Fortune favours the brave. But does process?

As some of you know, I'm a fan of the Apollo space program. I'm intrigued by every aspect of it: management, process, leadership and the politics of the program, as well as the engineering, research and bravery, and its general coolness.

Notice that word process?

Without process, Apollo would not of course have ever left the launch pad. You do need process to get millions of items in the right order, at the right location, to the right engineering spec, at the right time, at the right price, for a spacecraft to be built, tested and launched.

And yet.

Apollo originally proceeded on the basis of incremental testing. Every launch was a step ahead of the next, and each step built on the success of its predecessors. If a test failed, the programme paused to work out why.

It was a process championed by Werner Von Braun, the head of the Marshall Space Flight Center and the designer of the Saturn V rocket that was so fundamental to the success of Apollo.

In 1968, Apollo 7 orbited the Earth as an engineering test flight to check out the Apollo Command Module and Service Module (or CSM - cool Apollo jargon). Apollo 8 was scheduled to have flown the next flight, also in Earth orbit, to test the Lunar Module.

You can see the approach - and the process.

Except that Grumman's Lunar Module wasn't ready. And the Saturn V had not yet been tested all the way to the moon and back, and neither had the CSM. (Apollo 7 was launched into Earth orbit on the smaller Saturn 1B.)

Process dictated delay: the next flight should be the all-up test of the CSM and LM, in Earth orbit. Only then would the Saturn V be tested to the moon and back. And so on. Follow the process.

Enter George Mueller, associate administrator at NASA, who recognized when process should be reconsidered and who in fact had not lost sight of the objective - the whole point - of Apollo: land on the Moon, and beat the Soviet Union in doing so.

His genius was two-fold: to go for what NASA called an all-up test, of the entire Apollo stack - Saturn V, Service Module and a Command module with its crew on-board, with only the delayed Lunar Module missing. (That would be test-flown on Apollos 9 and 10.)

He side-stepped process. As a result, Apollo 8 flew to the moon in December 1968 with everything except the Lunar Module.

The first to the Moon, the crew of Apollo 8: Frank Borman, William Anders, James Lovell.

As a result, the programme was accelerated, no time was lost, and Apollo 11 fulfilled the programme's objective in July 1969.

Process has its place. But I don't think it favours the brave. There comes a time when we can and should abandon process, especially if the preceding elements of a project have tapped into process to set the project up for success.

Process is a means of managing complexity and replicating activity.

It never drives ambition. It never, of itself, delivers the result.

For more on Apollo 8, go to https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/how-apollo-8-saved-1968-180970991/.