Three days into the crisis, Kranz and his teams had managed to figure out creative ways to get Apollo back to earth while consuming a fraction of the power that would typically be needed. As the New York Times editorialized, the crisis would have been fatal had it not been for the “NASA network whose teams of experts performed miracles of emergency improvisation.”[91]
It was an incredible feat and a riveting story. But, we asked Riesenfeld, what’s the connection to Israel? Fast-forward to February 1, 2003, he told us, sixteen days into the Columbia mission, when the space shuttle exploded into pieces as it reentered the earth’s atmosphere. We now know that a piece of insulating foam—weighing 1.67 pounds—had broken off the external fuel tank during takeoff. The foam struck the leading edge of the shuttle’s left wing, making a hole that would later allow superheated gases to rip through the wing’s interior.
There were over two weeks of flight time between takeoff—when the foam had first struck the wing—and the explosion. Could something have been done during this window to repair Columbia?
After reading the HBS study, Riesenfeld certainly thought so. He pointed to the handful of midlevel NASA engineers whose voices had gone unheard. As they watched on video monitors during a postlaunch review session, these engineers saw the foam dislodge. They immediately notified NASA’s managers. But they were told that the foam “issue” was nothing new—foam dislodgments had damaged shuttles in previous launches and there had never been an accident. It was just a maintenance problem. Onward.
The engineers tried to push back. This broken piece of foam was “the largest ever,” they said. They requested that U.S. satellites—already in orbit—be dispatched to take additional photos of the punctured wing. Unfortunately, the engineers were overruled again. Management would not even acquiesce to their secondary request to have the astronauts conduct a spacewalk to assess the damage and try to repair it in advance of their return to earth.
NASA had seen foam dislodgments before; since they hadn’t caused problems in the past, they should be treated as routine, management ruled; no further discussion was necessary. The engineers were all but told to go away.
This was the part of the HBS study that Riesenfeld focused on. The study’s authors explained that organizations were structured under one of two models: a standardized model, where routine and systems govern everything, including strict compliance with timelines and budgets, or an experimental model, where every day, every exercise, and every piece of new information is evaluated and debated in a culture that resembles an R&D laboratory.
During the Columbia era, NASA’s culture was one of adherence to routines and standards. Management tried to shoehorn every new piece of data into an inflexible system—what Roberta Wohlstetter, a military intelligence analyst, describes as our “stubborn attachment to existing beliefs.”[92] It’s a problem she has encountered in the world of intelligence analysis, too, where there is often a failure of imagination when assessing the behavior of enemies.
NASA’s transformation from the Apollo culture of exploration to the Columbia culture of rigid standardization began in the 1970s, when the space agency requested congressional funding for the new shuttle program. The shuttle had been promoted as a reusable spacecraft that would dramatically reduce the cost of space travel. President Nixon said at the time that the program would “revolutionize transportation into near space, by routinizing it.” It was projected that the shuttle would conduct an unprecedented fifty missions each year. Former air force secretary Sheila Widnall, who was a member of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board, later said that NASA pitched Columbia as “a 747 that you could simply land and turn around and operate again.”
But as the HBS professors point out, “space travel, much like technological innovation, is a fundamentally experimental endeavor and should be managed that way. Each new flight should be an important test and source of data, rather than a routine application of past practices.” Which is why Riesenfeld directed us to the study. Israeli war-fighting is also an “experimental endeavor,” as we saw in the story of Israel’s handling of the Saggers in 1973. The Israeli military and Israeli start-ups in many ways live by the Apollo culture, he told us.
Connected to this Apollo culture, certainly in Nava Swersky Sofer’s estimation, is a can-do, responsible attitude that Israelis refer to as rosh gadol. In the Israeli army, soldiers are divided into those who think with a rosh gadol—literally, a “big head”—and those who operate with a rosh katan, or “little head.” Rosh katan behavior, which is shunned, means interpreting orders as narrowly as possible to avoid taking on responsibility or extra work. Rosh gadol thinking means following orders but doing so in the best possible way, using judgment, and investing whatever effort is necessary. It emphasizes improvisation over discipline, and challenging the chief over respect for hierarchy. Indeed, “challenge the chief” is an injunction issued to junior Israeli soldiers, one that comes directly from a postwar military commission that we’ll look at later. But everything about Singapore runs counter to a rosh gadol mentality.
Spend time in Singapore and it’s immediately obvious that it is tidy. Extremely tidy. Perfectly manicured green lawns and lush trees are framed by a skyline of majestic new skyscrapers. Global financial institutions’ outposts can be found on nearly every corner. The streets are free of trash; even innocuous litter is hard to spot. Singaporeans are specifically instructed on how to be polite, how to be less contentious and noisy, and not to chew gum in public.
Tidiness extends to the government, too. Lee Kuan Yew’s People’s Action Party has basically been in uninterrupted power since Singaporean independence. This is just the way Lee wants it. He has always believed that a vibrant political opposition would undermine his vision for an orderly and efficient Singapore. Public dissent has been discouraged, if not suppressed outright. This attitude is taken for granted in Singapore, but in Israel it’s foreign.
Israeli air force pilot Yuval Dotan is also a graduate of Harvard Business School. When it comes to “Apollo vs. Columbia,” he believes that had NASA stuck to its exploratory roots, foam strikes would have been identified and seriously debated at the daily “debrief.” In Israel’s elite military units, each day is an experiment. And each day ends with a grueling session whereby everyone in the unit—of all ranks—sits down to deconstruct the day, no matter what else is happening on the battlefield or around the world. “The debrief is as important as the drill or live battle,” he told us. Each flight exercise, simulation, and real operation is treated like laboratory work “to be examined and reexamined, and reexamined again, open to new information, and subjected to rich—and heated—debate. That’s how we are trained.”[93]
91
Michael Useem,
92
Roberta Wohlstetter quoted in Michael A. Roberto, Richard M. J. Bohmer, and Amy C. Edmondson, “Facing Ambiguous Threats,”