Last week at our OpenGoddard Roundtable, we had a chance to get some insight into what the Office of the Chief Knowledge Officer does. We spent some time looking at a case study where a spacecraft was damaged during what seemed like a fairly routine process.
I struggle a bit with these exercises. I mean, yeah, looking at it now, it is easy to say "well, duh, of course he/she should have done this or that." Hindsight is 20/20, after all! The real challenge is to have the foresight to realize that you have a problem BEFORE the accident happens! To be fair, people see and correct future problems all the time - but it only takes one accident to screw something up!
So the real question is (and the challenge of this office), how do you take lessons learned from a variety of failures (and near-misses) and turn that into knowledge that can be passed on to other projects so that these problems don't happen again?
My gut says that most of the time these issues feel mostly like cultural issues, specifically in the way that people communicate. Just today, I heard the Chief Engineer say that he's reviewed dozens of mishap investigation reports, and every one of them says something about communication. Where does this come from? Do we not take communication seriously at NASA? Are we just not trained in proper communication? Do we have unique challenges that we haven't solved yet in this area?
What do you think?
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3 comments:
Rivers,
I'm not surprised that the culture of communication is a reason pointed out by Mishap boards. From my own experience, the way we communicate amongst different organizations differs vastly. For example, the ACS group (which I'm in) communicates very well with the Software group. But, when it comes to communicating with Mechanical, the communication is not good.
Why is this? Political reasons? Organizational reasons? Probably both. Some don't want to be bothered with questions and prefer questions to go trough the chain of command. Whereas others would prefer to communicate directly with the individual that has the answers.
So, how do we fix this? At the individual level, don't worry about barriers between organizations ... call the people you have to call to get your questions answered. I'm not clear about how to fix it at the organizational level. Any ideas?
Is an organization anything other than a collection of people? If the people in an organization are willing to communicate on an individual level, doesn't that then mean that the organizations communicate?
You're right, an organization is its people.
I guess some people are not willing to communicate on the individual level. When you have enough people who do not want to communicate on the individual level, you get an organization that doesn't communicate well, which breeds more of the same behavior. You end up with a culture of poor communications.
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