Latest / ContraMinds Podcast - Unlocking Personal Growth and Professional Excellence / Roger Forsgren on Knowledge Management Lessons from NASA (#023)

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Roger Forsgren on Knowledge Management Lessons from NASA (#023) · ContraMinds Podcast - Unlocking Personal Growth and Professional Excellence

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, you have to determine is the data you're receiving, is it good data, is it correct data?
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_03: Am I making the proper kind of judgment?
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_03: And a lot of time an engineer will say, Well, here's the data, boom, we'll make the decision.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_03: Well, there's a lot more hidden stuff behind the data that you got to pull out.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_03: And that's what a historian does.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_03: And it really uh I realized once I became the chief knowledge officer and we were, you know, doing case studies and kind of under learning how to um gain knowledge and then share knowledge.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_03: I realized I was actually using my history degree.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_03: And I wish so much my father was alive.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_03: Could I say I I finally used my history degree, it finally paid off.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_00: In today's episode, we are in conversation with Roger Fosgren.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_00: Roger served as the Chief Knowledge Officer of NASA from 2013 to 2021.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_00: As CKO, he led NASA's knowledge management efforts, ensuring that the agency's workforce had access to critical knowledge needed for mission success.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_00: He also served as director of the NASA Academy of Program, Project and Engineering Leadership, internally known as Apple, the agency's education and training program in the fields of project management, systems engineering, engineering and leadership development.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_00: Over the course of his career, Roger has received multiple awards and honors, including NASA Silver Snoopy and the Manflight Awareness Award.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: Under his leadership, Apple was named the best academy in the world in 2015 by Human System International, a subsidiary of the Project Management Institute.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_00: In 2016, Roger and his team at Apple received NASA's Group Achievement Award for providing world-class training to the agency's project management and systems engineering communities.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_00: Roger most recently is the author of the book Lean Knowledge Management: how NASA implemented a practical KM program, where he lays out the principles, tactics, and strategies he implemented at NASA during his tenure as a chief knowledge officer.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_00: Roger is a student of history and believes that lessons of the past were the key to paving the road to the future.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: In this conversation, Roger talks to us about his career at NASA, the foundational ideas that underlie the practice of knowledge management, and why being at the intersection of history and engineering is a unique competitive advantage.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_00: As always, we have shared selected links in show notes for this episode on the Contraminds website.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_00: You can check it out at www.contramines.com forward slash blog.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_00: And now here is our conversation with Roger Foster.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_00: And we are live.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_00: So Roger, thank you so much for agreeing to be a part of Contraminds.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_00: Over the next uh couple of hours, we want to go through your career, your tenure at NASA, and the relationship between history and your take on knowledge management.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_00: So we have uh an amazing conversation lined up for our listeners, and I thank you so much for agreeing to be a part of this conversation.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, thank you for inviting me.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_03: I'm looking forward to it.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_03: Lovely.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_00: So, Roger, uh, my first question to you is that you have a very interesting comparison uh between the butterfly effect and a well-managed knowledge management program.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, can you explain this?
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_03: Sure.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_03: Um, in chaos theory, they talk about the butterfly effect, and it kind of originates, and it's very important to me because I happen to live in Florida.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_03: So there's a butterfly on the uh uh Atlantic coast near the Sahara Desert in uh Africa, and it can and this is where the area where the cold air and the warm air are starting to mix, and a little butterfly can fly by and kind of start mixing the air, and all of a sudden within weeks and months, that uh cold air and warm air mixture turns into a storm, it moves out into the Atlantic and it grows bigger and eventually ends up being a hurricane.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_03: So it just kind of shows the dramatic effect something small can have on a on uh you know on a big system.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_03: And I look at knowledge management the same way.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_03: It doesn't have to be a huge uh organization or it has to be a huge knowledge management, doesn't have to be a huge project with a huge budget to make uh some pretty incredible changes within an organization.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_03: I think we managed to do that at NASA.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_03: We we didn't have a giant budget, but we were smart with the money we had.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_03: We had some good people, and uh we just kind of focused on the technical workforce, and I think in a matter of years we were able to build up a uh uh a well-renowned knowledge management program and something that I think uh helped the NASA uh workforce and uh you know helped them do their jobs better.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_00: So since you since you mentioned NASA, uh so NASA is a world and an organization with hundreds of thousands of people working there.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_00: And when we talk about knowledge management, traditional sort of uh perspective on knowledge management is that it's something that needs to be done at an organization where there are tens of thousands of people or thousands of people, or it's a large, large organization.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, if you go by what people might think about, where the use of knowledge management might come in.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so my question, Roger, is how do you think about knowledge management when you're a CEO or a leader of a large organization vis-a-vis uh a founder who's running a rack tag bunch of guys out of a garage and ladies as well, uh trying to build a company?
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_03: Well, the neat thing about knowledge for any organization is it's free.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_03: You know, you you you have employees, uh, you've trained them, you spent a lot of money and time training them, and over the years, they've trained themselves.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_03: They've learned they've learned how to do their job better than the owner of the company does, or even their immediate supervisor or manager does, because they do it every day.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_03: And they learn the uh kind of inside scoop, what ways to make their job more efficient and more effective.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_03: And that knowledge is it's out there.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_03: And if you're the owner of a company or you're a manager of an organization, you have to realize that that knowledge and that ability for someone to do their job well and efficiently and effectively is sitting right in front of you and it's free.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_03: And if if that person happens to leave or retire or move on to another company, which they do a lot of times because they get gather this uh you know incredible amount of knowledge and they go to another competitor and share that knowledge with the competitor.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_03: I think if you're an owner of a company or no matter what size, or a manager of a group of folks, you have to realize that that knowledge is just sitting there waiting for you to gather and be able to share it uh and catalog it so that the next person can come along and be able to uh you know step right into that job function without going through years and years of training to get it.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_03: And a lot of times what happens, and I was speaking to uh I've spoken to quite a few people at different uh government agencies and and uh private companies where they have a person that has done a fantastic job their whole career, they've learned they've gathered all this knowledge, but if they haven't been able, they haven't shared it and they haven't been asked to share it, they retire, and then all of a sudden the organization's looking how how are we going to get this job done?
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_03: You know, where nobody knows how to do this, or nobody certainly knows how to do it as well as the person that has been doing it for the past 30 years.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_03: So they go out and they go out and hire the the retiree back as a consultant.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_03: And then this is this one-time free information is now costing them probably twice as much as it did when they uh you know before they lost this employee.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_01: Um Rajah, which gives me a very interesting follow-up question that uh uh that uh you talk about, and I found it very interesting, which is you take inspiration from history in building knowledge management.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_01: And that was something that uh I didn't see uh you know in many uh you know in many people who build knowledge management.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_01: And how do you see the connection between history and building a knowledge management uh in an enterprise?
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_03: Well, I'll give you a little bit of my background.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_03: Um, my first love is history.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_03: And um, my first college degree, I majored in history, and my father, yeah, I can remember uh when I told him I was gonna major in history, he said, Well, I mean, why would you do that?
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_03: You can't how are you gonna find a job with a history degree?
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_03: And I thought, well, you know, that's secondary.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_03: I love history and I want to learn history, and I'll think about a job later.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_03: And uh sure as heck he was right.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_03: When after I graduated, I couldn't find a job.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_03: Uh and uh it was at that point where I decided uh I have to go back, and I had a family at the time, and I had to, you know, support a family that I I have to get a career going.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_03: So I went back to night school uh to get an engineering degree, and uh I was happened to be lucky enough to uh to get hired back to hired at NASA.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_03: Um but I was hired in at the you know the lowest level.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_03: I was came in as an apprentice technician.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_03: And uh what I had to do is the next 10 years continue to go to night school to to earn my engineering degree and then eventually a master's degree.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_03: But I always at first when I started at NASA, I thought, wow, I I just wasted four years of my life getting a history degree, and my father was right, and it you know, he spent all that money for me to get my h history degree, and I I can never use it.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_03: But as I moved on through NASA and became an engineer and started working on a project team, and uh started getting into training and become the even become the chief knowledge officer at NASA, I realized how valuable my liberal arts degree was and how valuable my history degree was.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_03: Because I could look at things from a different angle from from a traditional technical-minded person.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_03: Um I I I I think I could see questions and and uh uh problems in a more uh uh global-like view, if you will, or a more diverse view.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_03: I could see it from different angles rather than just an engineer seeing things as uh you know right and wrong, on or off, uh black or white.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_03: I could see things in more of a gray area.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_03: Uh and that's what life is.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, and engineers, when you're dealing with machinery and and and uh uh equipment, it it is just a light, it is black and white, on off, uh resistance, no resistance, that kind of thing.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_03: But in life and with people, it's not that way.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_03: And we're working on project teams and and different personalities.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_03: Uh I I think having a history degree and a liberal arts degree gave me a great advantage, uh moving up the ranks uh within NASA because I I could understand questions and problems a little bit more thoroughly, I think.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_03: So anyhow, the uh with a history degree when I be first became the chief knowledge officer, it was like I I was researching and doing some case studies, and I found myself, you know, I'm actually doing I'm actually being like a historian.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_03: I'm I'm trying I'm evaluating uh engineering problems and engineering disasters from a historian's point of view rather than from an engineering point of view.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_03: And I I read this book, it was called Um Engineering in the Mind's Eye by Eugene Ferguson.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_03: And in there he has a quote where he says, and I this kind of changed my whole attitude uh uh in knowledge management and dealing with people and dealing with teams and understanding engineers a little bit better.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_03: But he said engineers need to be continually reminded uh that nearly all engineering failures result from faulty judgments rather than from faulty calculations.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_03: And our NASA engineers, they know their numbers, they know their math, they know their analytics, but it's the decision making, you know, you have to determine is the data you're receiving, is it good data, is it correct data, am I making the proper kind of judgment?
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_03: And a lot of time an engineer will say, well, here's the data, boom, we'll make the decision.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_03: Well, there's a lot more hidden stuff behind the data that you got to pull out, and that's what a historian does.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_03: And it really uh I realized once I became the chief knowledge officer and we were you know doing case studies and kind of under learning how to um gain knowledge and then share knowledge.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_03: I realized I was actually using my history degree, and I wish so much my father was alive.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_03: Could I say I I finally used my history degree, it finally paid off.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_01: No, which brings me um to a very interesting point that you also make.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, you talk about some great history uh events uh being lost because the knowledge was not captured, right?
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and I think that's a very interesting perspective, uh, which is almost bringing the soul to knowledge management, I would say.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_01: And uh, you know, I think that's a very interesting example.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_01: Can you share with us some historical events where probably knowledge was not captured and it just got lost?
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_01: And that's something that you know all of us can learn from.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, sure.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_03: Um the pyramids, you know, pyramids were built thousands of years ago.
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_03: They had they hadn't invented the the pulley yet.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_03: How do they build these pyramids?
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_03: And why don't we it's not like we're gonna build pyramids again, but we just want to understand, you know, uh what kind of uh technology they had and what what kind of creativity, innovation that these folks had that they were able to build pyramids, that you know, frankly, right now, uh it would be a major project for with everything that we have, all the machinery and the techniques and the civil engineering, it it wouldn't be easy to build a pyramid.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_03: And these folks did it thousands of years ago without the use of a pulley, and and you know, that information was lost, and nobody knows why.
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_03: And it's this you know, another issue uh thing is uh, and I was again, like I said, history is my first love.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_03: So my free time, I I like to read about history.
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_03: And I was, excuse me, I was listening to uh to a lecture on the uh uh uh uh the plague in in Europe during the 1500s and the 1600s and how it happened and it completely transformed humanity.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_03: I think uh uh Europe lost over a third of its population, and with that they lost a lot of knowledge.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_03: They you know it it ended up where uh because of the way society was structured, uh you had guilds of shoemakers, guilds of you know, uh farmers, guilds of leather people and and things like that.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_03: And then the plague would go through a town and wipe out this entire guild of shoemakers, and then two or three years later, nobody knows how to make a shoe, you know, and they have to relearn all this.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_03: And uh another thing is uh calculus.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_03: Everybody now believes that uh uh Sir Isaac Newton was the inventor of calculus, but there's also the thought that there was a j a German uh mathematician decades before uh, or uh actually a century before uh Sir Isaac Newton that had actually invented calculus, but he never shared it with anybody.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_03: They found some of his documents you know later, you know, decades or uh a century later and found that wow, he was doing calculus before Isaac Newton was.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_03: But he never shared the idea of calculus, he never published it.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_03: And then you have to get Sir Isaac Newton to come along almost a century later and reinvent something that somebody had already thought of, and they missed out on a hundred years of possibility of using calculus and engineering and building and and uh and even in uh you know philop philosophical talk and discussions.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_03: So there's all kinds of uh, and I go through them in the in the book uh Stonehenge is another one.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, the idea of Roman cement.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_03: Uh if you look at go through Europe, uh go through Rome and you see the Colosseum or any of the aqueducts, and you're like, my God, these things have been there for centuries.
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_03: And then you try to drive on one of our roads that was just paved two or three years ago and it's got chuck holes all over it, and you wonder how how how what did they do differently?
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_03: How can they, how can something like that still be um surviving uh uh centuries later, and we were having so much difficulty?
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_03: Well, the Romans had a certain recipe for their uh cement that enabled it to withstand uh variations in temperatures in the heat and cold, so it could expand and contract much better than the cement we have today.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_03: And we still don't really understand what that recipe was, and it was lost.
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_03: You know, the barbarians came in and and uh sacked Rome, they sacked the libraries, they sacked the churches, or any place where there's uh depositories of uh knowledge were just wiped out.
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_03: And they were, you know, it it affects us to this day.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_00: Roger, uh, while I was reading the book, uh you had you had this very interesting uh passage where you were saying that, you know, when you were getting into knowledge management, you had read many academic style books on knowledge management, uh, but you found them very unnecessarily complicated and impractical.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so I want to know why you feel this way.
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_00: And uh you also made a very interesting point about uh the difference between a traditional text and a blueprint.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_00: So you were seeking blueprints, which is very interesting from an engineer's perspective.
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_00: So, can you talk a little bit about uh why did you not like the dry academic texts and why were you seeking blueprints and what's the benefit of a blueprint compared to a text?
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I I I was uh can't tell you how many different uh forums I attended to try to build up a background in knowledge management.
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_03: Uh and I would sit there and it would get into an academic discussion.
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_03: And I'm I'm not an academia, I I uh I'm an engineer.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_03: I just want the information and the data, I want to consume it and absorb it and try to figure out and move forward and utilize that data.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_03: Well, I was getting a lot of uh data that I I just didn't understand.
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_03: And it it's not that it's bad data, or uh it's not that uh somebody was trying to you know bombast me with superfluous knowledge or something like that.
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_03: It was more of the fact that uh there's a place for academic research and then there's a place for practical um knowledge and getting a job done.
• 19:20
  SPEAKER_03: And I I have all the uh amount of uh uh respect for uh professors and and and folks in academia that are are studying and moving the industry, the knowledge management industry forward.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_03: But the kind of information I was getting from these sources would not interest the NASA workforce.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_03: The NASA workforce got a very difficult job.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_03: They're on the cutting edge of technology, they're given programs and projects to design and build when the technology isn't even built yet or isn't even understood, and they're supposed to take that, they're supposed to move that project forward and develop and invent and create the technology as they're moving along in the project.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_03: So, I mean that's a that's a pretty intense uh way to make a living.
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_03: And they come across different problems and and because people have been, you know, we've had so many different programs and projects, and understanding, like I said, we get the math right.
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_03: And it's very seldom we make a math error, but it's it's a decision-making process that we need to learn and build on.
• 20:21
  SPEAKER_03: And I think that's where uh with the MASA Technical Workforce needed a practical program, a practical knowledge management program, not an academic one.
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_03: They needed something where they can go to a uh what do we call our one-stop website where if they have a question or they want to search a little lessons in our database, they can do that.
• 20:42
  SPEAKER_03: If they want to uh learn more about decision-making skills, they can sign up for a course on decision making.
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_03: Uh there's just we we had to take this mountain of raw information and determine what the NASA Technical Workforce needs out of that mountain and therefore just kind of filter it and come up with uh what we consider to be critical knowledge.
• 21:07
  SPEAKER_03: And I uh the first step in what we to do that is to determine who your audience is.
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_03: And that NASA has uh we have 18,000 civil servants along with you know almost 60,000 contractors, and we have to kind of just determine of all those people who really moves NASA forward.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_03: And those are the engineers and the scientists on the program and project teams.
• 21:31
  SPEAKER_03: So we didn't need to ignore the people in IT or ignore the people in uh international relations or ignore these you know hundreds of other groups within the agency, but we had to just kind of be realistic and say uh who's really important, who's moving NASA forward?
• 21:46
  SPEAKER_03: And it it is the people down in the trenches that are doing the work on the program and project teams.
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_03: So once you determine who your audience is, and it for us it was a NASA technical workforce, once you get that in place, determine Learning how to siphon the enormous amount of information out there into critical knowledge becomes a whole lot easier.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_00: Which brings me to a follow-up question, which is I think you already touched upon it.
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_00: Now, NASA has multiple programs in its portfolio.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_00: You have your Mars Rover projects and your various probes and your jet engines.
• 22:20
  SPEAKER_00: So I want to sort of know how was knowledge management integrated into these programs, and what kind of support were you receiving?
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_00: And how did you really set it up?
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_00: And what were some challenges you faced?
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_03: Well, we're very fortunate because NASA management understands the importance of knowledge management.
• 22:42
  SPEAKER_03: And it maybe it's because you know NASA management is made up of engineers, and engineers have been on project teams for you know 10, 20, 30 years, and they've been through the you know the difficulties of making the same mistake that was made two years ago on another project on another center somewhere else, or uh so uh I've always been uh had the benefit of having NASA management support.
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_03: And also it's it was kind of um there was a committee that was formed by the uh US Congress to kind of oversee and advise NASA management on on how to uh you know how to get some of these huge programs and projects moving forward.
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_03: And one of their uh recommendations they came up with, and when a group that's appointed by Congress comes up with a recommendation, it's pretty much you know something you better you better look into and you better do.
• 23:38
  SPEAKER_03: And they came up with a recommendation about uh almost 10 years ago that NASA needs to concentrate on knowledge management and learning to share knowledge among the uh you know among the workforce.
• 23:49
  SPEAKER_03: So when you have that kind of support, it makes my job a lot easier because as any project manager knows, you're not gonna the most important thing you need initially on the project is is man upper management support.
• 24:05
  SPEAKER_03: If you don't have that, you're not gonna go forward.
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_03: So I was fortunate enough to have that kind of support.
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_03: And uh as far as the uh the the with every NASA program and project also has a requirement that they have to uh uh provide lessons learned when the program or project is over.
• 24:33
  SPEAKER_03: So it's it's kind of and it's not always followed, it's not always followed as as well as it should be.
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_03: But that became part of my job to make sure the uh program and projects understood the value of knowledge management and rather than you know shove something down their throat, made it more of a two-way street where we interacted and collaborated.
• 24:51
  SPEAKER_03: They understood the the value of it when I was able to uh you know to talk to them about the value, the real value of knowledge management, and how it's not just an unnecessary bureaucratic process that they have to go through at the end of their program or the project, but it's actually a valuable learning lesson for everybody on their project team.
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_03: And in the end, it not only can save uh you know a lot of engineering headaches and trying to figure out how to do something or why something went wrong, but it can actually save you a lot of money.
• 25:21
  SPEAKER_03: Let somebody else make the mistake and learn from it, and that you don't have to pay for that mistake.
• 25:26
  SPEAKER_03: That's somebody else has already paid for.
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_01: So, Roger, uh uh one of the things that uh you know you talk about is this Apollo 1 Challenger Columbia projects, which triggered the importance of knowledge management in NASA, and you also talk about a very deep connection between how knowledge management also transforms culture.
• 25:53
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
• 25:54
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, I I've never uh you know uh at least heard it uh you know heard it in forums because culture change and knowledge management is a very interesting correlation that you talk about.
• 26:06
  SPEAKER_01: So, talk to me about how did the culture change happen?
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_01: Because in some places you really talk about the fact that people don't even speak up when they know it's a mistake, right?
• 26:17
  SPEAKER_01: So, therefore, there is a I I really thought it was a very interesting point that you made, the importance of you know building culture and having a very deep connection with knowledge management.
• 26:28
  SPEAKER_03: Exactly, yeah, and I think that's one of the one of the biggest benefits knowledge management can bring to an organization is it gives you the flexibility and it empowers you uh to change a culture that needs that may need changing.
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_03: And in NASA's case, you know, NASA came into being at the at the beginning, uh, you know, the Cold War and after the Russians launched Sputnik, and then the whole American government and the uh American people were thought, oh my god, we're so far behind.
• 26:56
  SPEAKER_03: And President Kennedy sets a goal, we could barely get a rocket up in the air.
• 27:00
  SPEAKER_03: And all of a sudden he sets a goal that we're gonna land a man on the moon and bring, you know, return him safely to the earth.
• 27:05
  SPEAKER_03: My God, I think if you're a uh a NASA engineer and you have all of a sudden the entire, you have the president of the United States telling the entire world that you're gonna get, you're gonna land somebody on the moon, and you know, you you're just starting out.
• 27:19
  SPEAKER_03: And it I think NASA developed a, you know, and you have to in an organ uh situation like that, you develop a more of a military-like culture where you know NASA was given the resources, they were given plenty of money.
• 27:32
  SPEAKER_03: They at that back in the 60s during the Apollo program, the NASA budget was 4.4% of the United States budget.
• 27:39
  SPEAKER_03: That's a huge amount.
• 27:40
  SPEAKER_03: Today it's only four-tenths of one percent of the United States budget.
• 27:44
  SPEAKER_03: So Americans spend more money on pizza every year than they do in their space program or even dog food.
• 27:51
  SPEAKER_03: So uh, but back then the culture at NASA became we got to get this done one way or another, and they push things through, we're gonna make mistakes, but push things through because we got to get a man on the moon before the end of the decade.
• 28:05
  SPEAKER_03: And that kind of culture uh developed into what one you were talking about.
• 28:11
  SPEAKER_03: People were afraid to to to talk about mistakes because you know their whole vision is to move forward and and uh uh you can't make mistakes, or if you do, you you certainly don't want to publicize them.
• 28:25
  SPEAKER_03: And I think it came to a head, you know, it came certainly in a challenger uh tragedy.
• 28:30
  SPEAKER_03: Um the the the that shuttle, and again, it was not a uh analytical or a uh numbers equation that somebody messed up.
• 28:40
  SPEAKER_03: It was a decision-making process that somebody, you know, NASA manager um made the mistake, and uh it was publicized.
• 28:47
  SPEAKER_03: There was a uh presidential commission that reviewed it and everything was public, and and uh NASA promised that you know that they're gonna change their ways and it's not gonna happen again.
• 28:58
  SPEAKER_03: And uh they they pretty much kind of you know, I I think a perfect example of this is what they did with the Challenger debris once they uh recovered it from the ocean, is they buried it in a missile missile silo and covered it with a huge cement block so that nobody could ever see it.
• 29:16
  SPEAKER_03: Or it was just kind of like you know, shoving it under the rug and forgetting about it, and let's move forward.
• 29:22
  SPEAKER_03: And and you know, within a certain amount of time they went right back to the same old kind of uh uh you know culture that uh was successful in the past in getting to the moon, but all of a sudden times have changed, and and that's not the kind of culture an organization needs during the shuttle program.
• 29:39
  SPEAKER_03: And it once again uh Columbia happened.
• 29:42
  SPEAKER_03: Uh again, uh this was not a uh a math error, it was a decision-making error, and had to do with the foam strike, uh, you know, the the the wing of the uh Columbia and the uh you know the aftermath tragedy of that.
• 29:56
  SPEAKER_03: And this, you know, and again, uh there was uh President Bush at the time convened another uh presidential commission to study and figure out why, and again, it was the same reason.
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_03: And then in the report they came back and said that NASA just continually makes these same type of decision-making mistakes, and NASA has to reform.
• 30:16
  SPEAKER_03: And this time people were fired, people were uh you know moved to other jobs.
• 30:22
  SPEAKER_03: And I I think NASA took much more responsibility for it, and they implemented you know certain programs to make sure that this doesn't happen again, and one is called technical authority, and technical authority uh it it basically allows if if somebody's on a project team and they have a question whether it be you know an engineering, you know, design issue that they're not comfortable with, or uh maybe a project manager makes a health and safety issue that they're not comfortable with, well they have right now that they of course they bring it up to the project manager, and if the project, if he's still, if this person still doesn't come into an agreement with the project manager, it can go a step further.
• 31:03
  SPEAKER_03: And NASA will bring in a subject matter expert to review that question.
• 31:08
  SPEAKER_03: And the subject matter expert isn't paid by the project or the program, it's it's a totally objective person that comes in and reviews the request.
• 31:15
  SPEAKER_03: And if the person still, if the engineer on the project team still has some issues and and and wants to take it higher, it it can go to the center director, it can go all the way to the NASA administrator.
• 31:27
  SPEAKER_03: It can go to the uh NASA chief chief uh engineer, who happened to be my boss when I was the NASA chief knowledge officer, to review it, and then it can go to the administrator.
• 31:37
  SPEAKER_03: So there's a process in place that if somebody wants to make a decision that involves the uh health and safety of or or the uh you know uh program or project, you have alternatives.
• 31:52
  SPEAKER_03: You just you know, a project manager just can't say, no, I we're doing it my way or you know, my way or the highway.
• 31:57
  SPEAKER_03: That you know, that doesn't happen anymore.
• 31:59
  SPEAKER_03: And it and then that's you know has to do with the descending opinion.
• 32:03
  SPEAKER_03: Where uh and this is what when we started our knowledge management program, and this is how we changed uh helped change NASA's culture, is we took the ball and ran with it when it came to uh technical authority and descending opinion.
• 32:17
  SPEAKER_03: We incorporated that into our courses so that every NASA engineer understood exactly, you know, health and safety and the success of a mission or a project, um that's a that's an engineer's responsibility, ethical responsibility.
• 32:34
  SPEAKER_03: Uh and that you you have to talk up.
• 32:37
  SPEAKER_03: If you if you're uncomfortable with something, you know, we want you to be comfortable speaking about it and not afraid to speak up.
• 32:46
  SPEAKER_03: And so we make sure that we integrate that type of information into almost all our courses.
• 32:50
  SPEAKER_03: And I think what the really the most fundamental thing we did, and and again, I'm not trying to claim that our knowledge management program changed NASA's culture, but we helped change NASA's culture.
• 33:03
  SPEAKER_03: The only way you're going to change NASA's culture is upper management says, we're doing it, we're starting a new way, and they did that when they came up with uh the tech authority and the dissenting opinion.
• 33:13
  SPEAKER_03: But what we did to even demonstrate this further to the NASA workforce is we uh, and like I said, we've incorporated this in our courses, we developed case studies that you know make sure that this is prominent, but we came up with what we call the Columbia Tour.
• 33:31
  SPEAKER_03: And NASA has 10 uh uh engineering centers throughout the country.
• 33:37
  SPEAKER_03: And what we did is we brought some of the debris from the Columbia.
• 33:42
  SPEAKER_03: And let me back up a little bit.
• 33:44
  SPEAKER_03: After you I mentioned with Challenger, that debris was buried.
• 33:47
  SPEAKER_03: With the Columbia debris, that was taken and put almost into a museum-like setting in the vehicle uh in the VAB building at the Kennedy Space Center.
• 33:59
  SPEAKER_03: And every NASA engineer, if they get a chance to go to the Kennedy Space Center, is encouraged to go through there.
• 34:05
  SPEAKER_03: And it's a it's a really a very somber experience.
• 34:08
  SPEAKER_03: Uh I've been through there a couple of times, and our knowledge mon our knowledge management program helps fund uh this you know this uh Columbia Museum.
• 34:17
  SPEAKER_03: And when you come out of there, it it's almost like you've been through to a wake or a funeral.
• 34:23
  SPEAKER_03: You're really you you know, you can see the the landing gear, and it's still dripping red hydraulic fluid, and there's a pan underneath it.
• 34:31
  SPEAKER_03: You know, this is years and years later, and you can see the windows uh from the uh at the front of the shuttle, the uh frames that were that were uh you know just found.
• 34:43
  SPEAKER_03: And then you realize that these are the windows that the astronauts looked out of you know, the last moments of their life when they're trying when they were uh you know coming into deorbit.
• 34:53
  SPEAKER_03: And there was also some personal effects of some of the astronauts um that are on a table.
• 34:58
  SPEAKER_03: And I'll never forget there was one little um like a teddy bear like that.
• 35:05
  SPEAKER_03: I assume one of the astronauts' children, or it must have been a good luck charm or something that one of the uh a child somewhere gave one of the astronauts, and the astronaut took it aboard the shuttle.
• 35:17
  SPEAKER_03: And and there it is sitting there on a table uh with uh you know some other personal effects that they were found with the astronauts.
• 35:24
  SPEAKER_03: So it's a any any engineer that walks through there comes away with the uh idea that my job's important.
• 35:34
  SPEAKER_03: I have to I have to do my job well because I don't want to see this happen.
• 35:38
  SPEAKER_03: And you know, the shuttle was just a piece of machinery, but it held seven you know wonderful people on it that lost their lives that day and and seven families that mourned an entire you know nation that uh was upset by the tragedy.
• 35:52
  SPEAKER_03: And you know, you your specific job on a on a project team might not seem that important when but when you you know look at the possibilities of something that you're designing or something that you're assembling could go wrong and could cause a tragedy, you have to really um it puts a deeper aspect or deep deeper meaning in into your job.
• 36:13
  SPEAKER_03: And we wanted to convey that.
• 36:14
  SPEAKER_03: And we realize that most of the NASA workforce can't get to the Kennedy Space Center and it can't get through, you know, when you when you have 18,000 civil servants, 60,000 contractors, you're not gonna get them all through the uh you know the uh Columbia room where the where the uh debris is on display.
• 36:32
  SPEAKER_03: So we decided to take the debris to the centers and we uh brought some of the uh you know parts of the Columbia that were recovered, put them in a display case.
• 36:42
  SPEAKER_03: We went to the centers and we held a forum, almost a you know, a two, three-hour forum where we invite the entire center to participate.
• 36:50
  SPEAKER_03: We had great participation.
• 36:52
  SPEAKER_03: We had three, four, you know, 500 people come into an auditorium, uh, not just to see the uh artifacts from the uh shuttle tragedy, but also to we brought in speakers and the first one was really incredible.
• 37:04
  SPEAKER_03: We brought in the the the uh widow of one of the astronauts that was on the challenge, or on the Columbia rather.
• 37:11
  SPEAKER_03: And uh, you know, she said she just gave the most you know inspiring type of talk.
• 37:18
  SPEAKER_03: And she's still, you know, despite what happened to her husband, um, she's still part of the NASA family.
• 37:24
  SPEAKER_03: And as part of the NASA family, she wants to do everything she can to make sure something like this never happens again to a NASA astronaut and the NASA astronauts family and to the entire NASA workforce family.
• 37:35
  SPEAKER_03: And she just gave a wonderful talk about what uh you know what it meant to have her her husband be be an astronaut, what it meant to you know see him training and how much he loved the agency and how much he loved his job, and and then also you know the effect of the tragedy had on her and her family and children growing up.
• 37:54
  SPEAKER_03: So and then we bring in uh people who are at mission control uh during the uh you know, monitoring the Columbia as it came into deorbit and what their experiences was, and and we brought in people that were actually part of the uh recovery team uh that went out to Texas to comb through all the swamps and everything like that to try to discover or to try to recover some of the uh uh shuttle debris that had landed out there.
• 38:20
  SPEAKER_03: And I think what we wanted to make sure we did was bring the human aspect to the uh Columbia tragedy.
• 38:28
  SPEAKER_03: Everybody knows from an engineering standpoint, we all know what happened.
• 38:32
  SPEAKER_03: And it's not that difficult and it's not that complex, but the difficult and the complex thing is the the human aspect to it and the human aspect to your job and how critical your job is.
• 38:43
  SPEAKER_03: And like I said, the NASA culture changed from one of uh hiding the debris from the challenger and moving on and moving forward to one of openly talking about it, making sure that every NASA engineer is aware of it, and you know, actually bringing that debris out to the workforce and letting them see, you know, what happens when when uh you know your job isn't done correctly, what happens when an engineer doesn't speak up in a meeting where he he or she feels it's you know something uh there's a potential for a risk happening that needs to be mentioned.
• 39:20
  SPEAKER_03: And again, it it's the whole idea of helping and enabling NASA management to to change a culture to one that's uh more uh transparent and what one that where the opinions and the uh and the uh attitude of the NASA workforce is critical and important to them.
• 39:40
  SPEAKER_03: And actually, isn't that what knowledge management is about?
• 39:44
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, knowledge sharing, isn't that what at the heart of it is is really about um changing a culture, whether it be on a project team or within an entire organization.
• 39:55
  SPEAKER_03: It's about making something better.
• 39:58
  SPEAKER_03: And I I I I I'm real proud of the effect that our our knowledge management team had at NASA and helping NASA management do that.
• 40:06
  SPEAKER_01: Brilliant story, uh Roger.
• 40:07
  SPEAKER_01: Brilliant story, and uh to me, uh, you know, this evoked uh, you know, uh, I would say uh pictures in my head as you spoke.
• 40:18
  SPEAKER_01: I think that's really how this conversation and uh story that you said was very interesting.
• 40:24
  SPEAKER_01: The one question that I have, Roger, is uh one is the human aspect, the other is the rational engineering aspect, right?
• 40:32
  SPEAKER_01: So, so therefore, uh how do you connect both?
• 40:34
  SPEAKER_01: Because there's an emotional uh you know effect on knowledge management that happened, and then there is this whole engineering design aspect, which is extremely rational.
• 40:45
  SPEAKER_01: So uh, you know, how do you really uh you know connect both?
• 40:49
  SPEAKER_01: Because people then uh have to connect it for what you really talk about, which is not about return on investment, but it is return on mission success, right?
• 41:00
  SPEAKER_03: Exactly.
• 41:00
  SPEAKER_01: So, therefore, uh, you know, how do you really connect both?
• 41:04
  SPEAKER_03: I'm glad you brought that up because I think when it whenever you're having a knowledge management program or you're starting one, or or certainly when you're trying to defend one, everybody comes, everybody in management is is a bean counter.
• 41:16
  SPEAKER_03: You know, accountant come back, well, I mean, how's this helping?
• 41:19
  SPEAKER_03: How is how are we gonna, you know, how's this gonna save us money or how's this gonna help us make more money?
• 41:23
  SPEAKER_03: And it's the same thing with training.
• 41:25
  SPEAKER_03: You can't say, well, if if if this engineer attends this course, it's gonna increase his efficient his or her efficiency by 20%, and you're gonna save, you know, two twenty thousand dollars on your program.
• 41:38
  SPEAKER_03: Well, you there are no analytics for that.
• 41:42
  SPEAKER_03: And because, again, you're dealing with the humans, you know, it's not machines, and and you know, they uh you have to hit you know consider that aspect.
• 41:52
  SPEAKER_03: So I've been told countless times, well, how much why why you know how much is training saving us?
• 41:57
  SPEAKER_03: How much and everybody's trying to, you know, when when budgets are tight, everybody's trying to pull money from everybody else, and they're always looking, well, okay, we can cut human resources, we can cut training and that kind of stuff.
• 42:08
  SPEAKER_03: So you have to be able to come prepared to defend your budget.
• 42:11
  SPEAKER_03: And with us, uh we we realized that I can't come up with a number of return on investment.
• 42:18
  SPEAKER_03: Or somebody else, yeah, okay, if we buy from this supplier, we're gonna save 10%, that's gonna save us$50,000 to build this this project.
• 42:26
  SPEAKER_03: Well, I can't do that, but I can't come back and talk about return on mission success.
• 42:31
  SPEAKER_03: And that the idea about that is people and our courses, gosh, we we are I think we we held over a hundred courses a year, and they're usually they're two or three days.
• 42:44
  SPEAKER_03: And they're you know, we we try to limit them to 30, 25, 30 people, something like that.
• 42:50
  SPEAKER_03: So the NASA uh workforce is interested in learning.
• 42:54
  SPEAKER_03: Engineers enjoy learning, they understand that they you know they're they have to continually learn in order to grow in their in their field and in their career.
• 43:01
  SPEAKER_03: But we uh when we looked at the training, I can't, like I said, I can't come back with a number, but I can come back and say, I can do a survey.
• 43:12
  SPEAKER_03: People that have take taken our course, uh, talk to them, you know, have them do a survey before they step into the room.
• 43:19
  SPEAKER_03: How are you uh efficient or deficient in these certain areas?
• 43:23
  SPEAKER_03: The course is going to talk about, and then afterwards they take the course.
• 43:26
  SPEAKER_03: Same thing as survey.
• 43:27
  SPEAKER_03: Did you learn more in this area?
• 43:29
  SPEAKER_03: Were you able to increase your knowledge in this area?
• 43:31
  SPEAKER_03: Do you feel more comfortable making decisions in this area?
• 43:34
  SPEAKER_03: And that's kind of the raw data that I can get from them, and that's useful.
• 43:39
  SPEAKER_03: But the other thing that we did is we waited a month after somebody took a course, and we contacted their either the project manager that they were working for or their immediate supervisor and said, Have you noticed a difference in some in this employee after they're taking our course or attending one of our forums or attending a case study lecture?
• 43:58
  SPEAKER_03: And have you noticed that they have I think one of the important courses that we used to teach was communication skills.
• 44:06
  SPEAKER_03: And I think engineers are known at not being the most communicative of folks.
• 44:12
  SPEAKER_03: And I'm not trying to generalize or anything like that, but hey, I've worked with engineers for 40 years, and I know that sometimes they have a hard time expressing themselves or even a willingness to express themselves.
• 44:22
  SPEAKER_03: So one of our most popular courses was about communication.
• 44:25
  SPEAKER_03: And you know, communication can be not just orally speaking to somebody, but also written communication, which is critical.
• 44:33
  SPEAKER_03: And uh so we try to teach engineers how to how to communicate more effectively with other engineers and with their management, with their program within their programs and projects.
• 44:43
  SPEAKER_03: So after a course like that, then we you know we contact the person's manager or supervisor, say, have you noticed a difference in you know, have you in the emails you received from this employee, does it appear that they've you know making some headway and learning how to communicate more effectively?
• 44:59
  SPEAKER_03: And that again, that's more data and more information I can give uh to my management.
• 45:04
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, just you know, not only to let them know uh the progress we're making, but again, when somebody tries to come in and cut your budget, say, well, we're not getting a return on investment, I can come back and say, Well, here's all this data.
• 45:16
  SPEAKER_03: All your engineers are coming back telling me, yeah, they're they're they're uh they're feeling more confident because they took this course, they feel more confident if they can get their job done right and correctly.
• 45:26
  SPEAKER_03: And not only that, their managers are feeling they also are getting or improving as a program or project team member.
• 45:33
  SPEAKER_03: And to me, that's that's some pretty valuable uh uh information that I can use.
• 45:39
  SPEAKER_03: And I can proudly say that as a chief knowledge officer uh for about five years, I didn't take one budget cut because I was able to I was able to come back and you know, at least be prepared for the conversation.
• 45:53
  SPEAKER_03: And uh I I I you know that there's no way I can I can analytically tell you that training, everybody knows that training helps, but you can't come back and put a number on it.
• 46:05
  SPEAKER_03: But I can come back and give you some useful information that this the person who took the course, the people on the project team that the person works with have noticed uh improvement, and the person's manager has known an improvement.
• 46:15
  SPEAKER_03: So what we call that is return on mission success.
• 46:18
  SPEAKER_00: Roger, I want to take you back in time a little bit.
• 46:24
  SPEAKER_00: So uh towards this uh at the beginning of the conversation, you said that you finished a history history degree and then you transitioned into a life and career as an engineer.
• 46:36
  SPEAKER_00: So a question that I have, Roger, is uh what was the transition like?
• 46:40
  SPEAKER_00: So you were used to studying history and the liberal arts, and uh you know, as you moved into engineering, what were those days like uh brushing back up your math and building your skills forward in math?
• 46:54
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, and finally, what were some lessons that you picked up back in those days that have stuck with you to this day?
• 47:00
  SPEAKER_00: So, what is that experience like?
• 47:02
  SPEAKER_03: Those are great questions.
• 47:03
  SPEAKER_03: And I'll I'll like I mentioned earlier, history is my first love and it still is.
• 47:09
  SPEAKER_03: In my spare time, I don't sit down with an engineering book or a calculus manual or anything like that.
• 47:13
  SPEAKER_03: I'll sit down with a history book and and thoroughly enjoy it.
• 47:17
  SPEAKER_03: Um I I can remember it was kind of a demoralized, very demoralizing, actually, when I went to a very good college to get my uh history degree, and you can't can't find a uh you know, can't find a job, and and people don't really care.
• 47:35
  SPEAKER_03: You know, you know, what can you bring to me?
• 47:37
  SPEAKER_03: And I unfortunately I finally sunk in after that where I couldn't find a decent job.
• 47:41
  SPEAKER_03: And I realized, you know, I have to provide something to I provide uh a service to an employer that where I can help them and help them grow and help them become more successful.
• 47:53
  SPEAKER_03: And it was it was like I said, it was demoralizing to to to go from uh you know having a uh undergraduate degree in liberal arts and history and then start at the very bottom at NASA, running a lathe.
• 48:06
  SPEAKER_03: And people would, you know, they they come up to me and say, Why did you major in history?
• 48:11
  SPEAKER_03: And actually, I had a performance review while I was a syllable apprentice, and I'll never forget it.
• 48:16
  SPEAKER_03: I went into this, uh, my manager's we used to do three-month rotations throughout, so you could get to learn, you know, the the center you're working at, get to know the network with the people and get to learn the different jobs at the center.
• 48:28
  SPEAKER_03: So this certain rotation, uh, I had my performance review with the supervisor, and he asked me a little bit about my background.
• 48:37
  SPEAKER_03: I said, Well, you know, actually I have a uh uh undergraduate degree in history.
• 48:42
  SPEAKER_03: He looked at me and says, Oh, I'm real sorry about that.
• 48:46
  SPEAKER_03: And I thought, oh, and I was kind of taken back.
• 48:50
  SPEAKER_03: I said, Well, why are you sorry about that?
• 48:52
  SPEAKER_03: He goes, Well, I mean, you spent all that money, or your dad spent all that money, and and you know, you're not even you know you'll never use it.
• 48:58
  SPEAKER_03: And I I was I was he's another one that I'd like to talk to again and say, hey, here I I did end up uh using my history degree.
• 49:07
  SPEAKER_03: But it it was it and and I was after that, I would be embarrassed to talk to people uh you know that I was working with that, yeah, I have a history, and even engineers, engineers are so practical-minded.
• 49:20
  SPEAKER_03: You know, get it get to know an engineer as a friend and an honest technician, and get to know their background and tell them, share my background.
• 49:26
  SPEAKER_03: And it was always the same thing.
• 49:28
  SPEAKER_03: Well, why did you major in history?
• 49:30
  SPEAKER_03: You know, I mean, and it it it just to an engineer, it doesn't make sense for me to come back and say, Well, I love history, I wanted to learn more about history.
• 49:39
  SPEAKER_03: But you know, engineers and that kind of mindset, and it's not just engineers, but it's more like, well, what were you thinking?
• 49:45
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, what were you gonna use that degree for?
• 49:48
  SPEAKER_03: And for me, it was just like, well, I was wasn't thinking that way.
• 49:50
  SPEAKER_03: I was thinking about what can I learn about the world, you know, and that's what interests me.
• 49:57
  SPEAKER_03: So it it it was it was almost embarrassing after a while, and I and I I didn't even want to even talk about my history degree, but it was I realized that um once I you know I I got graduated through my apprenticeship, and I and then I went back to school and uh went went to get an engineering degree, and that wasn't easy because I was never real good at math, and uh I had to start all over again.
• 50:22
  SPEAKER_03: I never I trust me, I don't have the same love for math as I do for history.
• 50:26
  SPEAKER_03: It's just it's just not that interesting.
• 50:28
  SPEAKER_03: But I had this mindset, well, I have to provide for my family, I have to do something with my life.
• 50:35
  SPEAKER_03: Um, the world doesn't care too much about uh history degrees, they care a lot about engineering degrees, and uh I just you know sucked it up and went back to, like I said, 10 years of night school.
• 50:47
  SPEAKER_03: And and uh yeah, ask me, you know, if there's a kind of a lesson learned that I have personally from that experience, and that is uh, I guess two things.
• 50:59
  SPEAKER_03: One is never give up, um, never give up on yourself.
• 51:04
  SPEAKER_03: Uh there were times when I was going to night school.
• 51:07
  SPEAKER_03: I can remember one time in particular, it was snowing, and my car wouldn't start, and I finally got it, and I think I had a test uh that that evening, and I'm driving there and my car stalls on the way, and I'm gonna be late.
• 51:21
  SPEAKER_03: And I was thinking to myself, it's snowing outside, it's miserable.
• 51:25
  SPEAKER_03: I have a family back home, uh, I have a job, it's nine o'clock, 9:30 at night, and I'm stuck on the side of the highway.
• 51:32
  SPEAKER_03: Maybe I should just give up.
• 51:34
  SPEAKER_03: And there's uh I've had that several times.
• 51:38
  SPEAKER_03: There's several times when I was at like calculus in particular, where I could just couldn't figure out a problem, and and uh I just didn't feel adequate.
• 51:46
  SPEAKER_03: And I was thinking to myself, or thermodynamics.
• 51:49
  SPEAKER_03: That's another course.
• 51:50
  SPEAKER_03: I trust me, if if you want to look at just uh if you want to read something interesting, go to history, not thermodynamics, at least for in my case.
• 51:57
  SPEAKER_03: But that was another course that I had so much trouble with, and I thought I I just I don't have the makings of an engineer.
• 52:03
  SPEAKER_03: But um I had the support of my family, and I also had the support of NASA management uh to go back to school.
• 52:10
  SPEAKER_03: I think they they respected me, and uh uh NASA's a great place to work.
• 52:16
  SPEAKER_03: And all through my early career, uh there were times when uh there was one particular time when I worked at the hangar and we were working on airplanes, and all the airplanes took off, and my manager asked me, you know, I said, What do you want me to do?
• 52:29
  SPEAKER_03: And he says, Well, I mean, that there's nothing here really to work on.
• 52:32
  SPEAKER_03: I said, he said, uh, how's your school going?
• 52:35
  SPEAKER_03: I said, Well, you know, we got our finals next week.
• 52:37
  SPEAKER_03: He said, I'll tell you what, uh, the pilot's room is empty, they're all out flying their airplanes for a couple hours.
• 52:43
  SPEAKER_03: Why don't you get your books and go in there and study and uh prepare yourself for your tests?
• 52:48
  SPEAKER_03: You know, and then that's some that's some great support.
• 52:51
  SPEAKER_03: And I had the same thing at home.
• 52:52
  SPEAKER_03: You know, we were we we had four children, we were raising them, and my wife was uh always supportive of of me uh going to night school.
• 53:00
  SPEAKER_03: And so, like I said, uh the biggest lesson learned for me was was never give up.
• 53:06
  SPEAKER_03: And I I guess the other thing is it if you don't underestimate a liberal arts degree, even an organization like NASA, because when I got into management, or I got to be a chief knowledge officer, I use my liberal arts degree almost exclusively.
• 53:27
  SPEAKER_03: I I hardly ever use my engineering degree once you got into management.
• 53:31
  SPEAKER_03: And I I think my liberal arts degree gave me a a huge advantage over a lot of other uh people that just had an engineering degree and they were moved into management because they didn't really understand the people aspect of it and and they they didn't understand um you know how to I sometimes how to get the best out of a person.
• 53:48
  SPEAKER_03: And it's not you know just ramming things down their throat and just throwing data at them and having to come up with a you know, it's it's learning more about people and and how people function.
• 53:57
  SPEAKER_03: And uh I I think I I think uh one of the biggest advantages I had at an organization like NASA, because everybody's an engineer, was that I had my liberal arts background and that I could look at things from a different angle than most most folks could.
• 54:17
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 54:17
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, Roger, I think uh this is the 23rd uh episode that we have been recording, and I think that is by far one of the most amazing answers I've ever heard ever since I've been a part of this uh journey.
• 54:30
  SPEAKER_00: So thank you so much for sharing that with us.
• 54:32
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, absolutely.
• 54:33
  SPEAKER_00: So since thank you so much, Roger.
• 54:36
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so since we spoke about lessons learned, I want to sort of uh take it in a parallel direction and ask uh about uh uh the lessons learned database that you managed to set up, right?
• 54:49
  SPEAKER_00: And I want to know where did this idea for the lessons learned database come up from?
• 54:54
  SPEAKER_00: How would you go about instituting it and what's the real value uh behind looking at that kind of a database?
• 55:00
  SPEAKER_03: Uh I think the lessons learned database, well, before I get started, I want I want to make sure your listeners understand the difference between a lessons learned and a case study.
• 55:10
  SPEAKER_03: But the lessons learned database, it's uh completely practical, completely pragmatic.
• 55:18
  SPEAKER_03: It's all it's it's usually about uh, you know, for example, um fasteners.
• 55:23
  SPEAKER_03: Uh somebody at one of the centers purchased a thousand fasteners and started to install them into a into their uh equipment and all of a sudden discovered that those fasteners don't meet specifications.
• 55:36
  SPEAKER_03: So you get on a lessons on database and you put a note in there warning you know the anybody else is having problems with fasteners or is who's who's looking at you know purchasing fasteners, you know, give them a little bit of a heads up that there's a problem there.
• 55:49
  SPEAKER_03: And so the lessons learned database is full of that kind of information, you know, practical, usable, uh you know, something that somebody on a project team i i usually re you know is looking for something that revolves around equipment.
• 56:05
  SPEAKER_03: With a case study, it it's more about decision making.
• 56:09
  SPEAKER_03: And it's uh uh it goes into a problem a little bit more uh um in depth.
• 56:17
  SPEAKER_03: And I I think at the at the back of my book I give an ex uh example of a case study and it has to do with the Concord, the flight of the Concord, and the you know, the series of events that happened in that that it almost seemed unimaginable how uh you know there was somebody put adjusting or replacing the cowling on a jet engine at uh uh the Houston Airport.
• 56:38
  SPEAKER_03: This plane and he didn't do a you know a real good job of it, and this plane landed at at uh Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport and took off and this part fell off, and then the the Concorde was overfilled with fuel and it came and then all of a sudden they they uh the usual uh FOD, you know, the c cleaning up of the uh the uh tarmac, those processes were put on hold because the people are in training, all of a sudden you have this overfilled uh concord, hits a strip, busts a tire, the tire hits the under belly of the Concorde, starts this huge, huge fire.
• 57:17
  SPEAKER_03: Well, it's all unpredictable.
• 57:19
  SPEAKER_03: And and there's no, you know, that's not a lesson learned.
• 57:25
  SPEAKER_03: You can't put in the database, you know, don't put this piece apart uh cowling this way or something like that.
• 57:30
  SPEAKER_03: But it's a case study that helps helps an engineer understand um that uh a program and a project and issues like this, they're a system.
• 57:41
  SPEAKER_03: And everything's you know, if one part of that system all of a sudden doesn't work, it has a you know a domino effect on the other parts that can you know could cause a tragedy, a catastrophe like that.
• 57:52
  SPEAKER_03: So, anyhow, that's the difference between a lessons learned and a database.
• 57:55
  SPEAKER_03: Lessons learned is much more simple, practical.
• 57:57
  SPEAKER_03: Boom, boom, boom.
• 57:58
  SPEAKER_03: It is basically a database like an Expel Excel spreadsheet.
• 58:03
  SPEAKER_03: And uh again, the lessons learned database was something that was uh uh told you know the federal government uh had NASA develop a lessons learned database.
• 58:15
  SPEAKER_03: But one of the problems was when I became the chief knowledge officer, is that every NASA center has their own database.
• 58:23
  SPEAKER_03: Some of the big projects have their own database.
• 58:25
  SPEAKER_03: Some of the project some of the databases are behind firewalls, which what sense does that make?
• 58:30
  SPEAKER_03: You know, you're gathering information and then hiding it from everybody.
• 58:34
  SPEAKER_03: So what we tried to do is is look at all these different databases, and we came up with a you know what we call as a one-stop shop uh website where a NASA engineer can go there.
• 58:46
  SPEAKER_03: He doesn't have to, he or she doesn't have to go on you know one center's website, search through their database, and go to another center, find their URL and find out where their database is.
• 58:56
  SPEAKER_03: All they have to do is go to our uh website and everything's gathered for you.
• 59:02
  SPEAKER_03: And you can go go you can search, it makes it so much easier.
• 59:06
  SPEAKER_03: And uh it makes all the different databases that are out there much more available to all the different uh you know engineers rather than their life is busy, and they don't have time to go searching through dead URLs to find you know to looking for information.
• 59:20
  SPEAKER_03: It gets so frustrating.
• 59:21
  SPEAKER_03: So, what I had our team do was just gather all that information into one source, one spot, so that uh an engineer uh can easily access it.
• 59:30
  SPEAKER_03: Or not only access, but also add uh lessons learned into a database.
• 59:35
  SPEAKER_03: And actually, and I mentioned this earlier as far as communication skills.
• 59:39
  SPEAKER_03: A lot of engineers, you know, on project teams, they're either too busy to sit down and write a lessons learned that they'll see a problem and think, well, yeah, I'll file that to the back and I'll maybe I'll write a lessons learned thing into the date database at a later date, and then they forget about it.
• 59:56
  SPEAKER_03: Or they don't like writing.
• 59:58
  SPEAKER_03: You know, it just uh they engineers are so much more comfortable with numbers than they are with uh letters and and words and writing.
• 1:00:08
  SPEAKER_03: So uh what we did was offer if somebody's on a project team and they see something that needs whether it be a lessons learned or a database, we have uh technical writers on staff.
• 1:00:19
  SPEAKER_03: Contact us, just send us the information, and you know, we'll we'll research it and you know, we'll enter that into the database, or maybe even we'll build a case study around it.
• 1:00:29
  SPEAKER_01: Brilliant, Roger.
• 1:00:31
  SPEAKER_01: Um I think one point that you've been making through this conversation uh is really the importance of cognitive biases when you know taking a decision.
• 1:00:43
  SPEAKER_01: Uh walk me through the cognitive biases and the real problems of taking decisions and how it affects decision making.
• 1:00:53
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, yeah, cognitive biases.
• 1:00:55
  SPEAKER_03: And we developed a whole curriculum around uh around decision making and cognitive biases is certainly one of our most uh pertinent and also one of our most popular courses that we offer.
• 1:01:09
  SPEAKER_03: And it again, I I think this is coming from a more um liberal arts background where you realize that uh decis and I and I again I'll go back to that Eugene Ferguson quote that engineers, you know, they have to be reminded that engineering tragedies and disasters are seldom cause of somebody faulty calculations.
• 1:01:33
  SPEAKER_03: We're all all our engineers really know their math when they come out of college.
• 1:01:37
  SPEAKER_03: They know what they're doing as far as math goes.
• 1:01:39
  SPEAKER_03: But it it's uh it's the decision-making process and what what's involved with that.
• 1:01:45
  SPEAKER_03: And you can go into a, and this hasn't happens countless times, you go into a situation where you don't even you might not even realize, but you've already made up your mind.
• 1:01:54
  SPEAKER_03: You you you've gathered people together for for a uh you know a uh a meeting, you're leading the meeting, you you'll you'll you know go around what do you think, what do you think, what do you think, but you're wasting everybody's time because you might not even realize it, but in the back of your mind, you you thought about this and you've already come up with a decision.
• 1:02:12
  SPEAKER_03: And unless somebody comes up with some earth-shattering data that you never saw before, you know, the decision's already been made.
• 1:02:19
  SPEAKER_03: And just to make people realize that, that um, and it's not easy.
• 1:02:24
  SPEAKER_03: You you have to be open-minded, and uh you also have to um, and this is something that's been stressed at NASA quite a bit, and that's having a a diverse project team.
• 1:02:38
  SPEAKER_03: If you have all engineers on your team, they're all gonna come up with the same opinion or the or or the same decision almost all the time.
• 1:02:49
  SPEAKER_03: But if you have somebody that um ha has a different background and and they look at it from a different angle and say, well, yeah, you you can do that, but you know, further down the road, that might be a problem.
• 1:03:02
  SPEAKER_03: Uh for example, you know, when they're designing uh even when they were designing the space shuttle and for the challenger early on, and you're tight with a budget and things like that, but they designed the O-ring uh for the external boosters with only one backup, so that if one O-ring burned through, and they knew that there was gonna be a problem because there's a lot of heat temperature in there, and you don't know if you know the expansion, thermal expansion of the O-rings and the and the uh aluminum around it, things like that are gonna happen.
• 1:03:36
  SPEAKER_03: But they only they only had the funding for uh putting one backup O-ring in there and the joint that they designed, they knew it was problematic, uh, but you know, they they have a schedule that has to be met, and they only have a certain amount of funding, and you know, so they made a less than adequate design on the uh you know the shuttle boosters, and they knew it, and there was really nothing they could do about it at the time, but or they felt that at the time.
• 1:04:02
  SPEAKER_03: But when something like that happens early on in a project, you think, okay, yeah, okay, it meets the requirements, it meets the specifications, but if there is a problem further down the line, well, we've just designed something early on that's going to be here for the next 10 years because they're gonna you know continually keep making um this part or this uh system in the in the same way.
• 1:04:24
  SPEAKER_03: And uh early on in a in a decision making, uh a faulty decision early on in a designing project can have re repercussions years and years down the road.
• 1:04:35
  SPEAKER_03: And that's what happened with the the challenger.
• 1:04:38
  SPEAKER_03: So make sure that people understand this, and and and and and I think the best way uh when when you're teaching uh engineers about uh decision making and bias and decision making is to come up with case studies and realize that I I know one of the case studies we have, the the lesson learned from that case study, Red, is that sometimes no data is better than false data.
• 1:05:07
  SPEAKER_03: And you know, when you're making a decision, and if you're going on false data, you you're gonna you're gonna just multiply the problem.
• 1:05:16
  SPEAKER_03: But it you sometimes you're better off not having the data at all, so that you're thinking, oh my gosh, what if this happens, if this happens, if this happens, if this happens.
• 1:05:23
  SPEAKER_03: If you have false data, you're thinking, well, it can only happen this way, so I'm gonna I'm gonna go down this road.
• 1:05:28
  SPEAKER_03: So those are the kind of things that we we we stress, and and I think there are there are critical things that knowledge management uh should stress in or any organization is and it doesn't just apply to engineers, you know, having cognitive biases in their decision making.
• 1:05:42
  SPEAKER_03: It applies to accountants, it applies to to you know any medical services, anything.
• 1:05:50
  SPEAKER_03: But you at least you have to be aware of it when you're making a decision.
• 1:05:55
  SPEAKER_00: Since knowledge management is also uh An aspect of learning where there's a lot of documentation required.
• 1:06:04
  SPEAKER_00: You spoke about uh the services of technical writers uh across the board for folks to actually leverage and get their cases written, etc., etc., right?
• 1:06:13
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so my question to you, Roger, is that when you have a documentation intensive environment, uh communication is a very critical skill when you're actually writing your documents.
• 1:06:23
  SPEAKER_00: So, given uh your experience over at NASA, can you tell us about what makes what's the structure of a great document and what are some principles that a writer should follow to ensure that knowledge is captured, knowledge is knowledge is accurately shared, and uh it's in context to the problem that they're trying to solve?
• 1:06:44
  SPEAKER_03: I think uh one of the areas, and we recognize this, is that there's a lot of uh fascinating things happening out at NASA in these different programs and projects.
• 1:06:56
  SPEAKER_03: And there's case studies out there.
• 1:06:59
  SPEAKER_03: And how how do and in our courses when you're uh you know displaying a case study to a group of engineers, someone's in the audience is bound to come up and say, Yeah, you know, something similar happened to us on this program or project, or or not only you know your case study is interesting, but hey, I have this case, you know, we have this situation in our program that uh is just incredible.
• 1:07:23
  SPEAKER_03: And then you I uh what you try to do is, well, okay, again, that information's out there, that knowledge is out there, how do I gather it?
• 1:07:33
  SPEAKER_03: And not only how do I gather it, and how do I kind of share this knowledge?
• 1:07:38
  SPEAKER_03: What one of the um uh resources we came up with was we uh came up with a case study workshop for NASA, work uh for the NASA workforce.
• 1:07:47
  SPEAKER_03: And basically, you know, we advertise on our website.
• 1:07:50
  SPEAKER_03: If you have an interesting story to tell, come to this workshop, come be come prepared, come with the come with the you know your proposed case study and the data and the information you have about it, and we'll have a professional case study writer sit with you, talk to you about it, help you write it, and then you know, if it's first of all, they'll you know judge it.
• 1:08:13
  SPEAKER_03: Well, is this really a case study or is this a lesson learned?
• 1:08:15
  SPEAKER_03: You know, is this something that uh is gonna help the NASA technical workforce, or is it just kind of uh noise on the outside and you know, determine the value of it?
• 1:08:26
  SPEAKER_03: And then uh if it is something that we think would help the NASA workforce, we'll work with that person.
• 1:08:33
  SPEAKER_03: And what we're trying to do is, and it's a little bit different from the lessons learned where we have a technical writer that's gonna do it for you, we want to teach the NASA engineers and the National Technical Workforce how to write a case study.
• 1:08:44
  SPEAKER_03: First of all, well, first I guess how to recognize what is a valuable case study and then how to write it.
• 1:08:49
  SPEAKER_03: And of course, we'll you know come in with the editors and things like that to help polish it up.
• 1:08:54
  SPEAKER_03: But uh just it it it also incorporates in the in the back of a engineer, a project team member a kind of uh culture where they're looking for case studies, where they're looking beyond just the hardware, where they're looking at ways that you know that could make a that hardware better or that program project uh more efficient or more effective.
• 1:09:17
  SPEAKER_03: And case studies and storytelling are you know two great ways of doing that because that that really sticks with an engineer.
• 1:09:23
  SPEAKER_03: If you look at uh I think that's the real value of a case study, and particularly the value of storytelling, that it brings it home, you know, it makes it human.
• 1:09:34
  SPEAKER_03: And it's rather than just you know going through pages and pages of data and information, it it brings a human aspect into it, something that you can relate to.
• 1:09:43
  SPEAKER_03: And it makes you kind of uh when you talk about a case study, and almost all case studies revolve around engineering disasters or mishaps.
• 1:09:51
  SPEAKER_03: So when you bring the uh the human experience into that, when you have particularly if you have somebody that that made a faulty decision, made a bad decision, having the courage to get up in front of a group and say, I here's here's the best mistake I made.
• 1:10:05
  SPEAKER_03: And you say it's the best mistake because I learned from it, and I want to share that with with you know with my cohorts and my fellow uh engineers at NASA so that you don't so I learned it once, and it only cost the organization the for this one mistake, so you don't repeat this mistake, and it ends up costing the organization, you know, two or three times down the road for the same mistake.
• 1:10:26
  SPEAKER_03: And you know, to see a uh a person get up there in front of people and and you know talk honestly and openly about it, again, it it it's part of changing the NASA culture to make them make people understand mistakes happen and that they're always gonna happen.
• 1:10:42
  SPEAKER_03: But uh the real benefit is teaching people about it, learning from it.
• 1:10:47
  SPEAKER_03: So that particular uh you know, mistake doesn't happen again, or at least people are aware of it.
• 1:10:54
  SPEAKER_01: In this uh increasingly digital world, uh where you know you can learn anything on any digital platforms, uh, you know, there is a view that you have uh which I thought was extremely uh, you know, I would say uh very vivid for me in terms of uh you know how you expressed it.
• 1:11:17
  SPEAKER_01: Uh where do you use e-learning and where should you use in-person learning?
• 1:11:22
  SPEAKER_01: Because today uh you know it's touted as you know, you just get somewhere, get into a platform, you'll start learning anything, right?
• 1:11:29
  SPEAKER_01: So, therefore, uh how do you really distinguish between what can you e-learn and what can you in-person learn?
• 1:11:38
  SPEAKER_01: How do you distinguish it in terms of you know not only capturing knowledge but absorbing the knowledge, right?
• 1:11:45
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, exactly.
• 1:11:47
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, that is a tough question, but that that question was answered during the pandemic because all of a sudden, before the pandemic, all of our courses were in-person.
• 1:11:56
  SPEAKER_03: We hired an instructor to come, subject matter expert, to come in and for three days sit down with 30 NASA engineers and talk to them and interact with them.
• 1:12:05
  SPEAKER_03: And then the pandemic happened, and I thought, oh my God, we have to convert a hundred courses into e-learning real quick, or we're gonna be out of business.
• 1:12:14
  SPEAKER_03: They'll the agency will have no use for us.
• 1:12:17
  SPEAKER_03: And but I told our team that I wanted to do this the right way.
• 1:12:22
  SPEAKER_03: First of all, I want you to comb through our courses and discover which ones are really capable of being e-learning, and then concentrate on those.
• 1:12:34
  SPEAKER_03: If there's some courses, like we have an international project management course where we invite people uh from other space agencies, you know, European space agency, the German space agency, Italian, Korean, Japanese organization, twice a year they they come to the Kennedy Space Center.
• 1:12:49
  SPEAKER_03: And that is definitely interactive.
• 1:12:50
  SPEAKER_03: And the whole one of the primary ideas for that, so week-long course is to get people the network between the different agencies so that they understand the uh you know the culture of other agency and how projects are run at another agency.
• 1:13:03
  SPEAKER_03: Because there's in the future going back to the moon, uh, it's going to be with the cooperation of the Indian Space Agency, the Japanese Space Agency, the Canadian, everybody, because it's a huge project.
• 1:13:14
  SPEAKER_03: So a course like that, unfortunately, we had to cancel.
• 1:13:17
  SPEAKER_03: And we haven't had held it since the pandemic because we would be do doing those folks a disservice if we tried to do it virtually online.
• 1:13:25
  SPEAKER_03: But there's other courses that that we were able to work with the instructors and and come up with a uh a plan.
• 1:13:32
  SPEAKER_03: And first, well, there was a lot of hiccups, you know.
• 1:13:34
  SPEAKER_03: We were using Zoom and you know, just the same same kind of type of hiccups we had at the beginning of this conversation where you know, how how do I log into this?
• 1:13:42
  SPEAKER_03: And there's so many different platforms out there, we had to settle on a certain platform.
• 1:13:46
  SPEAKER_03: But we we we were able to, you know, to get through past those problems and fix things, and it, you know, it worked out real well.
• 1:13:53
  SPEAKER_03: But I can tell you one thing, before the pandemic and and when our all our courses were in person, I never had one person come up to me, one engineer or one student of our courses come up to me and say, Boy, I I really wish this was online.
• 1:14:07
  SPEAKER_03: I I really you know prefer uh training online, because they realize the uh real value of having a subject matter expert at their uh availability for three days to really have that one-on-one contact with someone and to talk to them and and really delve into it much deeper and not have to you know worry about uh you know distractions when when you're on your computer, if you're if you're in your office or even in your home, uh you know, working on your computer at online learning.
• 1:14:39
  SPEAKER_03: You know, the cat knocks something off a table and all of a sudden you're over there fixing it, and you come back and you're lost.
• 1:14:44
  SPEAKER_03: And the course is you know pretty much a waste for you.
• 1:14:48
  SPEAKER_03: But I had a lot of managers in the past come up with these great ideas why don't you put everything online?
• 1:14:55
  SPEAKER_03: And that'll save us tons of money, and you won't have to pay these subject matter experts to come in and teach and just you know videotape them and put put it up online and we'll be done with it.
• 1:15:04
  SPEAKER_03: Well, there's a uh a couple of problems to that is that a lot of the subject matter experts they do that for a living, and trying to convince them to hey, let me know how about I videotape this and then show it to everybody for free for the rest of the you know for the for the next 10 years, it doesn't go over real well.
• 1:15:22
  SPEAKER_03: They're not willing to do that.
• 1:15:23
  SPEAKER_03: And the second thing is uh that information and coursework, it changes, and and uh you if you if you have something that's online, all of a sudden you have to re-re-edit it and go back or pull something out or go back and try to add something to it, and it it actually becomes more time consuming.
• 1:15:47
  SPEAKER_03: You know, if it's an in-person course, you just notify the instructor, okay, you know, NASA's moving on from this systems engineering style to the this new one.
• 1:15:56
  SPEAKER_03: And here's some of the charts for you.
• 1:15:57
  SPEAKER_03: And if you have any questions, talk to us and we'll explain it to you.
• 1:16:00
  SPEAKER_03: But if it's already, you know, written, it's already performed on a videotape.
• 1:16:04
  SPEAKER_03: Well, if you know, you gotta you gotta find people with the technical expertise to go in there and edit it, and then you gotta go back out and try to uh you know refilm it.
• 1:16:13
  SPEAKER_03: And it just to me it became too bothersome.
• 1:16:16
  SPEAKER_03: But you know, I I'm not totally saying that online learning isn't good.
• 1:16:20
  SPEAKER_03: There's certainly aspects for online learning that are a benefit.
• 1:16:24
  SPEAKER_03: Uh but I think some of the in-depth courses where you want to collaborate and you want network and you want to talk to a you know one of the leading experts in the world about a situation.
• 1:16:38
  SPEAKER_03: There's nothing better than in-person.
• 1:16:40
  SPEAKER_03: Um one I'll tell you, one of the real benefits of virtual learning is podcasts.
• 1:16:47
  SPEAKER_03: And that's particularly with a younger generation.
• 1:16:50
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, I remember my my deputy came up with this idea.
• 1:16:54
  SPEAKER_03: Uh he said, you know, I why why don't we start doing a podcast?
• 1:16:59
  SPEAKER_03: I understand there's a lot of younger NASA engineers that, you know, on their breaks and stuff like that, they they just tune in on their phone or on their commute, they'll listen to a podcast.
• 1:17:07
  SPEAKER_03: And at first I thought, I'm a little bit old school maybe, but I thought I didn't know they do podcasts anymore.
• 1:17:15
  SPEAKER_03: And obviously, I was I I I had to be taught quite a bit.
• 1:17:20
  SPEAKER_03: I said, okay, we'll give it a try.
• 1:17:22
  SPEAKER_03: We'll see, you know, what the NASA workforce is like.
• 1:17:24
  SPEAKER_03: Oh my gosh, the podcasts were amazingly popular.
• 1:17:28
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, and our podcasts and most of our information, even most of our lessons learned database, is available to anybody in the world.
• 1:17:37
  SPEAKER_03: Our podcasts is our, you know, that's the cool thing about NASA.
• 1:17:40
  SPEAKER_03: It's it's very transparent.
• 1:17:41
  SPEAKER_03: We don't deal with a whole lot of you know super secret stuff, but we but we're an organization that wants to make sure we can share the kind of knowledge that we have with other organizations.
• 1:17:50
  SPEAKER_03: So NASA, I think, does a great job of that.
• 1:17:53
  SPEAKER_03: Um, but with the podcasts, uh, you know, they're available on iTunes, they're available right from our our website.
• 1:18:00
  SPEAKER_03: We're gonna get 20,000 hits, that kind of stuff from all around the world.
• 1:18:03
  SPEAKER_03: Because NASA is a name brand.
• 1:18:06
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, everybody, almost everybody on the planet knows about NASA or is interested in space, and you know, NASA's the place you go to.
• 1:18:14
  SPEAKER_03: So uh I was just overwhelmed, and it it really is a phenomenal tool for training and learning.
• 1:18:21
  SPEAKER_00: Roger, I have a question uh based on a comment that you had made in your book, which is in 1966, NASA's budget went from 100 million to 6 billion dollars.
• 1:18:34
  SPEAKER_00: Uh it was almost 4.5% of the federal budget.
• 1:18:38
  SPEAKER_00: Uh that's what you state in your book.
• 1:18:40
  SPEAKER_00: Uh today it's one half of 1%.
• 1:18:43
  SPEAKER_00: And as you have mentioned earlier in our conversation, that Americans spend more on pet food and pizza than their space program.
• 1:18:52
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so when we look at the future, that you know, we had a definite the 60s had a very definite view of what a determinist, uh deterministic and uh definite view of what the future should look like, where you have to put a man on the moon, and there were significant financial investments and technical developments that were made based on that vision.
• 1:19:13
  SPEAKER_00: And what do you think that in today's c in today's environment where it is less than 1%, what does that actually represent in terms of America's space endeavors and its ambitions?
• 1:19:25
  SPEAKER_00: And um, you know, what's what is your what is the temperature that you get from this sort of uh federal funding decision that's coming or the trend that preceded it?
• 1:19:35
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I think uh, well, first of all, the American public loves NASA.
• 1:19:39
  SPEAKER_03: Of all the different agencies and components of the uh United States federal government, I think NASA has by far the best reputation because we do interesting stuff.
• 1:19:48
  SPEAKER_03: We do stuff that, you know, for for a layperson, you know, a non-technical person, must seem like you know a miracle.
• 1:19:57
  SPEAKER_03: When you're in an airplane and you're looking out and you're you know you're three miles up in the sky, you think, how in the heck could they get this thing that weighs tons of metal flying up here?
• 1:20:07
  SPEAKER_03: Why aren't we falling?
• 1:20:08
  SPEAKER_03: You know, uh or just your computer, your TV, uh, everything.
• 1:20:13
  SPEAKER_03: It must seem like a uh you know, really like a miracle to a layperson how it works.
• 1:20:18
  SPEAKER_03: And I think people because of that, people have a lot of respect for NASA.
• 1:20:21
  SPEAKER_03: How do you get somebody to the moon?
• 1:20:23
  SPEAKER_03: How do you, you know, how do you build a supersonic airplane?
• 1:20:26
  SPEAKER_03: And then uh, you know, how do you build these probes that go all the way to Pluto to take pictures?
• 1:20:32
  SPEAKER_03: You know, they're flying at uh this unbelievable speed, 30,000 kilometers per hour, taking you know four or five years to get to Pluto at that speed, and and then and then photographing it as you fly by it.
• 1:20:46
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, how do you do that?
• 1:20:48
  SPEAKER_03: And so I NASA has a lot of goodwill.
• 1:20:52
  SPEAKER_03: And you know, we've had a lot of, you know, we've had some issues and we've had some problems, but I think we've been open and honest about them.
• 1:20:59
  SPEAKER_03: And as far as the funding for NASA, I think in the past, I would say in the past um probably eight years, the funding is uh NASA and that well, not only NASA, I think the federal government and the politicians in particular wanted to see a return to the moon.
• 1:21:21
  SPEAKER_03: And the first time we did it, you know, it was forced and it was part of the Cold War.
• 1:21:26
  SPEAKER_03: Uh this time I think they want to do it for a number of reasons, and scientific reasons are one of it.
• 1:21:31
  SPEAKER_03: And they would and rather than just land on the moon and come back and never go, you know, spend 50 years before you go back, they want to have a permanent base on the moon or permanent human activity on the moon.
• 1:21:42
  SPEAKER_03: And uh, you know, they've discovered frozen water that they'd be able to utilize.
• 1:21:48
  SPEAKER_03: And I think the overall goal is to utilize that frozen water and extract the hydrogen from it and actually launch uh you know a man uh you know flights from the moon to Mars because the gravity on the Mars is or the gravity on the moon is so much less one-sixth it is on the Earth, so it's much easier, and you require much less fuel to launch from the moon to Mars.
• 1:22:09
  SPEAKER_03: But obviously, there's all kinds of tech technological issues in you know doing that.
• 1:22:14
  SPEAKER_03: But I think that we have the ear of the politicians now, and I think they're interested in that.
• 1:22:19
  SPEAKER_03: And I think there's you know, it not only for scientific reasons, but I think there's also um you know the the international challenges we have with the Chinese and their space program, and and uh uh they're making some, you know, obviously some uh major headway in their space program.
• 1:22:37
  SPEAKER_03: So I think there's you know a little bit of a competitive factor in doing that.
• 1:22:41
  SPEAKER_03: So I think in the in about the probably the last eight years or so, the NASA budget has been um robust.
• 1:22:49
  SPEAKER_03: You know, I I don't think I think they're very rational and and try to be logical on how much money they they give NASA or they give any organization because they want to make sure that the money's well spent.
• 1:23:00
  SPEAKER_03: And that's where knowledge management can come in handy.
• 1:23:04
  SPEAKER_03: Because uh, like I said in the book, our our our budget uh for knowledge management, and again, it has to do with the butterfly effect, it's it's only$10 million, and we train every, you know, we we have to train 18,000 civil servants, and we have to make sure that knowledge is shared, and we have to make sure that that money is well spent and you know allocated correct resources, and that we're uh you know, we're fiscally making right decisions for the American public because you know, after all, the money's coming from the American taxpayer.
• 1:23:34
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks, Roger.
• 1:23:36
  SPEAKER_01: Uh now for some closing questions from our side.
• 1:23:40
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I have a question from my end.
• 1:23:43
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, what are the three, four things that you would recommend to an 18-year-old studying at the university today?
• 1:23:51
  SPEAKER_03: Well, I was gonna try to say something funny about don't major in history, but I'm not gonna say that.
• 1:23:58
  SPEAKER_03: Um I'm gonna say be you know be practical, understand uh that you have a real opportunity while you're in school to learn and to grow as a you know, not only learn a subject matter, but also grow as a person, take advantage of that.
• 1:24:17
  SPEAKER_03: Uh but be pragmatic and understand that those four years they go by awful fast, and you have to you have to, you know, support yourself and your family, and you have to be marketable when you get out.
• 1:24:31
  SPEAKER_03: Uh if I had to do it all over again, I would not have majored in history.
• 1:24:37
  SPEAKER_03: But I would have taken as many history courses as I could as as electives, and I I would have spent a lot of time following around history professors asking them questions.
• 1:24:47
  SPEAKER_03: Um universities, I you know, I know in the US I don't know what it what it's like anywhere else, but there's a lot of degrees that universities offer that uh you really got to scratch your head when you're well, I mean, it's interesting knowledge and it's it's it's good to have, but how are you gonna utilize that when you know when you're when you graduate?
• 1:25:09
  SPEAKER_03: And I I guess it's the same way I look at knowledge management.
• 1:25:11
  SPEAKER_03: Like I just mentioned earlier, there's a ton of information out there.
• 1:25:15
  SPEAKER_03: I can't catalog all that information.
• 1:25:17
  SPEAKER_03: I have to be able to define what my long-term goals are.
• 1:25:21
  SPEAKER_03: My long-term goals at NASA were to educate the National Technical Workforce.
• 1:25:24
  SPEAKER_03: So that makes it a whole lot easier than siphoning through and filtering through all that fast knowledge to come up with, or all that fast information to come up with critical knowledge.
• 1:25:33
  SPEAKER_03: And I guess I would take the same outlook if I was in a university.
• 1:25:37
  SPEAKER_03: Um, there's a lot of a lot of interesting stuff out there.
• 1:25:40
  SPEAKER_03: Um, but if it you you gotta determine what your long-term goals are for yourself and for your family, and how that information and what those courses and what that experience at the university, how's that's gonna help you in the long term?
• 1:25:55
  SPEAKER_00: Roger, what are some of the books that have really inspired you over the course of your life?
• 1:26:00
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, well, you know, most of them are gonna be history books.
• 1:26:05
  SPEAKER_03: The the one book that I mentioned earlier, uh, the Eugene Ferguson, Engineering in the Mind's Eye, I found that just eye-opening.
• 1:26:12
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, because he looks at he basically gives a history of engineering.
• 1:26:16
  SPEAKER_03: And uh I I I really and he understands engineers and I think he did a great job.
• 1:26:21
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, there's a whole different catalog of other books that I've always fascinated in and have to do with Russian history and German history and English history and also American history, part of the American Civil War.
• 1:26:33
  SPEAKER_03: I think that's a a fascinating topic for me because uh and if you look at Abraham Lincoln, talk about uh somebody trying to make decisions under duress and having you know faulty data and no data and and having uh the whole weight of the entire nation on your shoulders, and just seeing how somebody like that uh from a personal viewpoint and from a historical viewpoint uh can endure and and succeed.
• 1:27:03
  SPEAKER_01: Uh Roger, uh having spent uh such a long career, uh when you look back uh today, what does the word successful mean to you?
• 1:27:14
  SPEAKER_03: Um being content with yourself.
• 1:27:17
  SPEAKER_03: Um money's nice, but if you don't feel good about yourself and you don't understand yourself, you know, what's money gonna give you?
• 1:27:29
  SPEAKER_03: And uh and besides, I I can remember in one of my first engineering courses, uh, it was an introduction to engineering.
• 1:27:35
  SPEAKER_03: The professor said, Well, you're all here because you love numbers, but I can tell you one thing, none of you are gonna end up after becoming a uh millionaire by being an engineer.
• 1:27:44
  SPEAKER_03: Oh we're not here to be millionaires, we're here to build hardware and make things.
• 1:27:50
  SPEAKER_03: And uh, you know, in a way he was right.
• 1:27:52
  SPEAKER_03: Uh I I I I do love engineering, uh, I do love building things.
• 1:27:59
  SPEAKER_03: I love Figuring out how things work.
• 1:28:01
  SPEAKER_03: It's fascinating.
• 1:28:03
  SPEAKER_03: And I think as far as looking at engineers' creativity and innovation, how they can take, you know, a physicist and a scientist, they understand, you know, at this high level, but it's the engineer that comes in there and takes that knowledge and turns it, transforms it into a TV set or a computer or a rocket ship or an airplane.
• 1:28:25
  SPEAKER_03: And I always found that that you know that kind of aspect to be fascinating.
• 1:28:30
  SPEAKER_03: Um so uh again, it it's it's doing doing what's right for yourself and and make making the decisions that uh are gonna help yourself, help your family, and when you're an engineer, you can also help society, which is really a neat, neat thing to be part of.
• 1:28:54
  SPEAKER_03: Um you can be on the cutting edge of new technologies, or you can be there fixing old technologies.
• 1:29:00
  SPEAKER_03: And and I think you know that can bring a great deal of personal satisfaction.
• 1:29:06
  SPEAKER_03: The idea of just learning something new.
• 1:29:08
  SPEAKER_00: Roger, if you could invite three or four guests for a dream dinner, who would they be and why?
• 1:29:16
  SPEAKER_03: Oh wow.
• 1:29:20
  SPEAKER_03: Werner Von Brown would be one.
• 1:29:24
  SPEAKER_03: I would find it fascinating to talk to him.
• 1:29:27
  SPEAKER_03: Absolutely.
• 1:29:28
  SPEAKER_03: If you you know, know his history, you know, working with the Germans and and even being part of the SS, and then uh, you know, being you know, surrendering to the Americans so that you can continue your your uh studies on rocketry and then coming to the United States and you know, going from that to becoming uh you know, designing and being part of the team leading the team that developed the Saturn V rocket.
• 1:29:53
  SPEAKER_03: It would just be fascinating to talk to him and the different angles and the different things that he had to, you know, went through in his life.
• 1:30:00
  SPEAKER_03: And um uh there's so so many different historical characters, you know, Albert Einstein or or even um like I mentioned earlier, Abraham Lincoln.
• 1:30:17
  SPEAKER_03: Uh just to talk to them to see uh well with Einstein.
• 1:30:21
  SPEAKER_03: I mean he wasn't even an engineer, wasn't really a scientist, he was part of a studying patents in Germany.
• 1:30:28
  SPEAKER_03: And he he had this unbelievable intellect to to you know to become you know one of the greatest thinkers of our time.
• 1:30:37
  SPEAKER_03: But and I I guess I also like to have Swami and Big Nesh for dinner too, sometime.
• 1:30:42
  SPEAKER_03: How's that?
• 1:30:48
  SPEAKER_01: Roger, uh my qu my final question too is what's the one piece of best advice anyone that has anyone has ever given you?
• 1:30:58
  SPEAKER_03: Uh probably uh my father.
• 1:31:00
  SPEAKER_03: And uh everybody has a you know a certain unique relationship with their father.
• 1:31:07
  SPEAKER_03: And uh the idea uh he never gave up.
• 1:31:10
  SPEAKER_03: Uh he was the hardest working guy I ever met in my life.
• 1:31:13
  SPEAKER_03: He worked in a foundry and uh uh for the Ford Motor Company.
• 1:31:17
  SPEAKER_03: He he would come home smelling like a foundry every you know, because he was just immersed in the in the you know foundry dust and the suit and stuff like that.
• 1:31:27
  SPEAKER_03: And uh I just wonder what what made this guy tick?
• 1:31:30
  SPEAKER_03: What made him get up every day to do that?
• 1:31:32
  SPEAKER_03: And he had a hard job.
• 1:31:33
  SPEAKER_03: And uh it was just you know his nature.
• 1:31:37
  SPEAKER_03: And he'd always tell me to never give up, you know, decide what your dreams are and you know, go out and tackle them.
• 1:31:43
  SPEAKER_03: And uh and when when your father talks to you like that, it gives you that kind of inner um feeling of uh you know the possible, you know, yes, I can do this.
• 1:31:54
  SPEAKER_03: If my dad believes in me, I I can do that.
• 1:31:56
  SPEAKER_00: Roger, my final question to you is who would be a guest whom you would like to see in a future episode of Contra Mains?
• 1:32:05
  SPEAKER_00: I'd have to think about that for a bit.
• 1:32:07
  SPEAKER_03: Um I think, and actually uh part of my job when I was a chief knowledge officer was kind of I read a lot, and that's how I came up with you know, Eugene Ferguson and and some of the other people.
• 1:32:21
  SPEAKER_03: So I I investigate them, and then I I'll tell you who might be interesting.
• 1:32:26
  SPEAKER_03: Susan Kane.
• 1:32:27
  SPEAKER_03: She wrote a book called Um Uh Quiet, uh, and it has to do with introverts.
• 1:32:34
  SPEAKER_03: And she she gave an absolutely incredible TED talk, and she's an introvert, and you know, she always felt like she was different from everybody else, and was always, you know, being in a meeting and you'd just be overwhelmed by an extrovert talking, and you never got a chance to talk or express yourself.
• 1:32:48
  SPEAKER_03: I read this book, and you know, I'm an introvert, and most of everybody you know that I engineering has some degree of introversion.
• 1:32:56
  SPEAKER_03: So I watched this TED talk and thought this was really fascinating.
• 1:32:59
  SPEAKER_03: And I read her book, and then I contacted her, and we developed a course for NASA engineers, and it was it was really you know about um, and it all again it ties into um you know technical authority and dissenting opinion, make sure people understand that people want to hear what you have to say.
• 1:33:16
  SPEAKER_03: Even if you you know, if you're sitting back thinking, oh maybe I'll sound stupid if I bring this up, you won't sound stupid.
• 1:33:21
  SPEAKER_03: You sound stupid if you don't bring it up.
• 1:33:23
  SPEAKER_03: You just you know you have to make yourself known and uh make your ideas known and participate.
• 1:33:29
  SPEAKER_03: And I think Susan Kane uh in her her book Quiet you know uh kind of expands on that.
• 1:33:36
  SPEAKER_03: And certainly the course we developed uh with her help was a great again, it was really popular.
• 1:33:41
  SPEAKER_03: We had a lot of a lot of folks attend it and a lot of people, a lot of interest in it.
• 1:33:45
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, I think she's if you watch her TED Talk, I I think you'll realize why I think she'd be a great uh guest on uh Comcast.
• 1:33:54
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks, Roger.
• 1:33:56
  SPEAKER_03: Sure thing.
• 1:33:57
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks, Roger.
• 1:33:59
  SPEAKER_01: Uh it was an extremely uh, I would say uh the conversation was absolutely brilliant.
• 1:34:07
  SPEAKER_01: It was very, very honest.
• 1:34:10
  SPEAKER_00: It touched it was insightful, it was heartwarming, it was deep.
• 1:34:15
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I loved it.
• 1:34:17
  SPEAKER_01: I totally loved it, and thanks a lot for your time.
• 1:34:20
  SPEAKER_01: I hope you enjoyed this conversation with us.
• 1:34:23
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, absolutely.
• 1:34:24
  SPEAKER_03: This was fun.
• 1:34:25
  SPEAKER_03: Hopefully, uh some of your listeners will find some of the things I said interesting or important, who knows?
• 1:34:32
  SPEAKER_03: But that's all part of knowledge sharing.
• 1:34:35
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 1:34:36
  SPEAKER_01: I think uh, as you rightly said, uh it's a part of how you uh you know how you put it into content, how you convert information into knowledge, and I'm sure people are going to find this very useful, and uh this I believe is going to be one of the amongst the best episodes that ContraMinds has done till date.
• 1:34:59
  SPEAKER_01: So uh we we believe it's one of the best uh you know, one and a half hours that we had, and we have learned a lot, and it has been a knowledge uh you know learning session for both of us.
• 1:35:12
  SPEAKER_03: Thank you very much.
• 1:35:13
  SPEAKER_03: I I enjoyed myself.
• 1:35:15
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and uh Roger, we will also add links to your book, Lean Knowledge Management, how NASA implemented a practical KM program in our show notes and our links, and we'll also ask our listeners to go and get a copy if they really love this conversation, I'm sure they will.
• 1:35:29
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, that's great.
• 1:35:30
  SPEAKER_03: I appreciate that.
• 1:35:31
  SPEAKER_03: Thank you.
• 1:35:37
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks for listening to this episode.
• 1:35:40
  SPEAKER_01: For selected links and detailed show notes, visit www.contramines.com slash blog.
• 1:35:48
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• 1:35:54
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• 1:36:00
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• 1:36:02
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• 1:36:05
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• 1:36:12
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks for listening and stay staying.