Engaging JSC’s Next Gen: A Leadership Analysis

A little over 18 months ago, a group of about 30 young professionals at JSC were assembled in a conference room off-site and tasked with developing their own vision for the Center, as well as an associated strategic plan (1 year) to get closer to realizing this vision, over the course of a 2-day workshop. A response to the Gen Y Perspectives presentation that previously made the rounds within the agency, the JSC 20-Year Vision development effort was specifically designed to engage young professionals at the center and allow them to provide their own perspective of where they collectively hoped to see the Center in 20 years.

The team recognized at the end of those two days that its task was daunting enough to need extra work, and so the team members set out to accomplish their task. The result, after a little over a month of diligent work, outlined their vision for the JSC of 2028 and provided 5 suggestions of “immediately” implementable ideas that would, in the end, help realize this vision (presentation can be found in the Documents section of this website).
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NASA: Cultural Dust Storm

When everyone was looking for moondust from the LCROSS mission to crash land into the moon, I noticed something else — a cultural dust storm inside the agency. Did you see it too?

We heavily publicized the “moon landing” prior to Friday’s event. In Washington DC, the Newseum hosted our “Let’s Kick Up Some Moon Dust” party. (Even my mother received an email from NASA inviting her to attend. Not sure exactly how THAT happened. No matter.)
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Space Invaders in Nation’s Capitol

Crazy week at NASA. Space Shuttle Discovery completed her cross-country piggy-back ride from California back to Florida. We announced the discovery of water on the Moon…and more on Mars. The 2009 Astronaut Class and the STS-127 crew came to visit NASA Headquarters in Washington DC. We hosted a Tweet-up with Space Tweeps and the STS-127 crew. (Thanks all you Space Tweeps who joined us!)
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Launch Scrubbed, but Go to Post

So an hour ago, I showed up at the ISS Mission Evaluation Room to watch the shuttle launch. Last night, a friend of mine was asking me if I was going to get up at 6 AM to watch the launch. I wasn’t that enthusiastic about doing it, but realized that I had to option to go into my console in the MER and not only watch it on a nice big flat screen but I could also hear the other voice loops beyond PAO and CAPCOM if I watched it in the MER and used my headset.

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Work-Life Fit at JSC

A few weeks ago, the Joint Leadership Team (JLT) at Johnson Space Center (JSC) was treated to a day-long retreat of presentations from each of the Innovation and Inclusion (I&I) Council’s Engagement Teams. I know it seems like classic “NASA acronym soup”, but there was nothing classic about how far the audience was reaching outside of their comfort zone that day.

Perhaps the furthest-reaching team was called Barrier Analysis. You might be familiar with that team’s video, since as of now it’s received over 92,000 hits on You Tube. That’s right, it’s the one from Wayne Hale’s blog post and the NPR story. There’s even a good summary of its background here on OpenNASA. It has been great to see the conversation that has started among NASA employees and the general public alike. The other teams also had some very interesting (if not quite as controversial) contributions relating to the inner-workings of the JSC Community. They looked internally at challenges such as Recruiting, Mentoring, IT Infrastructure, or Work-Life Fit. Personally, I had the privilege of working with 12 others to study the latter, and in the spirit of being open, I’d like to share with the OpenNASA readers the results of our work.
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ACDC Rock

So for quite some time now I have seen the Lunar Lander as the project of choice that I see myself working on in my career in the mid-term.  I have been getting familiar with the Constellation architecture since ESAS was released, and I am hitting the workforce at the Altair sweet spot. Plus, working at Boeing, Orion is out. Ares rockets don’t really get my blood going as much as the lander either.

Sometime during fall of last year, I was perusing the AIAA library and I came upon a paper that some Boeing guys had published in conjunction with the NASA Altair Broad Area Announcement (BAA) regarding the trade space for the physical configuration of the Altair vehicle. There were half a dozen Boeing authors, and one of them happened to be in Houston.

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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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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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Re: NASA Careers

In the comment section of the “Participatory Exploration” post, a few comments referred to employment opportunities at NASA. I started to respond to the comments, but then it turned into something much longer than comment worthy, so I’ll just post my comment here as a blog post. Here are few thoughts in response to career opportunities at NASA.

This is the first page you reach when you visit the nasa.gov website and look for information about working at NASA. If you go to nasa.gov and click “About NASA”, and then click “Careers@NASA” it will take you to what I’m talking about. The text here talks about how NASA is more than astronauts – and gives a list of folks who work within NASA including: scientists, engineers, computer programmers, personnel specialists, accountants, writers, maintenance workers. This is absolutely true and the actual list is much longer. There are people from all walks of life and backgrounds at NASA. So to address your question Brian, we absolutey need folks like you to give us a new and fresh persepective. Your background at NOAA and education as a geoscientist is invaluable. This is evidenced by none other than Justin, who was a former intel officer, and is now very active in the NASA community making huge contributions to what we do.

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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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