NASA Engineer: The Space Shuttle Columbia Disaster Was Avoidable, So I rebuilt NASA

I don't have the data to prove this, but my gut tells me that the shuttle might blow up when it comes back. As the shuttle is coming back to Earth, as it's rubbing across the body of the orbiter, it heats to roughly 2 ,000 degrees Fahrenheit and it becomes almost like a superheated liquid.

And it flowed into the inside of the shuttle and melted the structures from the inside out, causing it to disintegrate over Texas and Louisiana, which... of course killed all seven astronauts on board again it's there's no data to back this up and you know we're without the data like this this is what we do is it lack of humility because you're working with the smartest people in the world is that an explicit thing coming down from management where if you don't have the data you don't speak up like do you know what that was i mean we we saw the foam hit the leading edge of the wing we knew that something had happened we had 16 days to check on and get imagery of the wing to see if there was a hole and then figure out some sort of a rescue mission or some sort of a something to do.

You know, I don't know what we would have done, but we would have tried to do something. They live in a culture where we've got signs hanging over all over the place that say, in God we trust, all others bring data. That's the reason they said our culture was to blame, because we didn't.

We chose not to look at it. We chose not to try to solve it. How could we have created a system that let smart people, you know, make mistakes like that or make those types of decisions? Welcome to Going In Blind. I'm your host, Zach Tidwell, and my guest today is an industrial engineer, Dr.

Philip T. Mead, who was also the Associate Director of Spaceport Integration and Services at NASA by the time he finished his career there. But during that time, he was at the organization when the Space Shuttle Columbia incident happened, and he was then tasked with basically rebuilding the organization's structure so that an accident like that never happened.

happened again and today he's ceo of gallagher edge where he helps other institutions make monumental ships in their own culture and structuring to make the world a more productive and better place for everyone and so very excited to get into all of this today philip thank you for being here thank you for having me i'm excited to be here talk about all this interesting stuff yeah a lot of i'm sure probably some of this is i would imagine brings up some emotions for you probably that had to be a hard time to to be at nasa but before we we get to the actual incident can you just talk through i mean what what you were doing at nasa before you know you were there for 30 years or in the industry for for 30 plus years so you know stepping into that world as an industrial engineer and talk through some of the the more exciting things that that you got to work on while you were there Yeah, I really loved working for NASA.

I tell people I had at least seven different careers while working for NASA. I actually, you know, I got my undergraduate degree in electrical engineering, and I started out as a payloads test engineer, helping to integrate and test the payloads that were being put into the payload bay of the space shuttle to go up on orbit and conduct experiments in space.

And that was one of the... Best times of my life, it was like, you know, being a kid in a toy shop, you know, just playing. So I had a great time doing that. And I helped to build the International Space Station. And after we got it up there, I was the process improvement manager for helping to make sure that we were being as efficient as possible and processing all of the pieces and parts that needed to go up there to keep it running.

You know, that was shortly after that was when the Columbia accident occurred. And I was asked to lead all of the organizational and cultural changes for return to flight for that. So that was a big turning point in my career, which actually. led me into HR, which I never would have guessed would have been a part of my career.

Sounds like a hard left turn. It was. I was asked by the center director after we had proved to Congress that the culture had changed and we were allowed to start launching again. He asked me to go and create an organization development group within HR so that we could keep keep everything going.

And so I went and spent a couple years doing that in HR. And then we were actually starting to retire the space shuttle program, which was the biggest program that we had at Kennedy Space Center. And so the biggest challenge that was facing us was the workforce challenges.

What were we going to do with all the people? And so I moved over to manage the workforce planning and strategy for the retirement shuttle. And I did that until we had that figured out. And then I went back into engineering just to prove that I wasn't ruined as an engineer.

You're still technical. That I could still do it. People had their doubts. And I helped design the launch control system that is launching the rockets that you see go up. now with the Artemis program and then moved over to help really spent the last decade of my career helping to convert Kennedy Space Center into a multi -user spaceport because that was really the biggest challenge facing us was what are we going to do now that the space shuttle is retiring?

What are we going to do with all these facilities and how are we going to keep this place from becoming a ghost town? OK, I am going to step back through some of this because this stuff is just this is wild to me. What were you doing? You know, you mentioned you helped build the ISS.

What what did you work on with that? So I was the piece. I mean, everything that I worked on, you've got to remember, it sounds really grandiose. And I was a part of a big team where there were lots of. incredible people working on it. And so it sounds wonderful when I say it and I feel embarrassed.

I don't want to take too much credit because there were, you know, hundreds of people working on just about everything that I did. And so the little piece of building the International Space Station that I had a part in was I was the lead engineer for the testing checkout system that basically simulated the electrical connections and command and control, all of the communication systems of the International Space Station.

So if you think about it, you've got this one little piece or part of the International Space Station that you're going to send up. And you want to make sure that when you get it up there and it plugs into the rest of the space station that it actually works.

So you had to have something that looked like the International Space Station that you could plug it into here on Earth and test and check it out and make sure that all the communications and all of the electrical systems and all of the stuff actually worked before you launched it up there.

Because, you know, once you got it up there, it had better work. And so that's the system that I was in charge of was that system that... pretended to be the rest of the international space station for the each piece as it came through that said okay you know do you really work let's make sure and so we would run tests all kinds of different interface tests against each piece to check it out and make sure it actually worked before we launched it gosh is it i mean i'm not trying to be corny here but this is the appropriate word because i know obviously the culture is your your thing these days but with the i mean in a space like that you hear i'm a i'm a tech guy you know hearing about the the big software companies you always hear about there there's this a certain environment there the it's almost very romanticized you've got builders building you're moving fast breaking and iterating on it and it's you know very unique campuses that have been built in these very special places that have kind of been cultivated and in terms of like physical environments to have these creative people that kind of be cut loose and in a way that's different from a traditional corporate environment.

But I feel like you don't really get an insight into the actual hard tech. What that world is like in terms of you've got all these geniuses working on systems that are one of one. What is that? What is I mean, it sounds like even you think of very highly of those years that you had there.

What is what was that like? You know, I loved it. I loved working with with great people on. Great teams, high -performing individuals that really cared about what they were doing. They were highly dedicated to what they were doing. They loved it. It was just an invigorating place to come to work because everybody really knew their stuff, and they really wanted to be successful, and they cared about what they were doing.

So it was just a great team to be a part of. That's cool. And you said you worked on one of the launch control systems? Yeah. I mean, this is actually helping get the rockets off the ground today that we see in the Artemis missions? Yes, yeah. I mean, it's a crazy large system.

You know, to be able to launch a rocket, all the things that go into the launch control system for Artemis, it's really huge. Again, I was a tiny part of a massive team. I know you said you started in electrical engineering. Do you have a software background as well?

Is that all kind of encompassed in this overarching umbrella of an industrial engineer? No, I wouldn't say software. I've been forced to do a little bit of software here and there, but not really. Okay. I'm guessing when you do it, it's more like Arduino type of stuff and actually working on the brains of hardware as opposed to, you know, human facing components.

I dabbled more in modeling and simulation than I did in actual like coding. Okay. So like more data science type of stuff too? Uh, you know, like, uh, agent agent -based modeling or um uh you know modeling for complex systems uh vince them that kind of stuff it's neat okay so i mean moving you kind of lined up all of that or i guess some of that was post columbia it sounded like but by the time that when Columbia happened.

And honestly, I had to look up what happened for Columbia. I'm 30 years old. I don't remember this. I feel like I kind of remember seeing this on TV, but I'm not positive if that's a real memory or not. So I'm sure, you know, there's a good portion of people listening that don't remember.

Can you kind of step through what actually happened with the shuttle and then how you were brought in to fix things there? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I'm getting old. Two of my own three kids weren't alive when this happened. Gosh. You know, so it was just a few seconds after the space shuttle Columbia launched a piece of foam, which, if you remember back to the space shuttle days, it had this.

giant orange tank that was underneath the belly of the orbiter itself. And that tank contained the cryogenic fluids for the liquid -based rockets that were part of the shuttle, not the two solids that were on the sides that looked like rockets, but what actually came out of the back of the space shuttle.

And so it had the cryogenic fluids in it. So obviously those were really, really cold. so initially ice would form on it and we were you know the program was afraid that the ice falling off and hitting the shuttle was dangerous so they sprayed this spray foam on the outside to form an insulator around it to keep the the condensation from forming on it and forming ice and so as soon as we did that then because of the massive air you know friction um hitting it as it accelerated to 17 ,000 miles an hour before it escaped Earth's gravity, little pieces of foam would fly off of it, and usually it would hit the shuttle's belly and take little pieces out of it.

This time, a piece happened to come off of the attachment point where the external tank attached to the front part of the shuttle is called the forward bipod ramp of the of the and instead of hitting the underside of the belly it hit the leading edge of the wing and so if you just remember back to a little bit of physics um you know a glancing blow provides a different amount of energy than a direct blow and so As crazy as it may sound, if you think of like a styrofoam cooler that you would pick up in 7 -Eleven if you're going to the beach, if you imagine trying to take that and, you know, throw it through the top of your desk, it seems like that should be crazy.

Nobody thinks that that should be possible. But then you see videos of the aftermath of a tornado and you see a piece of straw stuck through a telephone pole. I start to realize, OK, well, you know, enough force and enough wind and you can actually do crazy things with light objects.

And so that's actually what happened. The this relatively, relatively small, about the size of a suitcase piece of foam hit the leading edge of the wing and it was a direct hit and it hit with enough force because the shuttle was going fast enough at that point that it was able to punch through.

um the wing uh it was called the reinforced carbon panel over the front part of the wing that black part and um it didn't do any and didn't cause any harm on launch it was able to go ahead and and launch um you know successfully to orbit and the shuttle completed its its 16 -day mission But on reentry, what happens is the friction of the air as the shuttle is coming back to Earth, as it's rubbing across the body of the orbiter, it heats to roughly 2 ,000 degrees Fahrenheit, and it becomes almost like a superheated liquid, and it flowed into the inside of the shuttle.

and melted the structures from the inside out, causing it to disintegrate over Texas and Louisiana, which, of course, killed all seven astronauts on board. And so that's really the story of what happened. The physical cause was, of course, the piece of foam hitting the wing. The accident investigation board found that NASA's culture had as much to do with the accident as the piece of foam that hit the wing.

And so they grounded the entire space shuttle fleet and said, we weren't allowed to fly again until we fix the organizational and cultural issues that had led to the accident. And so then that's when I was asked to lead those changes at the Kennedy Space Center. And at that point, what?

What was your role before that conversation? And who had that conversation with you to be like, hey, you're the guy? I was actually just coming back from getting my Ph .D. And I was returning back into that ISS role where I was the process improvement manager. But I was also in a role, an agency level role called One NASA.

where I was helping to basically work on a cultural issue at the agency level where we were trying to stop acting like individual centers and act like a, you know, a united, you know, one NASA. And so as a result of that and the work that I was doing there and the work that.

We were asked to do in the initial phases of responding to the accident through OneNASA, the visibility that I had there, the center director asked me to be the one to lead the efforts at Kennedy Space Center. Okay, so they were already aware, maybe not to the full extent, but that there was some reshaping that needed to be done prior to the accident.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, we were already aware that... At least organizationally, there were attitudes that, you know, as an agency weren't necessarily beneficial. There wasn't as much cooperation or collaboration between the centers as what the agency would have liked. There was too much competition. And, you know, a lot of that came about because of the, you know, the budgetary environment that we were in.

And so each center was. to some extent competing for a scarce set of resources. And so it was, you know, they were, they were asking us to, to collaborate, but then at the same time, there were limited resources to really cover all of the personnel at every center.

And do you think some of that too, cause you know, I'm, I've seen this when I was in the military where there's, and I think you, I'm sure this happens in every industry, but that's, you know, that was my world before I became an entrepreneur with the military and where there's, you know, everyone's trying certain leaders will, there's this concept of the idea fairy and it's what everyone, it's a, it's not a loving, it's not an endearing term.

That's the asshole who always comes up with an idea to do something stupid, right? Like, and it's, but a lot of times the, I, the, reasoning behind the idea of fairy coming up with ideas is that they look great on paper and and where they can put it on their their fit rep their fitness reports to have for the next time that they maybe get thrown on a meritorious board or when they do come up for a promotion and so it's you know everyone essentially vying for another resume point to put on your your piece of paper did you see that in in in this scenario playing out as well No, not really.

It was just a very sort of naughty, really, if you're familiar with the term, it was a wicked problem. It was a good challenge to be given. It was a worthy challenge. I think there were ways that we could work together. It just required being... honest and open about the challenges that we were facing with each other while also figuring out ways that we could collaborate because there were resource constraints.

So part of dealing with the resource constraints, part of the answer was collaboration. So how do you simultaneously help yourself by collaborating while also not hurting yourself by collaborating? And so that's really where the wicked part of the problem comes in. And so I think that's what we were working to do.

And it was it all comes down to, you know, not surprisingly, developing the type of relationships where you can truly understand who you're working with and who you're talking to and you feel comfortable. And exposing yourself to them and saying, hey, I've got this little bit of work that I need help with.

I can share this or I need some support here. But then you're not worried that then it's going to become a, you know, a grab, you know, by them to try and take something away from you. And it's just about developing the trust and the relationships to know who's got what and who you can talk to and how you can develop the sharing.

you know, the interactions. Yeah. So what were the specifics that made you say that NASA's culture was just as much to blame as the actual structure, like physical structure failure from the foam strike? Well, initially I was confused by the statement. I thought NASA was an incredible place to work.

I mean, that was the... first part of our conversation here together. I mean, the way that I was describing things, that's the way I saw it. That was a kid coming to a candy store every day coming to work. I was like, what are you talking about? The culture caused this.

And just shortly after the accident, NASA was named the best place in the federal government to work, and our workers were named the most engaged and the most committed in the entire federal workforce. That was after? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, the survey was taken just literally like three months before the accident occurred is when the survey was taken, and the results were released just a few months afterwards.

So it perfectly bracketed the accident. And so, I mean, I was freaking out a little bit. I was like, how am I supposed to fix something that's not broken? I'll tell you, this honestly turned out to be the biggest gift to me because if it hadn't happened that way, I think I would have taken way more of a surface view of culture and I would have done what I think, you know, is done far too often where culture is seen as being either a version of employee satisfaction or.

just stopping at employee engagement. And, you know, I'll tell you, culture should create employee satisfaction. It should drive that. And it absolutely, you want to have employee engagement as a driver, you know, that comes out of your culture. But that's not all it is. And so when... you look a little deeper it really needs to be about what is the core mission of your organization all about and how is your culture intertwined with delivering that and is it really is it really a part of doing that and for nasa that was about safety and you know being able to launch astronauts get them on into orbit and get them back to earth and so for You know, other companies, it's about whatever your strategy is.

I mean, is your culture actually driving your strategy? The things that you need to have happen as a, you know, to make your strategy happen without you doing anything? Are people just showing up in the way that they behave because it's the way things are done here? Is it naturally?

producing the things that you want to have happen for your strategy? Or are you having to pour a lot of managerial energy into into making those things happen? Because those are two very different scenarios. And, you know, I learned that human behavior is it's it goes much deeper than just am I happy here?

And so the way that. the way that i show up and the way that i behave in critical situations i i can it can be absolutely true that an employee is very happy and they love their job and they love coming to work but that those factors themselves can also actually combine in ways in another situation that produces a behavior that might surprise you so for example you can take an engineer who I mean, we saw the foam hit the leading edge of the wing.

We knew that something had happened. We had 16 days to check on and get imagery of the wing to see if there was a hole and then figure out some sort of a rescue mission or some sort of something to do. You know, I don't know what we would have done, but we would have tried to do something.

That's like what NASA is known for. It's like we will duct tape something together. Exactly. Yeah. We had 16 days to do that. That's the reason they said our culture was to blame because we didn't. We chose not to look at it. We chose not to try to solve it.

And so you've got an engineer now who loves their job. They love working for NASA. They're super engaged. They're happy to come to work every day. They see this. This poof happen when something hits somewhere around the wing. They don't know exactly where it hit or exactly what happened.

They live in a culture where we've got signs hanging over all over the place that say, in God we trust, all others bring data. Their identity is intrinsically intertwined with being a NASA engineer. And they're presented with. the challenge of standing up in front of a mission management team and saying something like, I don't have the data to prove this, but my gut tells me that the shuttle might blow up when it comes back.

And if I'm wrong, I'm going to be the boy who cried wolf for the rest of my career at NASA. Now, that takes a lot of psychological safety. And unfortunately, we didn't have it. And it's the same some of the same things that made us the best place in the federal government to work actually combined in that scenario to create a situation where that individual didn't feel like they wanted to step up and say that because they didn't want to risk what they loved so much.

Was that an error internally and an error of. Again, it's there's no data to back this up. And, you know, we're without the data like this. This is what we do. Is it a lack of humility because you're working with the smartest people in the world? Is that an explicit thing coming down from management where if you don't have the data, you don't speak up?

Do you know what that was? So I obviously I don't know. If you ask me to guess. I think the pressure coming from management was the fact that we were under tremendous budget and schedule pressure. The International Space Station had passed by one vote just a few months prior in Congress.

And we had promised to get to what was called core complete with the International Space Station. And our ability to do that was tightly linked to the space shuttle. schedule and the ability for it to stay on schedule and to hit all of its launch dates to get all the pieces up there and to get it assembled on time.

I remember having a countdown clock as a screensaver on my PC for core complete. So, you know, we had put managers, you know, and I don't want to villainize anybody because these were These are great people. What's happening in all of these situations and what the scary thing is about culture and the way that it works is it works in our subconscious and it causes our brains to tell us stories in ways that we're not entirely aware of.

And we behave in ways that we wouldn't choose intentionally sometimes if we knew exactly what was going on. And so. The rationalized story that we tell ourselves, we actually believe. And so it's it sounded in the engineer's mind when he said things the way that he said it, you know, when he put the words down on the PowerPoint chart that were very difficult to understand.

And he put the most important points in eight point font at the bottom of the slide, you know, and the things that he was doing like it. It made perfect sense to him in his head. He. If he had thought for a second that he was doing anything that would have endangered a human's life, an astronaut, like he would have never done it.

He would have absolutely sacrificed his career if he thought that he was endangering an astronaut. I guarantee it. I know I know the people that work out there. And the same thing's true of the management person. But what happens is that when you're under that kind of stress, you know, the management is under that kind of stress.

At the time, they they believe that they're saving the program in a different way. They believe that they're saving something else. And so the they're rationalizing, you know, if we do this, what's what's the impact going to be like? You know, it's going to it's going to cause these other problems and it's these other things.

And so they're rationalizing away decisions in ways that it makes sense to them at the time. And it seems like it's perfect sense. And then in retrospect, especially after something goes wrong, in retrospect, you start to peel it away and it doesn't hold up under scrutiny, which is unfortunate.

But that's the way that it works. Well, yeah, I mean, we as it's this weird. You know, we do this in our daily lives. It's hard. We're tribal creatures, regardless of how much we try and be aware of that and, you know, not let that dictate what we do.

There's that. There's also, you know, the episode that aired of this podcast that aired today was with a cognitive linguist. And we spent a lot of time talking about how, you know, you can have one conversation with 10 different, you know, in one room, right? There's 10 different people in the room and there's 10 different.

basically conversations that were received from those 10 different people and so there's that playing into that too where everyone starts to get this separation based off from what the original or this you know digression from what the original messaging was and you guys have all this pressure on you that has to be i'm sure everyone's probably sleep deprived on top of that and just these you know this is unfortunately human nature playing out in a circumstance that had the most dire possible consequences for seven people.

And so it's been highlighted in front of the world, which is, it is unfortunate, but it's not, that's not an anomalous thing in humans. It's, it's not. And unfortunately, after something goes wrong, a lot of times the outside world wants to ask the wrong questions. Like how could they have been so stupid?

You know, What's wrong with them? Why would they do something like that? And more often than not, the right question is, how could we have created a system that lets smart people, you know, make mistakes like that or make those types of decisions? And that's really what happens is we take smart people, we take, you know, people who generally have good intentions and we put them into systems where.

They become influenced by what's going on around them. They become influenced by the environment, and it creates the behaviors that emerge. So when you talk about these systems, is there maybe, before we start to try and dissect exactly, you know, I guess different facets of how you might go about that, is there a general way that you think about these things?

Was this something... by the error you know was this why you went to go get your phd was this what you were looking to do and were you already doing these kinds of things at the time or is this something that you've learned through restructuring nasa after all of that yeah it's something i've learned through the work that i've done okay restructuring nasa i've learned a lot about organizational culture you know through through the years and one of the things that helped me was I realized that an organization is just a system.

And as an engineer, I'm used to working on systems. But it's important to recognize that it's not just any kind of system. An organization is a complex adaptive system, which means that it has feedback loops. its own name. You can tell it's adaptive. It adapts to things. It's the type of system that when you push on it, it pushes back.

And so you get a property that's called emergence, where, you know, the pieces and parts don't necessarily tell the story. It's as much about the relationship between the parts as it is the parts themselves. So, for example, if you think about the taste of sugar, sugar the taste of sugar emerges from the combination of carbon and hydrogen and oxygen.

You couldn't lick each one of those individually and tell me what sugar is going to taste like. And you can also combine those things in a different way and produce the taste of vinegar. So it's really about how are we combining these things and what's going to result at the end.

And that's a lot of what happens with culture. Are these good attributes or bad attributes? Is this a good employee or a bad employee? A lot of times those are the wrong questions. How are things combining? A lot of times you can see it even within the same organization.

You can move an individual from one team to another team, and suddenly they go from being a drag on the team to being a star on the team. Well, it's the same employee. What just happened? Well, we changed the formula in some way. So is this something, I mean, do you sit these days, I guess you're doing this and you're brought in to help other companies doing this, or maybe even when you did this at NASA, is it, are you literally sitting down on paper and started trying to figure out, okay, what is this, this organization's mission and how, you know, cause you, you kind of touched on this as well as.

like basically letting that mission filter down throughout every, you know, node in the system, every, every office and every person. But that's how I guess, how are, how do you measure that that's being done? How is this plug and play where it's just, you know, Training the leaders and leaving this to leader discretion, you know guided discretion.

Hopefully with some some training. I mean how this is it's Especially with something at the scale of NASA. I mean that that's kind of an art That's not something it's not a hard technical problem like you were used to working with So I do like to start with the strategy of the organization.

What are you trying to achieve? That's what I want to build the culture around. Oftentimes, you know, depending on the organization, many times they will have some aspects that are part of their cultural DNA, something that makes them who they are, that's important to them. So we want to build around that as well.

But it really comes down to what are the behaviors that embody that? Because that's the only thing that you can really look at and measure. And so those are the outputs. And so when you say, okay, what is our strategy? What do we need to do in order to be able to execute the strategy?

What are the results that we're looking for? then what are the behaviors that we want to see from people to where we'll know that they're doing the things that we want them to do for the strategy? You know, what do the behaviors look like when we are who we are?

Like if someone's really, you know, one of us, the part of the DNA of who we are, what are the behaviors that we see from them? If we can define it behaviorally, then we can start to... to measure it we can start to see it we can start to put it into you know expectations we can start to put it into even into employee you know performance plans we can put it into a lot of different things that says hey this is what we're looking for we can communicate it to employees so that they know what what we're looking for and then so yeah go ahead you're almost creating a model of what you're you know in you know with the interest of your strategy, what an ideal member of your team would look like integrated into that picture.

And then so that you can start to try and orchestrate that down the rest of the organization. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. And really it's like part of where this gets challenging is we're really looking for, for what I call critical behaviors. And so the critical behaviors are, are those differentiators that the way I describe it is if you think about like all the behaviors that you want to see, you're probably going to get 80 to 90 percent of them in most people.

Hope, you know, some people would argue that the number is going down these days, but I think that you're probably going to get most of them from most people. So what are the few that really set the superstars apart from the average? Like what are those differentiators? Those are your critical behaviors that you want to define.

It's not the what is the average employee doing? Let's define every behavior. Because part of making this powerful is not making it so big that it's overwhelming. It needs to be a small list. You need to really get down to water the essential things that really make the difference.

And so that's a piece of it. So we want to look for those critical behaviors that are really the differentiators between, you know, a good employee and the superstar. And that's what we want to try and identify. What are those for us and what makes that? And then.

Once we do that, then we start to focus on, OK, well, what do we need someone to believe in order to behave that way? Because the beliefs are what drive behaviors. And then since we can't tell people what to believe. And if you are a parent, you know, you can't tell people how to behave.

Incentives. Incentives work. Incentives work a little bit. the most effective way to get people to change their behavior is to to change their beliefs and incentives are a way to change their beliefs like if if they believe that behaving this way is going to get them more money then then that may be change their behavior um but what we want to do is we want to give them experiences that really are changing their mental model about how the world works and about what what behaviors are going to be useful to them.

And so that's where the work really comes in for the organization. And to some extent, it becomes a lot of trial and error, but we want to continue to refine like what are the experiences we want to continually create for employees that send the message about what is important to believe here that drives the behaviors that we're looking for.

Does that apply both in the office and off -site type of stuff? Like, hey, we're going to have a barbecue on the first Sunday of every month or something like that? Yeah. Okay. It does. And I'll say, I love having barbecues on the first Sunday of the month.

I love Beer Friday. I even joke about the ping pong table and the... the break room, like that, all of that stuff is great. And it's, it's only great if you know why you're doing it and you're able to communicate the why to your employees in a way that they know why you're doing it.

If, if you're, if you're not really doing all of that, you're, you're probably missing out on a whole lot of the, you know, the transfer of the belief and, you know, possibly the, the behavior because that, you know, One of the one of the worst things in the world to do is to let him let people just make up their own minds about why you're doing something, because there's no telling what they're going to what conclusion.

Yeah. The idea fairy. Yeah. So you end up with people calling you the idea fairy. Yeah, I've seen I've seen leaders do things, you know, and I've watched them like they I've watched them come up with the ideas and they think, oh, this I'm being the. the most generous leader in the world and i've watched them do things and then i've listened on the back side to employees as they've received it and they've they've their belief about the evil intent behind why this is being done to them and i'm like my gosh you know it's very important to make sure that you explain like why you're doing this and what you want them to get from it is it i mean is is something as general as you know i i'm gonna have i want to have all you guys over to my house on sunday for a cookout just so i can get to know you guys on a personal level and not not talk business have the families over too so we can all you know start to get to know each other on a deeper level is that like something that generic really effective or does it need to be you know i'm having a hard time picturing this not just you know a small startup you know like i'm hoping my my current endeavor turns into where I have, you know, five to ten employees at some point, you know, in the next couple of years.

But it's something like NASA, you know, how that scales is that across, you know, the teams are doing this and the messaging. I mean, how do you approach all that? Yeah, I mean, I think what you said is is good. I think it would be even better if you said something like, you know, if you're able to say, you know.

Because connection is one of our core values. And we believe that connecting with each other helps us connect with our clients and drives the business forward or whatever is true for you. Like, you know, it's interesting because like with all this stuff, you know, it's obviously, you know, NASA was a different circumstance because it was kind of mandated that it needed to be fixed.

But I'm sure there probably would have been some course corrections regardless. But in a normal context or a more standard context like you would deal with today, it seems like for people to reach out to you, it might almost be counterintuitive where at face value, you might think that.

oh, this is a business that's going horribly wrong, but it could just, I mean, it seems like it would take, require someone really caring about where things are heading and not necessarily, it's not inherent that it's going poorly. It's just, we want it to be better. Yeah. Yeah.

You nailed it. All the time people ask me, like, you know, they're wanting the horror stories or I bet you work with, you know, really, really crazy clients. And my answer is no, we actually work with really good clients because the people who are looking for help with their culture are companies that already believe that it's important.

And so typically it's companies that are wanting to take it to the next level. So these are all things, you know, you talked about the inter -team communication and having, it seems like, lateral and vertical lanes of communication open into where people are receptive and everyone knows that they can, you know, in a hardcore environment like that, they can be the one who speaks up, not always because they have data, but because they saw something and have a serious...

uh, concern about it is that, I mean, these are all things that you drove there as well. I mean, again, I realize on a larger scale, but you know, the trying to open up those lanes, trying to start and decide what is our, our real strategy here, like the safety that you talked about earlier.

Yeah. I mean, a lot of this has evolved the way that I'm talking about it now is, is not the exact terms that I was talking about things. 23 years ago, I've I've gotten a lot clearer on my messaging and on exactly what I what I think about it.

You know, for for example. At the time, I was focused on specifically what are the conversations we're having? How are we talking about things in meetings? How are leaders showing up? How are leaders accidentally like? shutting down conversations in ways that they may not be aware of um are we are we being intentional about raising dissenting opinions are we normalizing raising dissenting opinions because i mean one we we had an environment where failure is not an option so you know being being the one raising a dissenting opinion nobody wanted to be that that person because it wasn't necessarily popular you know we we were there to figure out how to do the impossible not to just you know not to raise a dissenting opinion and so uh you know figuring out ways to to drive dissenting opinions into conversations make sure that we you know it became a normal part of every single meeting to have dissenting opinions um you know making sure that i trained leaders that whenever they heard the the term save the program that they stopped the meeting and had a conversation because you're introducing cognitive bias the second you say that Once you think that your decision that you're making there is to save the program, you're automatically putting yourself in a bad situation in terms of being able to adequately weigh risk.

If this decision is being weighed against the life or death of the program and you love the program like it's a child, your decision making is compromised in ways that you don't fully understand. And you can't understand because it's happening inside your head. You can't see it. You can't read the label from inside the jar.

You don't know what's happening. Do you think that abstracts to less critical environments where it's a normal whatever kind of business? 500 employee business and but you've still got these corporate meetings where it's you know this is our our earnings are down this much this quarter you have to save it kind of thing like that it's that same pressure that starts to skew people's decision making and really is a a core problem in whatever organizations that you're working with absolutely The amazing thing about this is this is just fundamental human behavior.

Yeah. I mean, this is happening to every person in the world multiple times a day. It's happening in every relationship you have. And, you know, most of the disagreements you get in are a result of this. You have a psychological immune system that it's whole. purpose is to protect you from feeling psychological discomfort and so what it does is it activates anytime it thinks that you're going to hear or see something that is going to cause you psychological discomfort and when it activates it distorts reality just enough to where it tells you a story that makes you a hero or a victim or something else and You know, it tells you this story in a way that it protects you from from whatever it was that it didn't want you to see or hear or feel.

And when it does that now, all of a sudden you have at least to some small degree, sometimes to a larger degree, lost touch with reality. And this is where you then now start to get into an argument with a friend or a spouse or whoever. And both of you have differing views about what even the heck happened.

And both of you are so sure that your version of reality is true because your brain is telling you this is what happened. And both of you are probably both wrong. Yeah, I think we honestly, I think we do that with ourselves too. I think that's how you, you know, I struggled with addiction for several years, like very hard, hard alcoholism.

And I think you do. Whether it be in an instance like that where you are lying to yourself about why the next drink is okay or relapsing again is okay or whatever it may be. Or even when you're confronted with, I think it's probably anything that really challenges your own personal identity of yourself.

I think that same conversation happens. Yep. The antidote to this is self -acceptance. And so when I have trouble accepting myself, then I'm not going to want to see the reality of my situation in some way. And so if I am not able to see the reality of my situation as an alcoholic in this moment, then I'm not going to be able to have the self -awareness to really fully acknowledge that I am an alcoholic right now.

So my brain's going to jump in and it's going to tell me lots of stories and it's going to tell them to me in ways that are very convincing to me. And it doesn't matter how many friends and relatives come and tell me that I have a drinking problem.

I'm not going to believe them. And I'm going to think that they're nosy or they're, you know, out of their lane or they're crazy or, and I'm going to get mad at them. And, you know, I'm going to tell myself all kinds of stories about them. I'm going to blame them because I don't want to blame myself.

All these other things because I don't want to look at myself because I can't accept what I'm going to see when I do look at myself. And it really is. It's all of this is just the same problems that we started with are the same. Like you said, the fundamental human behaviors.

I mean, I think it's these things playing out over and over again. I think if you really zoom out as far as you can to the entire earth, I think the. our species as an organism in and of itself and then obviously these are just you know varying levels of microcosms relative to that scale as you get into the organization the family relationships and then you know your own conversations that you're having with yourself it is it really is it's human nature playing out over and over again it's wild it is and you know what's really wild is you know as much as a lot of the hardcore business types want to say, you know, there's no place for feelings in business or whatever it is that they want to say.

I'll tell you, the biggest thing that you can do for your business is to create a work environment that is conducive to self -esteem. If you have a workplace that is building the self -esteem of your employees. That is going to drive performance more than just about anything else that you can do.

How much of that do you think is about just being genuine? As a leader setting the example, and if you're genuine, then other people feel like they can be too. I think that's a big piece of it. I think being genuine, it's certainly important. I don't think you can be a good leader without the authenticity there and being genuine.

But I think it goes beyond that. I think that, you know, building people's self -esteem is helping them to feel like, you know, they are as competent as they want to feel and as significant as they want to feel, as likable as they want to feel. It's about helping them to be able to learn to walk through the world with integrity and to be able to you know, learn how to be self -accountable.

And, you know, it all becomes a giant feedback loop at some point, but the things that they do, it starts to feed into building their own self -esteem over time. It is that part of that setting up intentional experiences for those people that we talked about. So, like, that could be setting them up for success, you know, in the early days of their...

career at whatever your company is or your organization okay it absolutely is you know and i'll tell you a crazy story from from the my nasa days um one of my uh one of my friends was uh he was spent some time in the astronaut training office and he was telling me a story that they did an experiment and you know a while back with the astronauts and they took two sets of astronauts And with the first set of astronauts, they put them in the shuttle simulator and they rigged it so that they crashed every single time they tried to land it.

They crashed it every single time for, I think it was 12 times in a row, something like that. And then they let them have success. And then the other set of astronauts, they let them have success for 12 times in a row. just kept crashing them. And what they discovered was the ones that crashed for 12 times in a row, they always thought they were going to crash the next time.

Even after they had success for 20 successes in a row. And the ones that had success for 12 in a row, even after they crashed 20 times in a row, they always thought they were going to land successfully the next time. And so it was those early experiences that kind of shaped their beliefs about themselves and about whether they were a successful, you know, lander or not.

It kind of set that bit in their head. And so it changed how they how they decided to train astronauts. Like we want them to believe that they are, you know, that this is who they are. We want to give them this identity like you're a success. You know, you're going to pull this out no matter what.

so that, you know, I don't care what the situation is. I don't care how bleak it looks. We want you to believe you're going to be able to land this thing. Yeah, I mean, that belief in general, that... like a will that is there in whatever endeavor. I mean, they see this play on athletes and I think successful entrepreneurs, really any realm where someone is massively successful, it does seem always like there's this underlying thread in the narratives is always like, you know, I had this unrelenting knowing that like I was going to do this.

Kind of thing. And like, would think about it, picture it. I mean, people go as far as envisioning winning before they go into a competition. Like it is that powerful in sciences is back that, I mean, it's absolutely. We're strange, strange creatures. We really are. But with, with some of what you mentioned earlier, I was curious about at the individual level and talking about the, the critical.

I can't remember if you, I think it was critical behaviors that you said, but you know, if, if you're looking at an organization or a team and trying to adjust these things and realize like, okay, how can we be better? You know, I, some of that stuff, the, those critical behaviors that you're looking for and what you would picture as being your stud performer, it seemed like some of that stuff is intrinsic.

And so to what extent are, have you seen that when you're not seeing those behaviors at a certain level, how much of it can be taught slash learned versus how much of that means that there's going to be, need to be someone else filling that role? So this is a really fun conversation.

So I want to take a minute and try and parse this out a little bit because, you know, as humans, We like to like smush our words together. And so if we tease this out a little bit, behaviors are observable. It's something I can see you doing, right?

So if on a video, when we play it back, someone's going to be able to see that you just picked up a water bottle and took a drink. Like that was something that they saw you do. And so that's a that's that's the type of thing when we're talking about behavior, we can see you do this thing.

There's there's a difference between a behavior and then there's a skill that you have. So that's something you know how to do. So maybe you have the skill of being able to speak a foreign language or ride a bike or, you know. Balance a spreadsheet for an as an accountant.

And those are things that I can teach you how to do. I can come up with a training program. I can create a class and I can run you through it and I can teach you how to do that. And then there's this third category of things that we call attributes.

And these attributes, they tend to be more inherently inborn, but they can be developed. And these are things like patience and. Self -awareness, self -accountability, persistence. And these are a lot of times the things that people look at and say, oh, well, either you've got it or you don't.

But but you can develop it. The thing is, is that you don't teach them like you don't teach somebody like there's not a training class that I take you through that says this is how you how you. be patient or how you be self -aware. I give you experiences there.

It's experiential learning. So if you know, and there are absolutely, absolutely. I can take you through a, you know, a workshop and I can help increase your, your self -awareness about yourself, but I'm going to put you through experiences in that workshop where you're going to experience things.

I'm not going to, you know, I'm not going to have you read a book and. You know, write down answers to a test. That's not how I'm going to teach you how to become more self -aware. Right. And so these are all very different things. And so when we're talking about, you know, these critical behaviors, I think these critical behaviors are things that everyone can choose whether they want to behave that way or not.

Like once you tell someone what it is like, you get to choose. Do you want to do this thing or don't you want to do this thing? I can choose whether I want to do it. Now, to the extent that there are some attributes associated with that, you know, and depending on how you write the behavior, then maybe there is some development that you want to help provide people with that helps them learn how to, you know, maybe the behavior has to do with how they respond to, you know, how they respond to an irate customer.

Well, that that self -regulation is more of an attribute, you know, but I can see your behavior in your response. So your response is the behavior, but the self -regulation is the attribute. So you can either respond calmly or you can respond, you know, in a irate manner.

And I can see that and I can video it and I can show it back to you and I can say whether you did one or the other. And that's the behavior. But if I want to help you with that, then I need to look at, OK, but the attribute associated with that is self -regulation.

And so what what do I want to do to help develop that? Does that make sense? Yeah. And that's the hard thing with it. And I think, you know, I. When I said that some of these things seem like they're intrinsic, that's really what I meant is like, that is, again, you, there's a choice to, discipline is a choice.

Drive is a choice. All of these things, like you said, these are, these attributes are choices. And so for someone, and, but they're, because they are choices, you have to want to make that choice. And so that's, that feels like a big. like it might be a big bridge gap i guess some of that is probably awareness for like once some people are aware that you know this is uh you know maybe that that self -regulation like oh i had no idea i thought i was i'm always pleasant or something like but i i you know do you have you gotten a sense over time or how i guess there's really no way for you to measure not having you don't i'm sure you don't track everyone at these companies after you you leave but uh is there in your experience have you noticed a general i guess a disproportionate trend towards wanting to make those choices after the awareness is granted versus not yes i you know one of the things that i i say in our work is that there's no such thing as a silver bullet and the closest thing to that there is to a silver bullet is self -awareness it it's amazing how many problems become self -correcting when you increase the self -awareness of the individual.

Because so many things that are happening in organizations all across this country are happening because of the lack of self -awareness in individuals. A lot of the arguments that all of us get in are a direct result of our own lack of self -awareness. Yeah, it's a it's that's weird.

I've never stopped to think about how that is really developed. I mean, do you I'm assuming since this is a critical issue that you've seen in your work and are calling out right now that you might have an idea on how to cultivate that. Yeah. I mean, one of the things that we do is we learn to recognize this.

We call it defensiveness. When that psychological immune system jumps in, I become defensive. And, you know. Initially, people tend to think, okay, that means I'm defending myself against you. I have to defend myself against what you're saying or some outside thing. But in reality, as I've already described, I'm actually defending myself against my own harsh judgment of myself.

That's why I'm becoming defensive. And so when I become defensive, there's usually a few behaviors that each person has their own behaviors that they tend to do that's their favorites. And so I can learn to start trying to recognize when I'm doing something like that. So it sounds so crazy, but one of the most powerful things I can start doing is noticing.

And there's this crazy quote that basically says that the range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice. And until we begin to notice what we fail to notice, there's little that we can do to change right and yeah and it's so true like if i don't even notice that i'm getting defensive then i can't start asking myself well why am i defensive and i can't start calming myself down or choosing a different path and so it really all starts there it starts there with an understanding and a willingness to recognize that i'm human And I get defensive and that's okay.

And that the key is not to think that I'm somehow going to become a Zen master and never become defensive again, but that I'm going to learn to recover faster. And that's really what I want to try to do. And so when I, you know, I want to start noticing when I'm becoming defensive as quickly as possible so that I can recover as quickly as possible.

What a... what a conundrum to be like hey bob uh you know you're you tend to be different we're working on your self -awareness uh you tend to get really defensive when you know certain feedback is given to you and it's like no i don't it immediately gets defensive like i don't know how you start to win that battle at some point maybe if someone's heard it enough then our you know the the machine learning program that runs in our brains eventually something at some point it will register when you've you've heard it enough i mean i just i had a conversation with someone last week just in my personal life that i'm deaf in one ear so i you know my noisy environments with not being able to read lips and then also not hearing great on one side like it's not it's not a great combo, but this person was very quiet.

And I mentioned it like multiple times before. And I just, I did too. I was like, Hey, I'm sorry. I didn't hear your, your quiet. And there's, there's a lot of noise in here. And she was like, yeah, she had just come back from a business trip. And she had said like, man, everyone was telling me on this trip to everyone's been saying I'm quiet.

And I'm like, what do you think that means? Like. Does it? It's weird. And I, you know, I've been guilty of that too. Everyone has, but again, is this weird? Like at what point, how many times do you have to be told before it clicks? I like, I wonder if there's a, a steady number on that.

I don't know. If you find out, let me know. Like my son, my son, my youngest son, it's, it's the opposite. Like he's a loud talker. Oh God. You know, we keep telling him like we're out in public, we're at dinner and he, like he's, he's shouting. Whatever the conversation is, he's shouting it.

And we're like, the whole restaurant really doesn't need to know whatever it is you're talking about. And he gets upset every single time. We're like, you know, we're not telling you this to insult you. We're just letting you know that, you know, you could bring it down a couple of decibels there.

Again, man, we are such strange, strange little bags of meat. Yeah, we really, really are. Outside of that, are there any other big flags that you see pretty consistently as being an issue? I mean self -awareness is really a fundamental one just in life, but what else? Any other big ones?

You mean within organizations or – Yeah, I mean it's – that's the thing is I feel like if you're seeing it in organizations, that is also something that is – probably if it's if it's prominent there it's probably prominent in the regular world too but given that your your scope is more so organizations what do you see where they're more friction breakdown comes from one of the ones i'll pick on um is blame we You know, when we're working with organizations, we we always go in and we tell them that blame is the biggest source of wasted energy in organizations today.

And I think it does so much to actually hurt accountability. We like to help reeducate organizations and individuals to think in terms of contribution. so many people are especially in today's world there's there's so much of a focus on trying to blame figure out who's the who had just a little bit more to do with something than somebody else and then we heap all the blame on them and you know that's it's i don't know what good that does anyone it's it's really more about what what are all the the different things that contributed to the situation?

And then how do we shift those contributions going forward so that we get a different outcome? That's the question we want to ask ourselves. And so when I ask it in that way, first of all, it helps me accept that I did contribute to the situation easier than saying, you know, it's my fault.

A lot of people don't want to say it's my fault or I'm to blame, and I understand why, but... Saying I contributed to this situation makes it easier for people to take more accountability in their lives about everything. And just about every situation in your life, everything that's happening in your life, if you think about it long enough, you can think of at least one way that you contributed to that situation.

Yes. And that does not mean that it's your fault. And that's an important. That's an important factor. But the thing that I like to point out is that the more you've contributed to a situation, the more power you have over it. So I don't necessarily see it as a bad thing when I recognize how I've contributed to a situation.

If I'm unhappy with the situation and I'm able to see a bunch of ways that I contributed to it, It's actually a good thing for me because it means that I've got a lot more power to change it going forward because I've made a lot of contribution to it to get to this point.

Yeah, and again, that's the self -awareness of admitting that, okay, you have this role in it and then making the choice to make the adjustments. I mean, if you don't choose to act on that information, then that becomes a problem. But you think it's essentially reframing that and how people think about those conversations.

Yeah, absolutely. Because once you take blame out of the picture, it becomes a lot easier to have the conversation. And when you recognize that now contribution comes from a lot of different sources, it's not just one place. Contribution comes from probably everybody who is even remotely involved in this, as well as the system, as well as the environment.

you know we can say that okay there was a lot of different things that contributed to this and just because it contributed to it you know doesn't doesn't mean that we want to change moving forward we may want to contribute to it in exactly the same way or we may want to contribute to it differently moving forward but we can at least look at it and decide consciously which one that that is yeah it makes sense Any other big ticket items before we start to bring this bad boy home?

Accountability always seems to be a big issue in organizations. And, you know, accountability, I think a lot of times gets an inaccurate rap. A lot of people think that accountability is all about like holding people accountable, which is a backwards view of like punishment. It's kind of blame again.

Yeah, it's completely tied to that whole blame concept. I believe accountability should always be forward looking. And so it starts first and foremost with really getting clarity around defining the expectations and making sure that both parties are on the same page with what those expectations are and have, you know, agreed to what needs to be done.

And that, you know, that those commitments have been made around that so that, you know, we know what it is that we're circling back to if those aren't met. And then again, if it's not met, then we have the conversation about, okay, so what are we going to do moving forward?

How do we make sure this doesn't happen in the future? What were the contributions to us getting to this point? How do we fix this moving forward? And that's... It's really what we want to try and do with accountability to make sure that we're fixing this moving forward because there's nothing we can do about the past.

Yeah. How much of this comes down to or do you see playing out as a result of lack of direct communication and whether that be? I guess probably a lot of times people people skirting around a hard conversation in. Yeah. Yeah, I think a lot of it, you know, some of it's because of a hard conversation.

I'll tell you, in today's world, a lot of it's just time. You know, I think time is one of the biggest villains that's, you know, in most organizations, people are moving really fast. There's the illusion that conversation has occurred, that communication has happened, that, you know, that people are on the same page.

And I think that a lot of times that's where the miscommunication actually occurs is that it isn't really clear that both parties don't exactly understand. what each other is saying and um and so when we start off with a little bit of misalignment on exactly what's going to happen then then that just amplifies as we go through the accountability loop yeah and i i'd imagine some of that is also again people not speaking up when they don't understand until when and then assuming like you know making assumptions because they don't want to admit like hey i didn't fully grasp what what was or have a good tangible grasp on what was supposed to be done, what that conversation, what my goals are here moving forward.

It's all. Absolutely. The responsibility for accountability goes both ways. Yeah. I mean, if I'm the leader, I want to take the responsibility to ensure that the person that I'm signing something to understands my expectations and I want to do my job to. to follow through with the whole accountability process.

But if I'm an employee, I want to help my leader. I want to make sure that I'm clear on what it is that I'm supposed to do, that I understand the expectations, that I've gone through the whole accountability process as well. I mean, it's in my best interest to do so.

Yeah. Well, this has all been awesome. And I expected a lot of this to be kind of human nature stuff, but it's funny here. It is... again these are all fundamental things that we see play out in the smallest you know the most small circles of human interactions all the way up to i'm you know the scale of of something like nasa or i'm sure even bigger companies than that i mean it's it seems like if we understood ourselves a little better and we're more intentionally aware of that in our our interactions in you know, motions and actions that we take through the world, that it would probably save us a lot of, a lot of friction day to day and, and a bunch of different capacities.

Um, so I, today, you know, with Gallagher Edge, when, when people have heard some of this, these insights that you've had in this knowledge and want to, want to get some of that, or where can they reach out to do that? Well, the easiest way to find us is gestrategygroup .com.

That's a website you can get to us at. And we also have a free assessment. If you want to check out your culture and see how healthy it is, you can go to mlmini .com and take a free assessment there as well. Okay. Awesome. You got anything else you want to put out there before we call it a wrap?

No, I don't think so. Just enjoyed the conversation today. Yeah, man. Me too. Thank you. Thanks for being here. And I thank you everyone at home as well for listening to another episode of Going In Blind. I'm sitting here trying to find my buttons and my computer is not cooperating with me.

But great, great information this week in a very different lane than we've gone down before. So if you're an entrepreneur, you know one, share this thing around with them, I think. Again, and... even outside of that context i think this is stuff that is very very useful and i know i will listen to this episode again to try and uh remember some of these lessons and go back and get some notes that i wasn't able to take while i was actually talking so uh yeah i think that's all i have for you so i will see you next week bye