Save Your Company by Listening

On January 28th, 1986, the nation watched a tragedy. Shuttle Challenger exploded shortly after takeoff.

The investigation found it was due to a fault in the O-rings. In the cold of the morning, they failed to seal the connection between the external tank and the solid rocket booster.

This fault, however, was first reported in 1977—almost 10 years prior to the incident.

Nobel prize winner Richard Feynman was instrumental in bringing this to light.

He found it quite rapidly after the formation of the presidential commission setup to investigate the tragedy.

How quickly?

The day after.

The day after the founding of the presidential commission, Feynman’s notes show there was evidence the O-rings were the culprit.

What ensued was a series of “following procedure,” posturing, and other such common-place droll of meetings, presentations, etc.

But Feynman talked to the engineers and those who did the work.

He found they knew what was wrong, had been speaking up about it for years, but that management had preferred to wear their “manager hat” and look good instead of their “engineering hat” of what was right.

Management chose to favor results over reality.

They stopped putting out embers and hoped fires would never happen.

This drove a rift in NASA’s culture and culminated in the death of the Challenger crew.

His theory is that after NASA’s unified vision of getting a man to the moon and back, the promise of what NASA could produce had to be oversold and exaggerated.

This started the downfall.

Though his theory isn’t widely accepted, consider this:

What company name could be substituted for NASA?

Does this not sound like the story of Boeing and its Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 from January 2024, where the door plugs weren’t securely fastened?

Or the story of Southwest scheduling crisis of 2022 where many were stranded for days on end? Story after story came out about pilots, attendants, and more warning the company of the scheduling woes.

What about the story of Enron? Were there no warning signs from the workforce and deaf ears from management?

What about your company?

The question isn’t whether your company is doing what Feynman perceived to be NASA’s undoing.

The question is, is your company even better than NASA at making sure the problems of your company are heard by those who do the work?

The consequences of missed warnings in your company aren’t likely to result in the catastrophe that NASA faced in 1986.

But the impact of those misses affects your company, regardless of whether you believe or feel them.

So how do you fix it?

You listen.

Communicate with everyone in your company.

Remember a healthy part of communication is listening with an intent to understand.

The Healthy Company Framework’s third principle is Know What You’re Doing.

This third principle, built after the creation of The Foundation and the preparation of the Two-Part Epoxy, is how you can make sure your organization continues to communicate with itself.

What does this do?

It equips the individual to communicate horizontally about the work with their coworkers as the work is completed.

As a leader, you might not care about this, but it’s critical to the ongoing success of your business.

What you should care about is the vertical communication.

The Framework’s third principle enables vertical communication between employees and managers.

It further enables communication from managers to strategic decision makers.

It allows business owners to be in touch with the problems the front line may be screaming about.

If you really want to know what’s going on in your company, you must listen to those doing the work.

This is how you prevent issues from getting out of hand.

Consider a history where the mention of the “Challenger Shuttle” isn’t associated with “tragic accident.”

Consider how nice it would be to have January 28th, 1986 and the name Challenger be just another forgotten mission.

Consider the value it is for your business when another day goes by, business as usual, and everyone goes home happy.

The Healthy Company Framework is a business methodology that’s designed to harness what you’re doing well today and reinforce it with a Framework that allows you to have the company you’ve been working towards while giving you time and peace back into your life.

Below is a series of excerpts from Mr. Feynman Goes to Washington, by Richard P. Feynman, Caltech Engineering and Science, Fall 1987.

I encourage you to read these excerpts and investigate whether your work conversations, concerns, or defenses sound like the ones below.

And, if they do, ask yourself which side of the conversation you’ve been on.

The complete article can be found here: https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/3570/1/Feynman.pdf

• “NASA had developed an attitude: If the seals leaked a little and the flight was successful, it meant that the seal situation wasn't serious. Therefore, the seals could leak and it would be all right - it was no worse than the time before.”

  • “("It flew before, so it must be OK." Try playing Russian roulette that way: You pull the trigger and it doesn't go off, so it must be OK to do it again, right?)”

• “…the engineers knew there was something wrong with the seals, that they might have to fix the problem, and it might be expensive.”

• “I demonstrated that the rubber had no resilience whatever when you squeezed it at that temperature, and that it was very likely a partial cause of the accident.”

• “…the Thiokol-Marshall discussions [showed] the engineers never changed their minds; only the manager did, under pressure.”

• “NASA had no system for fixing the problem, even though engineers were writing letters like, "HELP!" and "This is a RED ALERT!" Nothing was happening. My question was: Does this lack of communication between engineers and management also exist in other places?”

• He found the engineer manager, who was previously an engineer, had very a very different understanding of the likelihood of failure than his engineers—by a difference of 1 in 100 failure rate versus 1 in 100,000!

• Management would play “the same game, just as in the case of the solid rocket boosters, of reducing criteria and accepting more and more errors that weren't designed into the device.”

• “When NASA was trying to go to the moon, it was a goal that everyone was eager to achieve. Everybody was cooperating… There was no problem between the management and the other people, because they were all trying to do the same thing.”

• “So my theory is that the loss of common interest - between the engineers and scientists on the one hand and management on the other - is the cause of the deterioration in cooperation, which, as you've seen, produced a calamity.”