Lessons in Integrative Global Leadership from Mars
Two weeks ago I watched (along with millions of others around the world) the live broadcast of the Entry, Descent and Landing (EDL) of Perseverance, the latest NASA rover to land on Mars. I have a life-long fascination with space exploration and have had the opportunity over the past twenty years to glimpse inside the science and engineering community responsible for Perseverance and many other U.S. space programs at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California. Recently my colleague Dr. Yang Zhang and I have been working with a number of partners, collaborators and clients to develop a new definition for what we call Integrative Global Leadership. Several aspects of last week’s landing strike me as highly relevant to these conversations.
On Beyond VUCA… to CAUVID?
Landing a rover on Mars is really complicated…. A LOT can go wrong! The Perseverance team operates beyond VUCA…. They work in CAUVID conditions. Many are familiar with the concept of Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity (VUCA) as an acronym of terms that describe working on earth during the 2010s. (VUCA was actually coined by the U.S. Army War College in the 1990s in the context of the collapse of the Soviet system.) Add to this Diversity and Interdependence, two additional conditions that are omnipresent today, rearrange the letters and we get “CAUVID.”
The NASA teams are good at CAUVID leadership. If you watch the daily public briefings from JPL from February 22nd you can see all of the CAUVID elements. (See the chat on the right of the screen to see the global interest in space exploration.) The level of precision required, and the number of interdependent and interconnected systems involved means that leadership and team performance for these NASA missions must be beyond world class: they literally must be solar-system class. These teams understand that, even when you do everything right, failure is a strong possibility. (For more on this, watch this presentation by Rob Manning, JPL’s Chief Engineer, from the day before the Mars landing where he shows a map of the wreckage sites from unsuccessful mars landings.) To deal with these CAUVID conditions the NASA leadership and teams have needed to develop the qualities on the right side of this graphic: Synthesis & Focus, Flexibility, Decisiveness, Calmness, Integration, and Inclusion.
NASA Mission Leaders Need Four Mindsets
Leading interplanetary exploration programs requires strong capabilities in four different mindsets. First is a Growth Mindset (as well-defined by Carol Dweck.) Dealing with everything that can potentially go wrong and having the capacity to keep moving forward, solving one science and engineering problem after another, requires the ability to see opportunities and possibility where the average person sees an obstacle. NASA’s program leaders are excellent at applying a growth mindset to their work.
Second is an Inclusive Mindset. Marshaling the full potential of people on teams demands high levels of inclusive leadership. Although NASA still has a long way to travel on the journey to full equity and diversity, project teams like the ones working on Perseverance are far more diverse than we’ve seen in the past. The agency is transparent about the state of diversity: 72% of NASA employees are Caucasian, 12% are African American, 7% are Asian American, 8% are Latinx. In 2019 NASA reported that women comprised about a third of their total workforce, held 28% of senior executive leadership positions and 16% of senior scientific roles. The agency has clear Diversity & Inclusion policies and performance indicators. Inclusivity, and the psychological safety that results, is of critical importance for the success of complex space programs.
Dealing with the international agencies and contractors who help build and communicate with spacecraft requires an Intercultural Mindset. Space exploration requires international cooperation at multiple levels. Continuously monitoring all of NASA’s space craft including Perseverance requires cooperation from the interconnected Deep Space Network (DSN) with globally-spaced hubs in California, Spain, and Australia. Ensuring this system never fails requires long-term international cooperation. In addition to the DSN NASA has agreements that grant it access to space communication facilities on all seven continents.
The level of interdependence of multiple organizations, both governmental and from the private sector, needed for mars mission is extraordinarily high. NASA cooperates with multiple other space agencies including the European Space Agency (ESA) which is, itself, a complex multinational, multicultural organization. Different instruments and components on Perseverance are produced by many different companies. All of these various devices must be able to operate in the most extreme conditions imaginable, and all must interface with the other components seamlessly. Both inclusive and intercultural mindsets help improve constructive interdependence.
Finally, NASA team leaders must have a Sustainability Mindset. Working on complex multi-year programs like Perseverance require a high level of personal sustainability: how individuals and teams maintain their own energy, productivity and focus over long periods of time. Second, working on extra-terrestrial projects is a good way to always have the planet in mind. It costs a fortune in time, money, and effort to launch a kilogram of anything into space. Most of us cannot imagine the resilience required from spending many years working on a scientific instrument only to have it literally explode or crash before you’ve even used it. When working on interplanetary projects like the Mars missions also puts emphasis on people not as Americans, Russians, Europeans, Indians or Chinese but as Earthlings. Ultimately we inhabit a precarious, tiny, and finite amount of space in an unimaginably large universe. It is perhaps easier to put energy and thought into our sustainability mindset if we are reminded of our collective responsibility to be good planetary custodians at work every day.
In today’s CAUVID world the demands, and expectations, on global leaders are extraordinarily high and evolving quickly. Supporting the development of integrative global leaders, people with the experience, values, and mindsets to guide teams and organizations forward is mission-critical. NASA’s inspiring missions of exploration hold lessons from which we can all learn.
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For more about Integrative Global Leadership please contact David Everhart