I have always been fascinated with what makes a situation, person, or event succeed or fail. The psychology of it fascinates me. I studied psychology as an undergrad and in graduate school, but it wasn’t until I read The Tipping Point by Malcome Gladwell that I really became hooked on social psychology and specifically the power that people have to make an impact or be change agents.

Gladwell starts his book with a description of the successful come back of Hush Puppies. Yes, it is true Hush Puppies weren’t always popular and the brushed suede shoe line was down to 30,000 pairs per year in 1994. Then people started showing up in the trendy clubs and bars in Manhattan and it was on. People bought up the shoes from anywhere they could. Issac Mizrahi (before he was so famous and designed for Target) was wearing them, another designer wanted them for spring fashion shoot, someone created Hush Puppy boutique, as so on and so on. By the end of 1995, they had sold 430,000 pairs. Word of mouth drove the demand and ultimately the supply. Amazing!

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I knew that I was joining a special group of people when I became a contributing author here because of the passion everyone has shown for making NASA the kind of organization we all know it can be.  I consider myself fortunate to be in the company of such a group.

I have learned a heck of a lot in a relatively short period of time about the various perspectives that people bring to the table from all over the space exploration community.  I expected and hoped that would happen, though.  What I didn’t expect was that participating in this electronic forum would lead to even wider, once-in-a-lifetime opportunities.

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You may have heard the buzz about the @MarsPhoenix twitter phenomenon. @MarsPhoenix has become extremely popular with an online audience of 20,000+. What makes @MarsPhoenix particularly engaging is its stream of regular first-person updates about life as a spacecraft on Mars. One of my personal favorite updates so far is this one:

“I know it LOOKS easy, but you try following instructions sent from 182 million miles away!”

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Here’s a Quick Quiz … what Gen Y’r wrote these words:”Come mothers and fathersThroughout the landAnd don’t criticizeWhat you can’t understandYour sons and your daughtersAre beyond your commandYour old road isRapidly agin’.Please get out of the new oneIf you can’t lend your hand … “For those of you who don’t know, three clues:

• This artist was born in Duluth, Minnesota
• This artist won a Pulitzer Prize Special Citation in April 2008 for “profound impact on popular music and American culture … “
• I left off the last line because it could be a giveaway

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I’ve had a couple of conversations (relative to a couple of different projects) over the past week or two around how open we should really be with our day to day work.  The discussion really centered around Twitter and whether or not someone like me should write job-related stuff like “oh no, my mission’s going to crash into the moon because I screwed up the calculation” when I screw something up.

 The concern was that if the public sees such comments about how often stuff gets screwed up, that they’ll want to take all of our money away because we seem like a bunch of idiots.  The flip side is that if we’re really open and honest about how close we are to failure every day and how incredible it is that people find the errors that they do, then the general public will gain a whole new appreciation for how difficult spaceflight is and how close we are to failure all the time.

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I’ve been giving a lot of thought lately about what it means for managing organizations now that Generation Y makes up a significant part of the workforce. I’ve also been reading some articles that discuss the difficulty and frustration managers today have with the younger workforce. Hopefully this post will help managers as they try to navigate leading their leaders as well as Gen Y’ers who are entering the workforce and are looking for opportunities to do their part in changing the world.

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I would like to share a really cool effort that is taking shape at Goddard!  There’s an awesome group of folks who are passionate and energetic about our space agency and (in my words) want to help lead the world in using space exploration to pursue knowledge for the benefit of all mankind!  The initiative is called OpenGoddard, and while there was no intention in using that name to connect specifically with OpenNASA, I believe that some of the efforts of the two groups look pretty similar!

Come on over to www.opengoddard.com and check us out!  The website is in its very early stages, but I’d invite you to head over, take a look, and perhaps leave with a little inspiration!  Check the May 19th post for a little more detail about our mission!

We’re back online! Thanks for your patience everyone– please comment and post as you were…

Following Justin’s post today about the JSC Vision Forum, I wanted to bring up a point based off a question that was asked at the forum:

The JSC Vision Forum concluded with a debrief on the activities that had transpired that evening.  During that time, a young lady asked a very important question regarding dissenting opinions and how they tend not to travel as far as the popular opinion.  I answered her question in a quick and simple fashion but for the sake of time, I did not voice all facets of this topic.

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I had the opportunity to participate in the first JSC Vision forum this evening. It opened with a brief introduction to the 20-Year Vision for Johnson Space Center, how it was derived, and the five big ideas for implementation. We then split off into breakout groups to discuss the Vision as a whole and the implementation concepts. Lots of people went straight for the implementation groups, so I decided to split off with the smaller group that was analyzing the Vision itself.

I was easily the youngest person in my breakout group. Including the moderators, the only civil servant was the guy taking the notes (which will be distilled and passed on to JSC management in an anonymous format). There were six of us, plus two moderators and our notetaker. I’d say the big theme that kept coming up was that we need to figure out a way to communicate with and get buy-in from people who aren’t necessarily sold on high-level collaboration and integration… and that we desperately need “public input” to help make what we do at JSC relevant to people’s lives.

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