Just after 9:00 a.m. on February 1, 2003, the space shuttle Columbia broke apart and was lost over Texas. This tragic event led, as the Challenger accident had 17 years earlier, to an intensive government investigation of the technological and organizational causes of the accident. The investigation found chilling similarities between the two accidents, leading the Columbia Accident Investigation Board to conclude that NASA failed to learn from its earlier tragedy. Despite the frequency with which organizations are encouraged to adopt learning practices, organizational learning—especially in public organizations—is not well understood and deserves to be studied in more detail. This book fills that gap with a thorough examination of NASA’s loss of the two shuttles. After offering an account of the processes that constitute organizational learning, Julianne G. Mahler focuses on what NASA did to address problems revealed by Challenger and its uneven efforts to institutionalize its own findings. She also suggests factors overlooked by both accident commissions and proposes broadly applicable hypotheses about learning in public organizations.

Why human skills and expertise, not technical tools, are what make projects succeed. The project is the basic unit of work in many industries. Software applications, antiviral vaccines, launch-ready spacecraft: all were produced by a team and managed as a project. Project management emphasizes control, processes, and tools—but, according to The Smart Mission, that is not the right way to run a project. Human skills and expertise, not technical tools, are what make projects successful. Projects run on knowledge. This paradigm-shifting book—by three project management experts, all of whom have decades of experience at NASA and elsewhere—challenges the conventional wisdom on project management, focusing on the human dimension: learning, collaboration, teaming, communication, and culture. The authors emphasize three themes: projects are fundamentally about how teams work and learn together to get things done; the local level—not an organization’s upper levels—is where the action happens; and projects don’t operate in a vacuum but exist within organizations that are responsible to stakeholders. Drawing on examples and case studies from NASA and other organizations, the authors identify three project models—micro, macro, and global—and their different knowledge needs. Successful organizations have a knowledge-based culture. Successful project management guides the interplay of knowledge, projects, and people.

“The new world is one based on knowledge. Lean KM offers a practical approach to Knowledge Management, filled with historical references and interesting stories. It brought back wonderful memories of NASA.”—Dr. Edward J Hoffman, Former NASA CKO and Director of the NASA Academy of Program, Project, & Engineering Leadership (APPEL), CEO Knowledge Strategies LLC Lecturer, Columbia University, Information and Knowledge Strategy (IKNS) Lean Knowledge Management Helped Change NASA’s Culture and It Can Do the Same for Your Organization. NASA suffered three human spaceflight tragedies and Lean Knowledge Management was a major tool that helped NASA management implement massive cultural changes. Traditional knowledge management is too often regarded as overly complicated or a wasteful bureaucratic exercise, but Lean Knowledge Management can become a critical component for your organization to operate effectively, efficiently and safely. Lean Knowledge Management simplifies the process by: Clearly defining your organization’s key employees, Filtering the enormous amount of internal “information” into “critical knowledge”. Utilizing a myriad of resources to get this critical knowledge to the people who need it most - the very people that can make your organization successful. Repetitive mistakes and failures can cost an organization millions of dollars in lost revenue, scrap, and even lawsuits. Lean Knowledge Management strips away the academic jargon and implements a practical, cost-effective, organic program emphasizing lessons of the past. Knowledge is free! Your hard-earned corporate knowledge is right in front of you, why risk losing it and having to pay for it all over again? Knowledge is power! Lean Knowledge Management is a structured plan to harness that power for your organization.

Every successful organization needs high-performance teams to compete and succeed. Yet, technical people are often resistant to traditional "touchy-feely" teambuilding. To improve communication, performance, and morale among NASA’s technical teams, former NASA Astrophysicist Dr. Charlie Pellerin developed the teambuilding process described in "How NASA Builds Teams"—an approach that is proven, quantitative, and requires only a fraction of the time and resources of traditional training methods. This "4-D" process has boosted team performance in hundreds of NASA project teams, engineering teams, and management teams, including the people responsible for NASA’s most complex systems — the Space Shuttle, space telescopes, robots on Mars, and the mission back to the moon. How NASA Builds Teams explains how the 4-D teambuilding process can be applied in any organization, and includes a fast, free on-line behavioral assessment to help your team and the individual members understand each other and measure the key driver of team performance, the social context. Moreover, these simple, logical processes appeal strongly to technical teams who eschew "touchy-feely" training. Pellerin applies simple, elegant principles from his physics background to the art teambuilding, such as the use of a coordinate system to analyze the characteristics of team performance into actionable elements. The author illustrates the teambuilding process with entertaining stories from his decade as NASA’s Director for Astrophysics and subsequent 15 years of working closely with NASA and outside business teams. For example, he tells how the processes in the book enabled him to initiate the space mission to fix the Hubble Space Telescope’s flawed mirror. Free downloadable resources will help you: Identify your teammates’ innate personalities Diagram your culture (And compare it to your customer’s) Measure the coherency of your project’s paradigm (Get this wrong and you will be fired!) and Learn to meet people’s need to feel valued by you. Further, you can download and use Pellerin’s most powerful tool for influencing the outcome of any difficult situation: the Context Shifting Worksheet.

Today, NASA's Office of the Chief Engineer delivers a mature methodology for capturing and disseminating knowledge, for sharing expertise and lessons learned, for ensuring effective communication, for developing its people and assigning the right people to the right projects and programs. How it matured is a story about failure and learning from failure. Much of it was painful. All of it was a journey to project management excellence.

Leading Organizational Learning brings together today’s top thinkers in organizational learning—including Jon Katzenbach, Margaret J. Wheatley, Dave Ulrich, Calhoun W. Wick, Beverly Kaye, and other thought and industry leaders. This handbook helps business, government, and nonprofit leaders understand how to master learning and knowledge sharing within their organizations. This one-of-a-kind volume is filled with chapters that directly address the most current ideas, concepts, and practices on the topic of organizational learning. Acclaimed authors, world-renowned thought, global, and industry leaders, managing directors, and presidents of leading organizations have contributed their original essays to this provocative collection. Leading Organizational Learning Offers ten guidelines to help key employees and knowledge workers do a better job of influencing upper management Demonstrates the best way to move ideas through an organization Outlines the principles that facilitate knowledge management Explains how people learn on the job Discusses how larger organizations can leverage their “bigness” Proposes a method of knowledge mapping to effectively organize and use knowledge in decisionmaking Outlines the knowledge and attributes integral to the success of today’s executives Discusses passing knowledge from person to person Explains how consultants can help organizations develop ideas Debunks the myths and explores the realities of knowledge management