When "Can-Do" Becomes "Can't Fail".
David P. Miller
Reprinted from an article in Fortune Magazine:
The Challenger space shuttle catastrophe continues to yield lessons
to managers everywhere. Prominent among these are that top executives
cannot afford to be isolated from the people below, who are in better
touch with what is going on,and cannot afford to set unrealistic goals.
Yet not even this conclusion goes to the heart of the trouble at NASA.
The flaw -call it an institutional virtue gone wrong- can trip many
companies with overweenig ambitions. In its widely hailed report on
the tragedy, the comission headed by former Secretary of State William
P. Rogers critized "NASA's legendary `can do' attitude". The agency,
Rogers and his colleagues admonished, can't do everything.
Senator John Glenn went further. The can-do spirit, he noted, worked
perfectly well in the old days, when it included a powerful commitment
to safety. In Glenn's view, "can do" gave away over the years to "an
arrogant `can't fail' attitude". Managers assumed that no matter what
risks they took, the shuttle would succeed.
"Can't fail" arrogance is common enough in corporations that have long
been in a roll. For years Detroit routinely launched badly built cars
because the auto manufacturers had always been able to sell whatever
they made. By the time they realized that consumers were rebelling,well
crafted Japanese cars had captured a commanding share of the market.
Sometimes "can't fail" reflects desperation. All to common is the new
venture so important to the corporate future that it `must' succeed.
Evidence to the contrary is not to be received with pleasure by top
management. Nor are the courageous people who dare to present the
evidence. NASA suffered from this dangerous imperative, having made
unrealistic promises in order to win congressional support.
Good internal communications will not help if top management does not
want to hear about impending disaster. For the people down in the
organization, survival dictates a blind eye. Setting realistic goals
is not enough either. Most of the great technological breakthroughs
were "unrealistic" ideas made real by determined, creative people. A
company whose goals are invariably realistic soon sinks into lassitude.
The range of undertakings viewed as realistic gradually narrows, and
managers become risk-adverse caretakers of corporate assets.
It would be easy to draw the wrong lesson from the Challenger tragedy
by failing to distinguish between can-do and can't-fail. A dynamic
organization has to take risks, and without a can-do spirit it can't
do much. That means that top executives have to know how to set
"unrealistic" goals that work, and how to motivate people to go after
them with fire in their bellies rather than fear in their bowels.
The company has to be strong enough to absorb the cost of failure, and
smart enough to listen when people who know what is happening reach
the limits of the can-do spirit.
- CHARLES G. BURCK -
--
David P. Miller - Loral Instrumentation. / USUAL \
{sdcsvax,sdcc3} loral!miller \ DISCLAIMER /
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"Uma vez Flamengo, sempre Flamengo ...."
Donald Stock
> Senator John Glenn went further. The can-do spirit, he noted, worked
> perfectly well in the old days, when it included a powerful commitment to
> safety. In Glenn's view, "can do" gave away over the years to "an arrogant
> `can't fail' attitude". Managers assumed that no matter what risks they
> took, the shuttle would succeed.
I agree with the theme. What should happen is that the designers think
positive while the testers think negative AND the testers have the authority to
prevent release of whatever it is that's being developed. What happened to
NASA was basically as simple as testers (perhaps it would be more accurate to
say their managers) thinking positive ("Well, so what if it failed this test?
It'll work anyway!). What made it worse was that the chains of command of
designers and testers met at far too low a level (i.e. not at the top). Good
ol' Larry Mulloy (head of NASA's solid booster division) should never have been
able to intercept the test results. But he did.
Don Stock