Bryan.oconnor
- 1. Challenging Assumptions (The Role of Healthy Skepticism In NASA Program Management) PM Challenge 2008 Bryan O’Connor Chief, NASA Safety and Mission Assurance
- 2. Mission Success Starts With Safety Safety Quote of the Day Life moves pretty fast, if you don't stop and look around once in a while, you might miss it. Ferris Bueller 6 Feb 07
- 3. Mission Success Starts With Safety Common Theme: Not enough “why?” • Mishap investigations: board did not get to root cause • Failure investigations: team found proximate cause, changed out bad hardware, but stopped short of knowledge needed to prevent future recurrence • Operational anomaly investigations: used dated models for critical decisions…no time to revalidate • Option trades: compared apples to oranges without question • Design studies: invoked historical data without caveats or context • Risk studies: treated numbers like absolutes…no discussion of assumptions, limitations or uncertainties 6 Feb 07
- 4. Mission Success Starts With Safety Skepticism as a Cultural Habit There is no harm in doubt and skepticism, for it is through these that new discoveries are made Richard Feynman 6 Feb 07
- 5. Mission Success Starts With Safety Healthy Skepticism…(Core Values) • Skepticism leads to a healthy result – Mission objectives are accomplished – Team can go home to their families intact (Safety) – Taxpayers are served as they deserve (Integrity) • Healthy skepticism enables a healthy environment – Professional (Excellence) – Respectful (Teamwork, Integrity) – Communications (Safety, Teamwork) – “Safety culture” (Safety, Teamwork, Excellence) – “Learning organization” (Excellence) – “Engineering curiosity” (Excellence) 6 Feb 07
- 6. Mission Success Starts With Safety Cynicism vs. Skepticism The skeptic doesn’t trust the analysis… the cynic doesn’t trust the analyst Today’s Briefer A cynic is not merely one who reads bitter lessons from the past, he is one who is prematurely disappointed in the future Sidney J. Harris 6 Feb 07
- 7. Mission Success Starts With Safety What We Need on Our Team Optimistic Pessimists or maybe Pessimistic Optimists who are Fearless Communicators 6 Feb 07
- 8. Mission Success Starts With Safety Common Communications Barriers • Language (literal and figurative) • Technology (not enough…too much) • Regulatory Limits (security, export control, privacy, etc) • Volume (wheat and chaff) • Human Limitations (pride, forgetfulness, cynicism, fear, communication skills) • Organizational Competitiveness (knowledge is power) • Time: “who has time to go over the lessons learned?” 6 Feb 07
- 9. Mission Success Starts With Safety Lessons Learned: Why Bother? No one wants to learn by mistakes, but we cannot learn enough from successes to go beyond the state of the art. Henry Petrosky 6 Feb 07
- 10. The System Must Support the Skeptics • Good: ops team questioned LCC rationale • Bad: absent right rationale, ops team manufactured wrong rationale • Mishap Board recommended team training and updating LCCs • Corrective action plan called for inserting rationale next to LCCs • JSC Mission Ops follow up: insert rationale with flight rules for real time access
- 11. Mission Success Starts With Safety Examples of Healthy Skepticism • Ask the risk analyst to present uncertainties • Ask for verification of a catastrophic hazard control • Take the time to read draft change board minutes • Ask Engineering to review assumptions inherent in rarely used damage model before the mission • Challenge the rationale for an unusual test request • Ask “why” one more time after the analyst proposes “root cause” • Ask that rationale be readily available for all new requirements Be skeptical of this rationale: “Because that’s the way we always do it” “Because that’s the way we always do it” is not a good rationale! 6 Feb 07
- 12. Mission Success Starts With Safety GITTERDUNN… 6 Feb 07