble team to see me as confident and fully behind them. They deserved this kind of support. Moreover, there was no alternative except to launch the telescope and see what happened. Either it worked or it did not. It was time.

After a few hours sleep, I returned to Kennedy for the final countdown in the launch control blockhouse. Gazing at the Space Shuttle five miles away, I listened to the launch director’s voice in my headset. As NASA’s director for astrophysics, my role was to provide quick recommendations if major problems occurred during the launch and deployment. After a textbook launch, the telescope deployed, powered up, and communicated with the ground just as we had planned. Everything was, in NASA parlance, “nominal.”

However, Would the Telescope Work?

In order to achieve the benefits of being above the atmosphere, the telescope’s body must point to a given location in the sky with a stability of .007 arc-seconds. This is equivalent to aiming a laser in Washington, DC and hitting a target in New York City the size of a quarter.

In the late 1980s, the White House decided to open space science cooperation with the Soviet Union. I cochaired the first working group with my Soviet counterparts. When I put up the chart describing the Hubble pointing specification, there was a murmur on the Soviet side. I asked my counterpart what was happening. He said, “It’s nothing, just a translation problem.” I said, “Please explain.” He answered, “Your chart says 0.007 arc-seconds as the pointing stability. We are sure that you really mean seven arc-seconds.” It took some time to convince them that we were actually building a system to achieve seven thousandths of an arc-second. These highly accomplished space experimenters could not fathom achieving that kind of performance.

What would happen if Hubble’s performance was a technically respectable 0.07 arc-seconds? Hubble would be a total loss because the resulting images would scarcely be better that what the best ground-based telescopes would do. We would have squandered $1.7 billion of taxpayer money! There was no way to be certain we would reach this level of performance before our public debut.

Hubble Looks Good, So Off to Japan

With the world watching, we opened the aperture door and let starlight in. I heaved a sigh of relief as a fuzzy spot of light appeared on our monitors. “It works,” we shouted. My engineers told me not to worry about fuzziness. We had intentionally launched the telescope slightly out of focus.

With Hubble looking good, I decided to visit my colleagues in Japan. I met with my boss, Len Fisk, just before my departure. He asked if he should do anything for me while I was gone. I said, “Len, we’ve just succeeded with what is perhaps the grandest science project in history. Surely, there will be medals in the Rose Garden for all of us.” I continued, “Your job is to get George Bush and not Dan Quayle to pin my medal on.” He laughed and said that he would do what he could. Looking back, this was pure hubris. I would soon learn that the gods do not like hubris.

My Japanese counterparts knew that I liked to meet in Ryokans (Japanese Inns) where no foreigner had ever been. I had no contact with my headquarters office for a week. As I flew from Narita to St. Louis, I wondered how things had been going in my absence.

“Conscious Expectation of the Unexpected”—An Early Hubble Motto

I entered the St. Louis airport lounge to await my flight back to Washington. I was in good spirits, although feeling like I was on “sake time.” I called my secretary to check in. She immediately said, “Have you talked to Dr. Fisk lately?” “No,” I answered. She said, “I’ll put you right through.” I wondered what was so important. Ah, this must be about the medals in the Rose Garden. A surprising few seconds later, I heard Len Fisk saying, “Charlie, where are you?” After I told him that I would be back in DC that evening, he said, “I’m glad to hear that.”

He continued, “Charlie, what do you know about spherical aberration?” As I wondered why he might be asking, I replied, “I know that it is a common mistake by amateurs. They sometimes make mirrors with a ‘down-edge.’ A telescope with a spherically aberrated mirror is useless.”

Len then said, “What would you say if I told we launched Hubble with a spherically aberrated mirror?” I answered, “I would say that you are annoyed that I had a good time in Japan, while you had to tend to the Washington bureaucracy. This is a really bad joke.”

He persisted, but I remained unconvinced. He finally said, “Okay, put the phone down, but don’t hang up. Just find the front page of any major newspaper and bring it back.” I returned with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in hand. He then asked me to read the headline to him over the phone. It said, “NATIONAL DISASTER, HUBBLE LAUNCHED WITH FLAWED MIRROR.” “Now what do you say,” Len asked? I replied, “You guys are really something. How did you plant a fake newspaper in here?” Later, I named this moment “denial is not a river in Egypt.”

Back in Washington, reality sank in. A trivial and obvious error overshadowed the accomplishments of thousands of dedicated people! The following months were to be a kind of living hell for my Hubble team.

The Congressional testimony was brutal. At that time, news of the Savings and Loan scandal was just emerging. Congressional representatives preferred to appear on TV beating up on NASA executives than explaining that crisis. During one session, a member asked me, “Dr. Pellerin, you’ve told us that the greatest advance of Hubble over prior missions is in the ultraviolet?” “Yes, that’s true,” I said. I thought he was getting ready to ask me how I knew the mirror was not contaminated. One molecular thickness of oil would have made the mirror black in the ultraviolet. We worried constantly about contamination of the optics.

Instead, the representative looked at me accusingly and said, “Mr. Chairman, the witness is lying. Everyone knows that ultraviolet radiation is invisible.” My first thought was to explain that we had detectors that converted ultraviolet radiation into electrical signals. Then I had a better idea. I said, “Sir, x-rays are also invisible to the human eye, yet you can see x-ray images on film.” The chairman said, “You are out of order. Let the record end with the member’s remarks!”

After the first week of testimony, a friend invited me to a concert at Wolf Trap Park, an outdoor park just outside Washington. The world seemed an okay place after a bottle of wine, a nice dinner, and a beautiful sky. Judy Collins walked over to the microphone and began to sing. No sound came out. She went to another microphone and said, “Aren’t you glad that the idiots that built Hubble Space Telescope didn’t build this sound system. At least, we have a backup.” I felt terrible. Our failure had permeated popular culture.

While I avoided late night television, there was more to co...