‘Ship It Now, Ready or Not!’ : Mindset That Doomed Shuttle Is All Around Us, Hard to Fix

The presidential commission investigating the space-shuttle explosion has recommended a sweeping management shakeup at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

The commissioners are assuming that if we fire the people who value launching a spacecraft over the safety of its crew, then we’ll purge the organization of such a twisted value system.

That’s not necessarily true. Organizational pressures breed the mindset that triggered the shuttle explosion. The same code of behavior could become ingrained in future NASA executives.

Such a mindset--”Ship it now; if it breaks, fix it later”--plagues not only the space agency but other organizations. This rule becomes habit because of its benefits:

--The boss gets to check the item off his list.

--The boss can tell himself and his superior that the job is finished.

--Maybe the product will be OK.

--And even if it breaks, maybe no one will notice.

Please don’t get me wrong. I am not saying that all managers in organizations are callous and shortsighted. Only some supervisors have the “ship it now” mentality, and those who do often aren’t aware of it.

Rather, it slowly becomes a way of coping with complaints of “we’re understaffed, behind schedule and the customer wants it yesterday.”

The mentality starts to become permanent if the company is always understaffed and the customer always wants it yesterday. Or the company may need the strategy to save money to stay profitable. So if workers point out problems with this ethic, they’re branded as troublemakers instead of team players.

Because their values differ, engineers often find themselves clashing with managers. Engineers refine, perfect and verify. But realistic managers often feel that if they waited to test something nine times, engineers wouldn’t have a company in which to work.

Not all engineers and managers are like this. But sometimes when engineers cry, “Let’s wait and be sure,” managers reply, “Ship it.”

So when scientists weren’t sure that the shuttle rocket was safe, their bosses may have thought that the warnings were coming from indecisive perfectionists.

The managers created a new standard to test how serious the complaints were. One engineer testified, “I had the feeling that we were in the position of having to prove it was unsafe instead of the other way around, and it was a totally new experience.”

Although the Rogers Commission did not assess fault for the tragedy, we still want to hold someone responsible.

NASA executives are trying to dodge the responsibility, perhaps relying on another rule: “If the product fails, no one gets blamed.” In other words, you fault the process and try to satisfy the customer.

If I were a manager, I’d be thinking, “This isn’t fair. The behavior that earned me a raise might now cost me my job.”

The organization had needs and values that rewarded the “ship it now” mindset. But, once exposed, the public deplored it. Different social settings have different values.

The space agency’s executives haven’t explained their actions well to the presidential commission, perhaps because they didn’t recognize the problem.

It’s hard to understand how unspoken rules subconsciously affect you until you step outside your social setting and view it as an outsider. You can’t tell that the world is round until you see it from space--something that the astronauts aboard the Challenger were trying to do.

The “ship it now” mentality doesn’t plague all companies. Different firms have different value systems. Nevertheless, the mentality can be traced to more than just the shuttle explosion.

Some computer-software firms sell programs that don’t have all the bugs worked out. If people complain, they offer upgrades. Car makers recall models with defects.

But if you swap managers instead of trying to change organizational mores, you don’t solve the problem.

Business culture is like the gears of a clock. You can fire a person and you can replace a gear. But a new gear in the old clock still turns in the same direction.

A new executive in an operation with the same organizational setting will adopt the same mindset: “Ship it now; if it breaks, fix it later.”

Unless commissioners recognize this, they’ll miss the lesson of the space-shuttle tragedy.