The Year of Change

And I’m not talking about the presidential election.

No, I’m talking about something much closer to home.  In the past year, I have seen and been involved in some amazing changes at Johnson Space Center.

For me, personally, it really started when I got back in touch with Nick Skytland (whom I first met at the 2006 Space Exploration Conference here in Houston) and he talked me in to writing for this blog.  Around the same time, I came across Steven Gonzalez’s (of JSC’s Advanced Planning Office) blog and became aware of a group of 30 young professionals from around the center that was finishing up a 20 Year Vision for the center.  Eager to help make a difference, I began attending the group’s after-work discussion sessions at a local pub and participated in the first Vision Forum that began spreading the message to the wider community.

This summer is when things really started to get interesting, though.  In July, Nick, Garret Fitzpatrick, and I had the honor of representing the NASA community on a panel on young professionals in the workforce at the 67th session of the UN’s International Civil Service Commission.  It was fascinating to hear the different experiences and perspectives from our peers from around the world, but refreshing to know that most of us are seeking the same things – challenging work, relevance in what we do, and a sense of belonging to something worthwhile.

In August, JSC Center Director Mike Coats kicked off a new activity that has consumed much of my thoughts in the intervening months.  It began with his Inclusion & Innovation Council constituted with the express purpose of ensuring that JSC is not only open to, but actively pursuing, new ideas and ways of thinking to better accomplish our missions.  The 20 Year Vision team was so successful in both articulating a message that built on our heritage while looking to the future and coming up with actionable proposals that the I&I Council decided to roll this approach out to the wider JSC community.

Some of the 20 Year Vision proposals, such as the Explore JSC contest, have been set aside for implementation.  I would say it’s an example of an idea that can sell itself.  However, the Vision Forum in May clearly illustrated that we need participation and buy-in from the JSC community as a whole to enact wider and more fundamental changes.   The I&I Council sponsored the creation of seven “Engagement Teams” to study specific areas where JSC can be more inclusive and innovative and come up with a few proposals to that effect.

We have a Communications team, an Information Technology team, a Mentoring team, a Recruiting & Employee Experience team, a Work/Life Fit team, an Awards & Recognition team, and a Barrier Analysis team working every week with the explicit support of center and, in the case of contractors like myself, company management.  The first six are largely self-explanatory and I’m very excited to see what they come up with.  However, I am the co-lead of the Barrier Analysis team.  Remember how I said most of us at the UN conference said we were seeking challenging work?  This is definitely it!

The Barrier Analysis team has perhaps the broadest scope because we’ve been asked to examine what barriers exist at JSC to inclusion and innovation.  Perhaps fittingly, we have an incredible diversity of professional experiences, backgrounds, and thought.  We have engineers of various stripes from Shuttle, Station, and Constellation.  We have finance and HR.  We’ve even got Andy Thomas from the Astronaut Office.  We have career veterans, young professionals, and those in-between.

Last week, the Barrier Analysis team was asked to present our findings to-date to visiting management from Toyota, so it really gave me an opportunity to take stock of how much we’ve done thus far.  Starting from an enormous matrix of problems and issues we identified on the surface, we have been able to drill down to a core group of consistently manifesting root causes that drive many of the barriers we see in our organization and culture.  The method itself wasn’t very complicated.  We just kept asking “what?” and “why?” until a coherent theme began to emerge.

We asked what were the mindsets, assumptions, and processes that stood behind the surface problems.  We asked why those key drivers existed, even in spite of incidents like Challenger and Columbia.  A sobering picture began to take shape, but it also helped us start to see a way forward.  Building on the values espoused in the 20 Year Vision, we have started developing pathways from the current root barriers against inclusion & innovation to a more ideal state.  Thanks to bi-weekly “liaison” meetings between the seven teams, I know the other six teams are engaged in a similar creative process and are tackling some of the same issues from different angles.

You may ask, “Just what are the root barriers to inclusion and innovation that your team identified?”  Perhaps you’d even like to know what the pathways we’re pursuing are.  Stay tuned.  The Engagement Teams report back to the I&I Council in mid-January, and I really think we’re going to turn some heads.  Perhaps that’s the biggest change I’ve seen this past year – the fact that we’re engaged in this process at all.  Colleagues and mentors that have been here at JSC as long as I’ve been alive (and, in some cases, even longer) are all telling me that the nature of the conversation has changed.  We’re not just giving lip service to the idea of changing the way we do business.  We’re figuring out how we’re actually going to do it, and how we’re going to get everyone involved.

I can’t wait to see what 2009 will bring.