The 5 Characteristics of High Performing Organisations
No organisation is immune to things going wrong. Machines fail, parts malfunction and human error is something that simply can’t be avoided. But for NASA, failures can have very large scale implications. So how do you manage these inherent risks? It requires high performing, high reliability teams and the backbone of it all is good leadership. During Mainstream Conference 2016, Ed Van Cise, Flight Director for the International Space Station, pulled back the curtain on NASA’s culture and revealed the secrets of its high performing, high reliability team. A Near Disaster NASA had been tracking a very small ammonia leak in a power channel cooling system on the space station for a number of years and it was agreed that it was small enough to accept and live with. Then in May 2013, the space station crew reported ‘snow flakes’ outside (quite alarming as it’s not supposed to snow in space). It became obvious the ‘snow’ was ammonia flakes and it was leaking at an exponential rate. The International Space Station (ISS) program asked the team to stop the leak before the system runs dry which would have been about two days. Now for a normal spacewalk you’d have about 12 months to plan it. If you had to do one in a contingency timeframe you need at least nine days. Ed and his team had 39 hours. Watch this video for the full run down of the crisis. Spacewalks are inherently dangerous. By all accounts and purposes, given the … Continue reading →