One time back in the 1960s, a NASA employee was roaming the halls of Kennedy Space Center.  He came across a group of three janitors cleaning a restroom.  Given his friendly nature, he stopped and approached the first one who seemed particularly dour.

“How’s it going?” he asked.  In response, the first janitor growled “How do you think it is going?  I’m stuck here cleaning toilets.”

Shocked, the employee decided to talk to the second janitor.  This guy seemed a little more excited about what he was doing.

“Hey, what are you doing?” he asked.  The second janitor looked at him with a spark of hope in his eye.  “I’m feeding my family,” he said.

Intrigued, the employee decided to go say hi to the third janitor.  This guy was humming and smiling while he was cleaning the restroom.

“Why are you so happy?” the employee asked.  The third janitor replied with a grin “because I’m sending man to the moon!”

The message?  The context is decisive.  In our lives, we control how we react to and how we perceive the world.

The new NASA budget is likely to bring out lots of folks living from different contexts.  Some of those will look like ”The Constellation Program shouldn’t be canceled” or “We are losing jobs in my state” or “We have no mission, no direction.”

I choose a different context:  the new budget is an opportunity.  An opportunity to transform our planet’s future in space.  An opportunity to engage the global community on a journey of exploration.

That sounds like fun.  What is your context?

I say yes – NASA would benefit from such a program, specifically a program that would train the agency’s next generation of leaders.  While the NASA Academy and the International Space University fit this type of need, they don’t specifically train young NASA civil servants.

For the most part, we tend to hire folks to fit a specific need, to replace someone who has retired, or for a specific role in a specific branch.  These folks are then effectively trained to be just like everyone else who has ever worked in that organization.

We need to find a new way to train our leaders, and it needs to start when they are hired.  I picture something like a NASA boot camp + a graduate school version of military academies.  It would attract college graduates from all across the country.  Each group would be trained together for several years, doing hands-on work on small, inexpensive, risky projects (perhaps at Wallops?).  More importantly, they would be trained as leaders, in team-building, critical thinking, communication, and all the other fields that are necessary to be effective in leadership positions.  In return, they’d promise to serve NASA for a particular number of years, and when they graduated from the program, they’d fill positions all across the agency.

How does that sound?

This one had a NASA contribution…

I was really struck by how much of the news is about violence between human beings.  Pearl Harbor and Oklahoma City.  Columbine and Virginia Tech.  Martin Luther King and John F Kennedy.  The sheer horror of September 11^th.

Then there was an image of the Earth from space.  Peaceful.  Beautiful.  Inspiring.

In that image, there were no human beings… no countries… no war.

I was touched, moved, and inspired.  THAT is why we should be in space – because it alters the paradigm of what it means to be a human being.  All of a sudden, all of our disagreements, problems, concerns, and issues disappear.  We’re all on this together.

World peace.  That’s what space exploration offers us as a species.  Not like something that could maybe happen someday, but in reality, like something that is really and truly possible for all of our lives.

Wow.

(By the way, I would personally propose that effective communication may be THE area that could raise NASA’s success to a whole new level.  Look at our history: In 1986, Challenger exploded thanks to poor communication that manifested itself as a bad O-ring.  Seventeen years later, the same thing happened AGAIN to Columbia, this time disguised as a piece of foam.)

As I was participating in this discussion about communication at Goddard, I could see three levels of communication, which I’ll call tools, content, and context.  I found it interesting because most of our discussion focused on tools: PowerPoint vs Twitter vs Word vs Spacebook vs blogs, all those mechanisms that are used to communicate between people.  Of course, these tools are developing so quickly that many people find it difficult to keep up.  And you know what?  I think we spend way too much time worrying about catching up to the latest and greatest tool.  In the end, while we want to be able to use these, I would propose that these make NO real difference in the way we communicate with each other.  (I’ll come back to this.)

The second layer of communication is the content.  Engineers love the content – this is all the data, the calculations, and the information that folks have to share with each other.  The content is the substance of any particular communication – this is the answer to whatever question is being asked.  I think we generally do content pretty well at NASA – after all, we’re a technical organization, and so many of us are specifically trained to be able to produce answers and solutions to problems.

The third layer of communication is the one that has the potential to shift our entire paradigm of how we do business at NASA: context.  Context can be more difficult to see, yet as human beings, we can sense it even when we don’t see it.  Context is (usually) the unspoken in the room, generated by all human beings… trust, excitement, nervousness, confidence, etc.  It gets in the way of our listening to each other.  It has some people talk constantly while others speak almost nothing at all.  It has absolutely EVERYTHING to do with how well we communicate with each other as human beings.  Think about it… do you actually respond to the words that people say or who they are being when they say it?

The bad news?  As far as I know, scientists and engineers aren’t getting a whole lot of this kind of training in school and don’t necessarily appreciate the benefit of it.

The good news?  People CAN be trained in the areas such as self-awareness and in relating to others.  There is a lot of momentum that has been building (at least at Goddard) in adding these skills to people’s skill sets, through coaching and leadership programs!

So I wonder… what would it take to provide this kind of training to EVERYONE at NASA?

The company has spent several years now reinventing itself.  They’ve gone through a process in which they’ve gone all the way back to nothing – where no one’s assumptions about what the company should or should not do influences the outcome.  Then from nothing, they looked at the business they really wanted to be in, and how their current assets contribute to that future.  They declared the 2020 vision complete and are moving forward with the results from this reinvention.

This subject is really intriguing to me on a personal level.  In recent weeks, I’ve been thinking a lot about moving.  I own a house in Columbia, MD, and so of course, there are all sorts of complications around what I would do with my current house, plus all of the usual conversation about where I would really want to live!  So I started thinking about what it would mean to reinvent MYSELF… wow!  I mean, what if I really started at nothing, from scratch, and looked at my life and my future from a whole new perspective.  That’s when I start to think outside the box – after all, the reason I am working at Goddard is because I didn’t get a co-op position at Johnson or Kennedy.  If I really start from a blank slate, it opens up a whole new trade space for my life!

So in thinking about this conversation, I’m now intrigued by what it would look like if NASA were to reinvent itself!  I mean REALLY reinvent itself… as in start with no assumptions.  What would we (nation, world) want for an organization that does space exploration in 2009?  What would we look like?  What would be our mission?  How would we be organized?  Then, once we reinvented a whole new organization, how would we use our current assets and knowledge to meet our needs in space in 2009?  What an intriguing question!

Take a look!  The paper identifies primary and secondary objectives of human spaceflight, and I think they are captured pretty well!

Head on over to http://hubblesite.org/gallery/holiday/. There are some awesome cards over there! Happy Holidays everyone!

However, I don’t know about you, but my reaction to that was “is a spacecraft really an invention?”

As a result, I’ve been looking around for a definition of an invention that I like.  The best one I’ve found so far is “a product of the imagination.”  I like the simplicity of the definition, and yet somehow, it still captures the excitement and creativity that I like to associate to an invention.

So is a spacecraft an invention?  Is it a product of the imagination?  Why not?  I mean, there was a time, not so long ago, when getting anything into orbit was only a product of someone’s imagination.  Now granted, while a spacecraft cannot generically be considered an invention any longer, for the most part, at Goddard each individual spacecraft that we build is generally a unique combination of systems, designed to carry out a unique set of tasks.  LRO definitely falls into this category: a unique solution with a unique purpose, created through the imagination of scientists, engineers, and politicians.

What do you think?

 Take a look at the website: http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/events/launchfest.html.

 Hope to see you here!