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.
NASA has some strong leadership, and among the top of those ranks, is Bill Gerstenmaier. Gerstenmaier is the Associate Administrator for Space Operations and is the point man who directs NASA’s human exploration of space. Today at the Project Management Challenge, he gave a really great talk entitled “Thinking on the Job: Distractions, Multitasking, and the Erosion of Attention.” I posted my notes on the #PMC2009 blog, but thought I’d do the same here. Multi-tasking, or continuous partial attention, has been a subject that has came up quite a bit lately. Psychologists have experimented on the nature and limits of human multitasking and shown that multitasking is not as workable as concentrated times. Still, our increasingly complex, and information overloaded world, almost seems to demand it (or at least that’s the perception). It’s a problem we all share to some extent or another. I think Gerstenmaier offers some really invaluable insight into the subject so I wanted to share my notes with everyone. Oh, and Gerst, if you are reading this, I loved your slides!
Disclaimer: I multi-tasked and wrote this on my blackberry during his presentation. :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
Heard of Twitter yet? Ever thought of Twitter in terms of a “communications strategy?” If not, this presentation may be for you. It discusses twitter as a strategy for customer relations, crisis management, reputation management, event activation, promotion, issue advocacy and internal communication. It also discusses some twitter best practices and offers some links to popular twitter tools such as TweetDeck, TwitPic and TwitterGrader. The general strategy is built around “Follow > Create > Engage.”
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.”
July 3 |
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7:08pm | Did you see the first moon pictures sent back by LRO and released yesterday? Check them out at http://tr.im/qPkc |
July 2 |
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4:09pm | The Soyuz move is complete. The station crew will spend the wknd prepping for the shuttle's arrival and enjoying some off-duty time. |
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3:45pm | @benstanfield The Soyuz move opens the Zvezda docking port for the arrival of a new Russian Progress cargo vehicle later this month. |
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3:20pm | Three space station crew members will move their Soyuz form one docking port to another. Undocking @ 5:26pET. Watch it on www.nasa.gov/ntv |
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2:59pm | @Twit_nut Landers and rovers will be visible. Depending on lighting conditions, we could see a very high level of detail. |
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2:58pm | @illumicdigital No firm date yet, but in the very near future. |
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2:56pm | RT @ NASAGoddard Zoom and move on the first images from the LRO Camera. Is that sweet or what? http://bit.ly/yXPCB |
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1:52pm | Arctic forest fires have an impact on climate change? Yeah, and NASA airborne scientists are in the thick of it. http://tr.im/qFpB |
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12:12pm | Great response for the STS-125 Tweetup, registration is closed. Confirmation e-mails will go out mid-next week; more details to come. |
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11:55am | Check out the Apollo Anniversary Mission Control Peeps! http://tinyurl.com/mm5zbw |
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11:49am | NASA's LRO Spacecraft Sends First Lunar Images to Earth: NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, or LRO, has transm.. http://tinyurl.com/nx4z2v |
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11:13am | Anniversary Apollo Peeps |
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9:05am | You've got that right! RT ilzamacario @NASA that is so awesome!! Our planet is beautiful!! |
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8:36am | Whoa! Look at all this Saharan dust blowing off of Africa yesterday, as seen by NASA's Terra spacecraft. http://tr.im/qCKQ |
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8:22am | There's a new astronaut to the Twitter-verse. He's @Astro_Jose and he'll fly on STS-128. Bio infor at http://bit.ly/AstroJose. |
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8:21am | Image of the Day: Refuge: Situated as it is near the Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge, t.. http://tinyurl.com/m6cxx6 |
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7:52am | There's still time to sign up to attend the STS-125 crew Tweetup at NASA Headquarters July 21: http://www.nasa.gov/tweetup |
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7:10am | Earthquakes! - Live NASA chat & videocast with NASA scientists using space-based technologies. July 6, 8pm EDT. http://tr.im/qC0j |
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6:37am | Three space station crew members move their Soyuz from the Zvezda module to the Pirs Docking Compartment - watch live on NASA TV at 5 pm EDT |
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6:15am | @panicpack121 Atlantic hurricane season began June 1. For updates & info on NASA hurricane research ... http://tr.im/qBDa |
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6:07am | One month down in Atlantic hurricane season - see how hot the Gulf & Caribbean are, from NASA satellites. http://tr.im/qByj |
July 1 |
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10:00pm | Saluting Our Nation's Independence |
June 29 |
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10:00pm | Space Station Appearing Nationwide Over July 4 Weekend |