NASA Culture (2 of 2)

The first time I ever thought of culture, I did so kicking and screaming. It was World Cultures class in ninth grade. Everyone had to take it. I didn’t know why I needed to take any kind of culture or history class at the time. My eyes were on the future, my head in the stars. Thinking back, I have no idea what I was thinking. 

Culture is cool. I get that now. And it’s important, too. It’s a unifying force and the unseen hand of progress and failure, tolerance and pride, beauty and injustice. It’s always there and might be the most important factor in our success as an agency and nation.

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Video: Barriers to Innovation and Inclusion

Last summer, Johnson Space Center senior management coordinated a center-wide, cross-generational effort to explore well thought out and researched recommendations on improvements that can be implemented to make the center more open minded, collaborative, inclusive and innovative. They worked with the Joint Leadership Team (JLT), Employee Leadership Team (ELT) and Next Gen Groups, and used a team of senior leaders called the “Inclusion & Innovation (I&I) Council” to pull together seven Employee Engagement teams to work on the recommendations.  The seven teams were broken down into the following categories: information technology, recruiting and new employee experience, communications, mentoring, work/life fit, awards and recognition, and barrier analysis. The teams worked for months and their recommendations were presented to senior management earlier this month.  We’ve been looking forward to sharing the results on openNASA as soon as they were approved by senior management.  This video, which was created by the Barrier Analysis team and posted by Wayne Hale, is the first artifact to make its way into public domain.  It highlights many of the barriers an employee with an idea encounters within the organization, including management styles, institutional inertia, organizational silos, and complexity of processes.  The Barrier Analysis team did an excellent job identifying the barriers and developing implementable solutions to overcome those barriers (which are captured in a hopefully soon-to-be-released white paper).  We look forward to posting the rest of the work by the Barrier Analysis team, as well as the other engagement teams, as soon as we can.

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How to Make Participatory Exploration Happen at NASA

It was refreshing to read the previous post on OpenNASA that released a list of specific Participatory Exploration (PE) policy recommendations for NASA. The authors of the recommendations have witnessed first hand the problems with how NASA is managed, reacts, and is perceived by internal and external constituents. The hard lessons that my friends learned through the NASA CoLab experiment more than qualifies them as competent at offering specific solutions to some discrete and genuine problems within NASA.

Unfortunately, the PE Recommendations document does lend itself to some old criticisms as it carries over weaknesses of CoLab’s prior efforts to fix NASA. The suggestions only treat symptoms of an Agency wide disease, but they do not not offer a systemic cure. There needs to be cogent, material, and real offerings on how to change the minds and behaviors of NASA’s workforce from the top down. Instead of being told how to fix some of yesterday’s problems, NASA employees should be nurtured so the ideas of Participatory Exploration and Collaboration develop organically across the Agency.

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NASA Participatory Exploration Policy Recommendations

Participatory Exploration Policy Recommendations for National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Participatory exploration was first introduced in 2007 at the NASA Participatory Exploration Summit at Ames Research Center and was prioritized into the NASA Authorization Act of 2008 (H.R. 6063), highlighting its necessity to NASA’s continued public relevance in the 21st century. We have written a paper for NASA senior management that discusses the role of “participatory exploration” as a way of “aggregating and leveraging people’s contributions in ways that are useful to other people” which can be applied to NASA programs and projects to engage the American public in the exploration experience and to identify opportunities for the direct involvement of the public, the private sector, nongovernmental organizations, and international partners.  The paper includes specific recommendations which we have summarized below.  We’ve posted the paper on openNASA for your consideration and encourage you to share your thoughts on Participatory Exploration as well. Please share your thoughts via the comments below or on if you have specific ideas or recommendations, via the ideas forum.

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Our Nation: Culture and Change (part 1 of 2)

Culture.

What does that word do for you? I hear it thrown around a lot when talking about change.  And change, unless maybe you’ve been living in a Thai jungle for the last 2 years or so, seems to at least be a hot topic on many people’s minds lately. 

(No offense intended if you have in fact been living in a Thai jungle and feel this image unfitting.)

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The Terrestrial Planet and Other Holy Grails

So I asked my wife what she though the impact of discovering an Earth like planet would be outside of our solar system. She traditionally rolls her eyes when I start into my discourses on space discoveries and technology. But when I asked her this, she said “I think that we would be on the first ship out of here!”

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Will We Really Go Back To The Moon?

With a recession, an oncoming Obama administration, Shuttle post 2010 utilization rumors, and other national flux, we ask ourselves: will we really go back to the moon?

The answer is yes, in only for one simple reason: We have nothing else to do. The Shuttle has enjoyed 100+ great missions. Mankind has lofted 12 space stations (9 Salut, 1 Skylab, 1 Mir, and 1 ISS,) we have built two fully reusable shuttleing spacecraft (Buran and Shuttle,) done space tourism, reusable suborbital craft, and most other things that people dreamed about back in Von Braun’s time. The marginal utility in discovery and inspiration decreases with each dollar spent. The price to launch a government kilogram to orbit remains the same, and in some cases increases. We have done every major accomplishment the ancients have dreamed about; well, everything they dreamed about doing in LEO.

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CATALYST

Recently I’ve engaged in a number of discussions centered on the definition of a “catalyst.”  The principle of these discussions hinges on the idea that we are in a state of “change” and that this change is a factor of the many fluctuations in governmental personnel and policies.

Many look to the new Obama-Biden administration as a sign of significant change.  Though it can be argued whether this change is projected to be good or bad, everyone seems to agree that there will be some change and many believe it will be drastic.  I’ve embarked on the question of what it means to be an “agent of change,” what qualifies one to be an “agent of change,” and how the world around us is affected by these “agents of change.”

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How Online Organizing Lessons from ’04 and ’08 Can Help NASA in ’09

Recently I was asked to reflect on how the lessons of online organizing by those of us who worked in the 2004 Presidential campaign have impacted not only the 2008 Presidential campaign (in which Dean ’04 and Clark ’04 veterans teamed up to create Blue State Digital, the technology backbone of Obama’s online operation), but also the Federal Government, over the past four years.

Many 2004 campaign veterans have been working in the realm of making government more open in order to enable watchdog oversight of it. I have been working more in the realm of trying to make government more efficient and effective through technologies and organizing techniques that promote openness. I’m personally mostly focused on the cultural and policy side of things– trying to get people inside NASA used to being more open and sharing by default rather than only when explicitly forced to. There is also a great deal of work being done by reformers in the CIO’s offices and elsewhere on the communications technology side of NASA’s operations. They’re working on open APIs, open-source licenses, etc. I’ve told a bit of this story, in the context of NASA, in several presentations over the past year. Here below I’ve attempted to break down the problems, implications and solutions I see in a more structured format, again using examples we have encountered at NASA.

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One Year on the Job

Whew-I made it!

One full year on the job.

(NASA, I’m writing you this blog entry as a combined present for our anniversary and your 50^th birthday. Even though I’m technically late on both and you might have been hoping for a more substantial present like a bouquet of tulips or a nice dinner at that fancy French restaurant in town or a pearl necklace-yeah right on my salary!-I hope you won’t use that in future arguments over which TV show we’ll watch on Tuesday nights. I’m still voting for House, for the record).

I started full-time at NASA back in August 2007, having graduated the previous May after spending five co-op tours at JSC over the previous four years. They say you usually don’t start talking to yourself or addressing the agency as your significant other for at least 10 years, so I’m thrilled to be ahead of the curve on this one.

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