So I’ve been thinking a lot about how we can improve and promote communication at NASA, both internally and externally.  Well, ok, I’m not necessarily putting hours of thought into it, but I’m at least letting the thoughts meander around a little bit.

I thought that maybe I’d do a little research - you know, find some other huge government organization that stretches across the country, one that works on horribly complex technical projects while having an amazing reputation for fostering collaboration and teamwork… oh wait, does such a thing exist?

So I started thinking about other ways to relate to the organization at hand.  I started thinking about the roughly 17,000 civil servants (plus tens of thousands of contractors) across the agency… (at this point, you have to understand that I bleed orange and maroon)… and realized that for most of us, working at NASA is kind of like being part of the 65,000 people at Lane Stadium cheering on the Hokies on a Saturday afternoon in the fall.  (I know, this sounds crazy, but bear with me.)

See, the way I figure it, trying to collaborate with the other thousands of folks at NASA is not unlike trying to collaborate with your fellow fans at a football game.  It is really easy to stand and cheer and feel like you’re part of the team when everything is going well.  But there come those times when things aren’t going well - when your team is struggling, falling behind, and fighting really tough competition - and the crowd starts to have doubts and starts thinking that this might not really turn out so well after all.  You end up with a stadium full of folks who don’t quite work so well together anymore.

And then there are the logistics.  Everyone knows that there are certain roles to be played in the crowd: some folks are there just to socialize and to have a good time and some folks are subject matter experts who can tell you every tiny detail going back five decades.  You spend your time at the game with a small group of folks you know well, and you know that your group functions better if you have people who play different roles.  While you have a certain bond with everyone else in the stands, you’re not going to go to a whole lot of effort to find the guy in row 5Q who specializes in making cheap orange and maroon body paint.

And as much as I hate to bring it up, in recent years VT and NASA have both been defined to the outside world by tragedy instead of by accomplishment and success.  We don’t receive attention for all of the positive things going on within the organizations; instead we find ourselves trying to explain how we lost some of our best and brightest, answering questions about what we have done wrong instead of what we have done right.

So what’s the moral of this analogy?  I don’t know, but we don’t talk about getting 65,000 people to work together on one tailgate for a football game, and maybe we can’t do that in an organization like NASA either.  The question is, what can we do to make the key connections and to enable to key collaborations that are needed to produce superior results?

I don’t have the answers, but would certainly like to hear your ideas.