“How NASA Builds Teams”

How NASA Builds Teams: 4D-Systems

In the late 90’s, Korean Air Lines (KAL) was crashing at 17 times the industry average. The pilots were well trained and individually proficient. The root cause was the importation of Korea’s Confucian social context into the cockpit. The crews were so deferential to the Captain that he essentially flew the plane alone. Modern, bigjets require two or more active crew members for safe flight.

In 1990, as NASA’s director of Astrophysics, I sent Hubble Space Telescope into space with a flawed mirror. Although we spun the story hard, the telescope was essentially useless for a primary scientific purpose, cosmology.

The Failure Review Board named a leadership failure as the root cause. I was astounded. Was it possible that something we had never thought about, leadership, much less talked about, had trumped the work of many of the best technical people in the world? The Board chose this terminology of ‘leadership failure’ because the responsible contractor, Perkin-Elmer (P-E), rationalized away the many test anomalies of the mirror in the flight mount.

Hence, they did not report these anomalies to NASA, nor aggressively analyze them. After 15 years of research into teams and leaders, I name the cause of the Hubble flaw the social context as in the case of KAL’s crashes. NASA’s Hubble management team had created a social context that led the contractor to conceal technical hints of a mirror problem.

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