Lessons From NASA: How Failure Begets Success

Forbes

6 days ago

Organizations need to learn from failure, encourage constructive discussions, debates, and even ... More dissent, and move forward.
Many organizations—and their leaders—don't recognize the value of trial and error. They want the Moon shot to succeed, perfectly, the first time.
But as Martin Reeves, chairman of the BCG Henderson Institute, our internal think tank, describes, embracing 'experimentation, fast learning, adaptation, and innovation,' especially on big 'super-projects,' can make long-term success more likely.
NASA, which has been dealing since 1958 with the challenges and (sometimes) chaos of trying to put people and machines in space, can attest to that.
Failure Is An Option, And Sometimes It's Necessary
Few projects have been bigger than the early U.S. space program, sparked initially by the then Soviet Union's 1957 Sputnik launch and then by President John F. Kennedy's 1961 challenge to the newly established National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to land U.S. astronauts on the Moon and safely return them to Earth.
The U.S. space program encountered numerous setbacks and failures, both before and since the July 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing—most tragically, the Apollo 1 fire during a pre-launch test in 1967, the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster in 1986, and the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster in 2003, each of which resulted in multiple fatalities.
The ultimate test for any organization or team, however, is whether it is capable of analyzing the source (or sources) of such failures, correct the problem(s), and move forward.
What isn't an option—and shouldn't be an option—is wallowing in failure. As Robert (Bob) Gibbs, NASA's Assistant Administrator for mission support until his recent retirement, told me recently, whether an organization benefits from failure, or gets dragged down by it, largely depends on how its leadership reacts to setbacks.
NASA, Moon Shots, Potholes, And Mars
Today's space commercialization and exploration programs are driven by increasing collaboration between government and the private sector. These missions not only aim to return to the Moon, but to go far beyond. The science and technology are challenging and the missions unforgiving. Errors and failed attempts go with the territory.
That means the road to success likely will have any number of dead ends, detours, and potholes—a familiar path SpaceX seems to be following with its super-sized, 400-foot- tall Starship rocket, designed to support interplanetary travel. First stop: Mars.
At this writing there have now been nine Starship tests, several of them explosive failures. Every failure, however, produces valuable information and insights, bringing the team closer to success.
How You React To Failure Is Key
According to Gibbs, who also served as the U.S. space agency's chief human capital officer during his tenure there, organizations can react to setbacks in one of two ways.
One common approach is the 'kill the messenger' approach, he told me. That's when leaders 'make it absolutely clear that failure is not acceptable, and ensure those associated with it don't advance and are seen to 'pay a price'.' This approach effectively kills discussion about what went wrong and guarantees that your team will become even more risk averse, he stressed. Yet, this is the way many leaders respond to adversity—probably because it's hard for many leaders, for both personal and financial reasons, to be open about failure.
The alternative is to learn from failure, encourage constructive discussions, debates, and even dissent, and move forward. This is the approach that NASA has embraced, Gibbs says. It's how engagement and innovation thrive and learning from failure becomes part of the culture.
One way an organization can demonstrate this principle is to talk candidly about failures. According to Gibbs, NASA does this through its publicly available lessons learned system.
To evaluate whether your organization truly embraces failure as part of its learning process, Gibbs suggests that you take the test below.
If you answered yes to all of Gibbs's questions--which come from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and are included in NASA's Lessons Learned Information System--you have created an environment where employees can fail, learn, innovate and move forward, an environment for success.
One of the most-often repeated quotes about one of the world's most-impactful inventors is Thomas Edison's alleged description of his serial failures on what became known as the light bulb. 'I have not failed,' he reportedly said. 'I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.'
The rest is history.