The Comeback Chronicles Podcast
Welcome to The Comeback Chronicles, where raw truth meets unwavering resilience. Hosted by Terry L. Fossum, this podcast reveals the untold stories of remarkable individuals who’ve faced crushing defeats—only to rise stronger, wiser, and more determined.
Through candid interviews, you’ll hear about moments of failure, heartbreak, and doubt, as well as the transformational steps that led to victory. This isn’t just about inspiration—it’s about equipping you with actionable strategies, like Terry’s signature ‘Oxcart Technique,’ to overcome challenges and ignite your own comeback story.
If you’re ready to break free from fear, shame, or self-doubt and move boldly into your conquer zone, The Comeback Chronicles will empower you with the tools, mindset, and motivation to rise above and achieve your next great success.
Get ready to turn your setbacks into stepping stones and reclaim the life you’re destined to lead.
The Comeback Chronicles Podcast
Leading Through Disaster: NASA's Path Forward After Columbia with Paul Sean Hill
NASA's journey of cultural transformation after the Columbia disaster reveals profound leadership lessons applicable to any organization facing challenges.
• The Columbia accident created a deeply personal sense of loss and responsibility within NASA's community
• Success and confidence had bred organizational arrogance where rigorous questioning had diminished
• Small, seemingly insignificant details (like foam impacts) can lead to catastrophic failure when not properly analyzed
• Leadership requires creating a culture where anyone at any level can speak up without fear
• Breaking "impossible" problems into smaller, manageable pieces leads to breakthrough solutions
• The most dangerous words in business are "that's how we've always done it"
• Asking "why" at every decision point is the foundation of good leadership
• Cultural change must be initiated from the top and demonstrated consistently
• Leaders must be confident enough to accept challenges to their thinking
• Even the most technical organizations must address the human "touchy-feely" aspects of culture
To transform your organization, ask why on every decision, ensure your team can ask you why, and hold yourself accountable to answering those questions honestly.
If you've been stuck in fear, self-doubt, your past failures and you're ready to break through your comfort zones to finally reach the pinnacle of success in every area of your life, then this podcast is for you. Here's your host, Terry L Fossum.
Speaker 2:Hello, this is Terry Alfosum, and welcome back to a very special edition of the Comeback Chronicles podcast. On Saturday, february 1st 2003, space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated as it reentered the atmosphere over Texas and Louisiana, killing all seven astronauts on board. This was the second space shuttle mission to end in disaster after the loss of the Challenger and crew in 1986. America and the world was in shock.
Speaker 2:Nasa knew that changes had to be made. Their culture had to change. Their entire way of doing business had to change. To make those changes, they brought in Paul Sean Hill as the youngest director of mission operations in NASA history. As the director of mission ops from 2007 to 2014, he is credited with revolutionizing the leadership culture, dramatically reducing costs, increasing capability, while still conducting missions in space. Today, he's a leadership evangelist, an executive consultant and a speaker whose candor and passion has inspired leaders from across many industries. His book Leadership from the Mission Control Room will help you lead change in any organization you're part of Today, to help us understand NASA's Comeback Chronicle and apply those principles to our companies and ourselves. Paul, thank you so much for joining me.
Speaker 3:Oh, my pleasure. Always good to talk to you, Terry.
Speaker 2:Same at you, and Paul and I go way back to actually helping me with a book that I'm working on right now and then having beers around his swimming pool afterwards. So let's talk about you. Were there at Mission Ops. You were part of NASA at the time when the Columbia accident happened. Tell me the emotions that were involved there.
Speaker 3:At that point I had been a flight director for seven years, both for Space Station and for Space Shuttle, and, as you can can imagine, the community was stunned. It was, you know, losing astronauts. In that business it's like losing family members, because they aren't just passengers on the spacecraft that we're managing. I mean, they are friends. In some cases they are family. We know them extraordinarily well and every one of us believes it's my job to protect their lives and help them get the mission done.
Speaker 3:So a loss like that it feels like losing a very, very close family member and it is difficult not to kind of internalize the guilt. If I had been better, this wouldn't happen. Now, on that day, I mean, I didn't even work that mission. So I will tell you, it is not just the people that worked the mission that felt that way, any of us in the community. And the more leadership responsibility that you had leading up to that, the more difficult it was not to feel some piece of that guilt. I wasn't good enough, we weren't good enough, because if I had been and if we had been, they wouldn't come back home alive and that's on us. So it so that was terrible.
Speaker 2:And then you know also, there are grieving widows and widowers, there are grieving children, there are grieving family members, many of them right there at the launch. Of course, I've been to a couple now, right there at the launch, that are staring in amazement and grief and horror at that moment.
Speaker 3:Well, and I can tell you, at the time that happened, columbia that is I happened to be in a school gymnasium watching my gosh, I think sixth grade daughter play basketball in a recreational league. Sitting right next to me was Charlie Hobart's wife. Charlie was the astronaut that was on console as Capcom calling Columbia in Columbia, houston, with no answer, and our kids were playing basketball together and I looked up and saw my wife come in the gym looking like she'd seen a ghost, and I walked over to her. She handed me my keys and said something just happened to the shuttle. I think you need to go to work. And I drive like a bat out of hell to the control center. Pull in, go up into the control center, into one of our management meeting rooms, and it was about that time that I realized I'm in shorts and tennis shoes and a T-shirt and have no idea what I'm doing here.
Speaker 3:And you know that goes a long way to characterize the entire community.
Speaker 3:You know, the people that were working the mission in the control room were very focused on doing the job until it was clear they're gone, we have nothing left we can do. And then the community was kind of like me looking around thinking, okay, what am I supposed to do now, holy cow, how do we take next steps? And then you start taking those next steps, both to figure out what happened and how do we correct that, how do we recover from that, how do we fly again? Now, my role in that timeframe was very much on the technical and it was first a role in the accident investigation itself, trying to put together imagery and various other things from various governance sensors to try to help us isolate what caused the vehicle to come apart in the first place. And then after that I was assigned the leadership of the next flight and leading the team that would figure out how we would detect damage on the outside of a shuttle if it happened again when we launched, and then how we would get outside and repair it.
Speaker 2:Because the accident was attributed to a phone piece coming off and hitting the shuttle, was it not?
Speaker 3:It was, the impact of which was trivialized at the time inside the NASA community. It was not taken as seriously as it should have been and there's some interesting psychological reasons for that, some of which are the obvious ones. You know, flying shuttles is a really difficult business and the most difficult part of it, from the outside looking in, is 7 million pounds of fire shooting out of the back of the rocket. It's easy to see those types of things in the systems that could cause the rocket to explode if we're not paying attention to them. And there were a handful of problems like that in the propulsion system that were being worked in the shuttle program, things that the pro the community did not fully understand and was very concerned like. There's lots of fighting internally on whether or not we understood some of these problems that could cause engines to explode while we launched. And there were a handful of other big ticket things like that, one of which that threatened the entire electrical system on every single show that we were working. And those things it's easy to see. We have to keep our eye on those.
Speaker 3:In this case, a pound or so of foam came off the tank and hit the vehicle, and a vehicle that most of us take for granted that hey, it's like an airplane, it's a space shuttle. Some foam hit the leading edge. Actually, we didn't even think it hit the leading edge, to tell you the truth. We thought it hit the bottom by the left main landing gear door for the longest time. It wasn't until much later that we realized. No, I did hit that left leading edge. But even with that knowledge we would have said what's the big deal? It's just foam. And the interesting thing is an organization with such technical prowess as NASA and all of those very, very smart people inside the agency and all of the contractor team that worked with us, not one of us sat down and said well, what's the actual amount of energy?
Speaker 3:A pound and a half of foam traveling dealt a velocity of 700 miles per hour, Right, what if I just stood on the highway and you hit me in the chest with that piece of foam at that velocity? What do I think would happen? And we didn't actually do that simple calculation until well after the accident. In fact, there was time when there was significant argument in conference rooms about whether or not the phone was even capable of damaging the leading edge. And those arguments were all based on emotion, not based on the actual data, Because once you do that back of the envelope calculation, the experts on the structure of the leading edge could tell you just like that oh, we can't tolerate that. If that happens, we're in a lot of trouble.
Speaker 2:Right. So now you've got to find out what happened, of course, but now NASA needs a comeback. I mean, this is their second shuttle to blow up and more astronauts killed. That obviously can't keep happening. How do you take a situation that is that highly charged with emotion, not to mention the future of manned space, at the very least from the United States of America and everything that goes along with that, all the industry and everything goes along with that? You're saddled with helping that turn around. Where do you even start?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I got to tell you in this part of my career it was easy for me, if you could think of it that way because my entire role was technical leadership.
Speaker 3:It was not on a cultural part at this point A few years later, based on this experience and how that went, in my role in it, I had an opportunity to affect the culture itself.
Speaker 3:At this point, the program management, namely Wayne Hale and John Shannon.
Speaker 3:They looked really hard at the accident investigation reports and what they were saying had been wrong with the process and the culture, the way certain decisions were being made without rigor, and they went to work on that.
Speaker 3:Meanwhile, while they were doing that, my job was to figure out how do we inspect the outside of the spacecraft and how do we repair it, and how do we get astronauts to all parts of the outside of the spacecraft to repair it in the first place, since that didn't exist and the repair has to be able to survive entry heating. So for that part, I will tell you as a leader, you know, and in fact I would have told you then wow, my leadership job is hard. It's the hardest to do to ever be, because all parts of that problem were considered impossible. And when I was asked to lead the team to solve those problems, I was told we expect that in a couple of months you're going to come back and report out that it's not solvable and then we are going to accept that risk and move on without being able to inspect the outside of the vehicle.
Speaker 3:Wow Repair.
Speaker 2:I want to. I want to cut in real quick. I want to cut in real quick. So much to unpack with what you've been saying here. For as far as everybody relating to your own life, your own business or whatever notice you got to look for the details. The devil's in the details, even if it's for yourself. What's causing you these self-doubts, these excuses you're coming up with, these fears. Sometimes we just look at the big things. Maybe it's something smaller you really need to look at, or within your company, for your company comeback. You need to inspect all of these things and listen to everybody, including the line people that have data and a focus that you may not have.
Speaker 3:So I will tell you, I agree Absolutely. I will tell you in this case and it hasn't been written or talked about, in my opinion, fully accurately, because the general portrayal to the public and, in fact, a lot of NASA, is coming to accept this all the time from people that didn't live through this, but the common knowledge now is oh well, the people down at the line level they knew this, and it was managers at the top that weren't listening, which is apocryphal. It's not actually true. Were there one or two engineers that were, that were raising hell about this? That some other action needed to be taken? Yes, one in particular, though, had a reputation for flight after flight being the, the, the guy who cried wolf. So you have to ask yourself wow, how do you take that that seriously when the same guy, in fact, is quoted in one of the books on the accident saying I really didn't know what should be done. I really didn't know what the problem was. I just felt like we weren't doing something that we should have been doing. I've got a lot of teams. I'm not sure how I would have been able to use that input. However, what is accurate is by the time of the Columbia accident, and it happened before that and it had been coming for a few years.
Speaker 3:The management team became less and less willing to ask the question why? Why is this an okay thing to do? Why do I think I know this? And it became more and more the norm, I wouldn't say the culture, although culture kind of went down this path. Right Organization with a history of making very rigorous decisions. It became more and more easy, in great part because we had been so successful and had done so well, and the flights themselves had gotten longer and more complicated and we still kept knocking them out of the park, doing this really difficult job, making it look easy.
Speaker 3:And with that confidence comes a certain amount of arrogance. And the insidious part of this is it's easy to not be aware of it. You don't realize that you're not asking why on all these things. You don't really realize that hey, look, I'm the 900-pound gorilla at the head of the table. I've heard all the inputs. I know what the right answer is. I don't want to hear any more talk. Let's move on.
Speaker 3:And over time, when you get to that point, all the people who work for you who, by the way, also look up to you, they don't just have to fear you and not tell you what you need to know. Sometimes they realize you are the smartest guy in the room. So if you don't need any more data, even if the rest of us don't really get it, we'll go with you, boss, and I would say there was a strong element of that, and we had been moving so fast on so many things for so long, anytime when the NASA budget was being reduced. So missions were becoming more complex and we were told to do more of them at a higher rate with less money Faster, better, cheaper. In fact, that's what we call it faster, better, cheaper. And, as most good engineers know, you can't get all three usually.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 3:You can get two of the three, not all three. You choose.
Speaker 3:We tried to do all of them, and what would happen is then the community. Because you choose. We tried to do all of them and what would happen is then the community. Because we wanted to support the boss. We knew that the senior management didn't have more money, but we got to keep flying. There were some things that we didn't take forward that we should have because we realized, well, this isn't on the program manager's radar and if it's not on his radar, he's not going to give us budget to do more analysis or more tests. So let's just forget this and let's move on to the stuff that we know he takes seriously, which is how incrementally the organization culturally starts accepting things without the rigor that we once did. And the hard part really is before you can then listen to those guys closer to the hardware or on the line. You have to change that mindset in the team that it's okay to ask why. It's not just okay. It's incumbent upon us to ask why we're going to take a risk, we're going to accept some in-flight anomaly? Okay, why?
Speaker 3:What's our rationale. Is it because we really want to or we really need to? The schedule's getting tight, it's going to cost us money, or is it? No, it's because I understand that risk. Here's what I understand, here's why it's a good risk to take, and I know, or we know, that if we take this next action, we still can accomplish the mission or protect the people who have trusted us with their lives. Ask why. And if I'm the boss and I make a decision that you on the team don't think we're ready yet to make, or my logic isn't sound, you're expected, in fact, need to be empowered to ask me why, and I need to be able to answer it. It can't just be because I'm the boss and I get to say so, at least not on the things that matter.
Speaker 2:And I think this is critical.
Speaker 3:I would learn later it all matters.
Speaker 2:It all matters and I think this is really critical from the corporate standpoint too, and I know you do a lot of corporate speaking. That's what your book addresses, et cetera. It's these lessons applied to business and I hope everybody's listening from that standpoint and for this honor to other of your friends in business, because these are critical points. If your company needs to have a comeback and many of the companies out there right now do many of the organizations, philanthropic organizations, non-profits need to have their own comeback and these are some of the steps to make it happen. What are some of the other steps that you took when you were doing all of this, paul?
Speaker 3:You know, when it came to solving the quote impossible technical problems which, for the record, if they had been impossible we couldn't have solved them, which, by the way, I will also say. So we started that work in February. We started bringing in the recommendations or recommended actions to actually solve each part of that problem by mid-May, end of May or so, not more than about three months. And within two or three months after that we had nailed all of it with one kind of gray area and that's how to repair one very specific dicey part of the wing, and we had options for that. It just wasn't as rock solid as the rest. So, three to five months and we had all the impossible stuff solved.
Speaker 3:And for me, as a leader, I just had to carve the different parts of the problem up and there were different areas of expertise that we needed to weigh in and solve them. So I carved the problem into pieces that each of those areas of expertise and the experts in them could then focus just on those. And then, as they would come back to me, and in fact almost across the board, the best experts we had in each part of the various problems that we had to solve came back to me at first and said, yeah, that's not possible, we can't do it, oh wow. And so my pushback on them is tell me why, tell me what the hurdle is, and then let's talk about how do we approach it without having to clear the impossible hurdle.
Speaker 2:Do me a favor. Do me a favor. I'm going to jump in Repeat that that was huge. Say it again.
Speaker 3:Tell me why you think something's impossible.
Speaker 3:What, specifically, is the technical hurdle? I'm not telling you that you're wrong. Tell me what that hurdle is and now let's see if we come up with an approach to solve it that doesn't require us going over that impossible hurdle, because if it is impossible, it's impossible. Let's put looking at the impossible solution and find ways to solve it differently. And we did, case by case, and in fact and this is an important point for me in a learning lesson as a leader, it wasn't me asking them those questions and then I realized what the answers were Across the board. This was true in the accident investigation and it was true in this return to flight effort. This was true in the accident investigation and it was true in this return-to-flight effort.
Speaker 3:The guys who told me, from my experience and expertise, this is not possible each one of them was the one that eventually came back and said I get this. This is how we're trying to solve it in the impossible way, and try to work around that. What do we have to change in the environment? What do we have to change in the ground rule, in our approach to this? That doesn't require that impossible. Whatever that impossible thing is, let's go around it. It's those experts that, after enough of those type sessions, came back and said I got it, I know how to do this.
Speaker 3:And we didn't do it in one great big you know fell swoop. It was little incremental pieces that we put together and now this part of the problem solved. More incremental pieces. Put those together. Now this part of the problem solved Because little solvable pieces we can wrap our minds around. Even a hundred solvable pieces you sit back and look at and you can be overwhelmed. Carve it down into small pieces, get the impossible solutions out of your way and try to actually solve the problem in some other way. One of the things I love Eliminate the impossible condition.
Speaker 2:One of the things I love to ask is when people come up to me well, there's no way, it can't be done. There's no way. So, okay, I get that. All right, if there was a way, what would it be? And for some reason, paul, for some reason, their brain shifts and they go. Well, I guess if there was a way, it would be. I'm like, oh my God, there it is Same thing, If you could.
Speaker 3:just. Well, it's like this problem If we could just do this, then I could solve that problem. Okay, well, what does it take to do that? Well, if we were going to do that, then we would also have to do these tests and develop this capability. So, okay, what does it take for us to do that? Well, we would have to do these things and a week later we would be at work.
Speaker 2:Isn't it funny. It really is about asking the questions, asking the questions, asking the questions.
Speaker 3:Ignore the can't be done, just ask the questions and they can come up with solutions themselves. So I'll tell you that when that effort and that effort, by the way, was almost two and a half years From the time we started that work right after the Columbia accident the time we flew the next shuttle was about two and a half years right after the Columbia accident. The time we flew the next shuttle was about two and a half years Now. Most of our work in nailing down the solutions to those problems we were done within about six months, at least the early, you know, pathfinder work. And then it was another year or more to actually turn that into real flight hardware, real flight software, and get it tested and proved to be on the shuttle so that we could fly it on that very next flight. But it all went swimming. It was great. As you know, we went back to flying shuttles. It was still hard. We still had to pay very close attention to little details.
Speaker 3:The community, the broader shuttle community, bigger than just my flight control community, had definitely taken to heart that notion that we have to ask why, we have to have rigorous answers to those questions on everything that we do Now. From that experience I ended up becoming director of mission operations over the course of the next two years or so and then in that role actually even before that as deputy director I worked with my predecessor, melanie Mallon-Flint, and he had been concerned about some problems not with the rest of NASA culture, not that they didn't have their challenges but you know, you fix what you can fix. So we wanted to fix what was in-house first, yeah, and he saw things in-house in the mission operations organization that he didn't understand. That looked like we're doing things, because this is where we've always done them. It's the good old boy network. There's some things that we say we're very rigorous about that we're not. There's other things that we don't have documented, but we are very rigorous about it and we spent a very focused effort over the course of a couple of years analyzing that and working as a team In fact I'd say we. Alan was part of that process for about six months and then he handed it off to me when I replaced him as director of mission operations and all of my direct reports who had been all Alan's direct reports we kept focusing on those same things.
Speaker 3:What is it about us that makes us uniquely capable? What makes the performance of our organization different than other similar organizations in what we do? How do we answer those questions? And over time we came to realize, as a management team, all of those very things that Alan was the first one to say out loud.
Speaker 3:You don't challenge the culture internally. That's disloyalty to the team, it's disloyalty to the guys that came before us. You know, in our case, you know, chris kraft and gene kranz put us on the moon. How dare you say right culture, is that right? Yeah, but we let some, we let some bad behaviors creep in, just as the show program had leading up to columbia. We saw similar things inside mission control. The difference was we care I shouldn't say we cared, they didn't care. It's not fair. We saw it and the fact that we saw it, we care enough to not ignore it and just assume that we are the gods of man's spaceflight. This stuff doesn't matter, which I will admit to you that for a NASA engineer, especially for somebody who spent a career in mission operations, right, the way we would refer to that is we took the touchy-feely bullshit serious.
Speaker 3:We had been trained not to I mean, it wasn't like I came up with that term myself. We were told hey, don't forget to dance with the one that brung you. You're really good at what you do because of your rocket science. All that touchy-feely bullshit doesn't matter, and what we realized was you know, that's the very stuff that got in the shuttle program's way that led to Columbia, stuff that got in the shuttle programs way that led to columbia. That is the very thing that we have now let get in our way inside the mission operations organization. Yeah, so I think to a great extent my experience during the return to flight uh, helped, helped make me, I think, um more attuned to seeing this and not blowing it off because it's not technical, it's not the rocket science, and so I don't care. I'm the head guy at the head of the table, so I get to make decisions and I don't really care about that stuff.
Speaker 2:Well, there's a lot of smart people at NASA, but the bottom line is they're people, and, of course, the words that's the way we've always done things around here are probably the most dangerous words in all of business, and NASA as well. Wouldn't you say things when they?
Speaker 3:established some process actually had a reason to do it that way, but then you kind of forget about it and you just kind of keep doing the same thing because that's the way you've always done it. Well, if that's what you're always going to do, then sure, keep doing it that way.
Speaker 3:But, as Marshall Goldsmith would say well, got you here, won't get you there, that's it. So you got to think real hard about it. And it's that mindset of just looking in and just assuming well, this is what we've always done, so this is how we'll always do it. That's one of the ways you creep along and stop asking the whys, stop having the rigor, because, well, we know it's right, we know we're good because we're mission operations and everything we do is gold. Well, no, that's the recipe for the next accident is going to be our fault. We can't let that happen. And so we learned how to do things like how do you enable all of the actually anybody at any level of the management, or even at the working level in the mission operations director? We went far enough that it was easy for anybody at any level to raise their hand and say Paul, I think what you just said was wrong. I think we need to come back and have that conversation again. And they knew they weren't risking their career to do it.
Speaker 3:In fact, the ones that would be at risk are the ones that, after they let me screw something up afterwards, say in the hallway well, that was wrong, we all knew that was going to be a mistake. I guess Paul was the only one that didn't know. That's the guy that I'm going to fire, not for saying that, but for not having the courage to speak up if he actually knew. And the way you get there is get everyone aligned on our core purpose as an organization. In fact, I have a speech that I first gave a number of years ago. That's called Lead Proudly to Failure. And it's all about this point. And that is forget being proud of who we are. Be proud of how we do what we do In the case of mission operations. We exist to protect the astronauts, accomplish the mission and not damage the hardware. That's it.
Speaker 2:That's our entire job there you go, and then wrapped around.
Speaker 3:That is now. How do we do business in a way that we make sure that we're making right decisions for right reasons? We're not letting opinion creep in or we don't have the courage to speak up because the upper management has said they want this to happen, but we think that's the wrong thing.
Speaker 3:We'll say that it's incumbent upon us to say that, just like in the control room, that one smart engineer who could have kept me, as a flight director, from making a mistake that puts a crew at risk, if he doesn't speak up, it's not my fault. I was dumb enough, I didn't know we were making a mistake. The one guy in the room didn't speak up. He didn't learn what our culture is all about and the culture there and this is what we really learned. It's just kind of the magic that I helped bring from the control room into our management ranks although, again, to be fair, alan was the one that got us to see this in the first place. So I like giving credit where credit's due.
Speaker 2:Another big point, right right there.
Speaker 3:But the whole idea that we have to have the courage to speak up and say I know we are doing a mistake and if every one of us has the courage to do that, accidents like Columbia, accidents like Challenger are significantly less likely to happen, as are other things that are perhaps less impressive in other businesses. I actually had somebody ask me in an audience one time how does this apply to my business? Because we don't have rockets, we're not going to blow up rockets or kill astronauts. I said, well, is it possible? And actually the person who's asked me this was in their business office.
Speaker 3:I said do you have business processes in your company that, if you don't manage them correctly, you could impact cost to customers, lose customers over your costs or your mismanagement of money, maybe even put your company out of business? Oh yeah, that could happen. But there you go. My guess is, to your company that's going to feel just as traumatic as losing your astronauts. So you have to frame it in that way. What are the losses? We can't afford to do, and are we willing now to lose fear of those, to give us the courage to speak up and say something that would otherwise make me uncomfortable to say?
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely, and along with that, though, you've got to be the leader that allows that to happen. You're confident enough in yourself that you create the culture. That that's okay. You don't think it's questioning your leadership or your knowledge or your skill. It's doing the right thing.
Speaker 3:And you know and the hard part there is, it has to be. That message has to be sent and demonstrated from the top down. You cannot bubble that up from the bottom, because power sits at the head of the table. Everybody knows it. Even if, as a leader, you're not beating everybody over the head with it, it doesn't change the fact that the dynamic in the room is you have the power to get everybody promoted. You have the power to move money in the organization to approve programs, cancel programs into projects, whatever that is, and it does affect the dynamic.
Speaker 3:But you can, in fact, if you're very deliberate about this every time you engage with your team, send that message down. It's okay for any of you to tell me that. If you think I'm making a mistake and I am expecting you to weigh in on every decision we make which doesn't mean every one of you is expected to be an expert at all things Not realistic and it's not even necessary but if you have a point of view on it or there's some part of it that it just doesn't click for you doesn't seem like we're making the right decision, say it. It'll enable the experts around the team to then weigh in and answer the male and answer the wise, and then, once we've done that, let's move on and let's get to that next decision. You can do that as a leader, but, boy, it takes discipline every single day to do that because what?
Speaker 3:they are looking for, whether they're conscious of it or not. Is that indication of? Well, he may say he wants that, but did you see how he raped that guy over the coals? Who dared to say that to him or, worse, fired somebody who challenged him on something.
Speaker 2:Then it'll never happen again. They'll never bring it up again. We're getting near the end of our time, I'm sorry to say so. I know there's going to be a lot of NASA and space enthusiasts watching this, so for them specifically, nasa's role has changed. Briefly, what is NASA's role now? Has it really changed or hasn't it? What do you see?
Speaker 3:You know it's kind of a mixed bag. You know NASA is still developing new its own flight hardware, new big rocket, new big spacecraft. When I say they are developing, they are managing the development project, but, like most NASA equipment, it's being built by companies like Boeing and Lockheed. They have different contract structure with some companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin, where NASA has a less hands-on role in the development and, in some cases, less hands-on role with the flight operations, and this is kind of a new thing that's getting the attention of the federal government. Maybe we should be doing less, not just in NASA. Maybe we ought to go back and be more like that in some of the DOD work. To be fair, though, the DOD tried some of this in the operational environment 20 years ago, 30 years ago, and found out in a hurry. They lost all kinds of expertise and found themselves not in a good position to manage what some of those people were doing because of that, and they had to take steps back away from it.
Speaker 3:The real problem that NASA's dealing with is, over the decades, their development programs became extraordinarily expensive with these big cost plus contracts, but I would say, as a former NASA guy, that largely happened because NASA didn't manage them.
Speaker 3:Well, nasa didn't hold the contractor's feet in the fire to deliver on contract, deliver on cost or on schedule. They kept giving them high award fees anyway, because we're all family. You got to take care of the family and you get what you incentivize in the contract. If NASA had done a better job managing those contracts, they would not have had that same runaway cost growth. If they did, on some program, they had options to end that contract and start again, which they also didn't want to do for other reasons. And it's not easy to do that. But if you're never willing to take any of those steps, then of course costs are going to go out of control and the contractor performance may go downhill. Okay, I have said for some time, you don't solve that by just stepping back and saying, hey, industry, you just do develop all of it and go fly home right, right, so you were managing those contracts with it, so we are unfortunately out of time.
Speaker 2:This is fantastic stuff and I know especially I mean there's all the space folks that are watching this, listening to this, are going to love the space details and the business people and team members are going to love the leadership principles. What's just something to leave everybody with as we close down for the day.
Speaker 3:You know, if I was going to sum it all up and I've said this a few times already, but if I would sum it all up, the most important thing that I learned to take very seriously every day as a leader was ask myself why, on every decision, ask the people working for me, make recommendations, why, and make sure they can ask me those same whys and hold myself accountable to be able to answer those whys. And if I can't, or if we can't, maybe we're not ready to take that risk.
Speaker 2:Huge advice at the end of this podcast. I know, once again, there's a lot of people out there, first of all, whose lives need to come back, whose businesses need to come back. They're part of a charitable organization, maybe a civic club or something that needs a comeback, and I think that Paul's words there are absolutely critical all the way through here. So go back, listen to this again if you need to take notes. Ask the questions. Why change the culture? Allow people to speak up, and then you can have your own Comeback Chronicle.
Speaker 1:So that's it for today's episode of the Comeback Chronicles. Head on over to Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen and subscribe to the show. One lucky listener every single week that posts a review on Apple Podcasts will win a chance in the grand prize drawing to win a $25,000 private VIP date with Terry O Fossum himself. Be sure to head on over to ComebackChroniclesPodcastcom and pick up a free copy of Terry's gift and join us on the next episode.