Experts say NASA's safety culture may be too broken to fix

WASHINGTON -- With NASA under orders to fix its safety culture in the wake of the Columbia tragedy, industrial psychologists and management wizards say extreme measures may be needed: a purge at the top, the return of Apollo-era decision-makers, more businesslike behavior, possibly even a new name.

"It's a bad enough problem that you start to wonder if they almost don't need to have their name changed, like WorldCom and MCI," said Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, associate dean for executive programs at the Yale School of Management.

"For sure, all the top brass at NASA should be reviewed."

The Columbia accident investigators are giving NASA months, if not years, to change the deeply rooted culture that led not only to the destruction of Columbia and the deaths of seven astronauts on Feb. 1, but to the loss of Challenger and seven astronauts 17 years earlier. In both cases, engineers were too afraid to speak out to managers about technical concerns, and managers driven by flight scheduling pressures made deadly decisions regarding foam and, in the case of Challenger, O-rings.

Beginning at the top

NASA administrator Sean O'Keefe promises to implement all 29 technical and organizational recommendations issued by the Columbia Accident Investigation Board last Tuesday and insists culture changes will begin at the top with him and his staff. He moved from the Office of Management and Budget to NASA less than two years ago to rein in space station spending.

Deborah Lipman Slobodnik, co-founder and managing partner of Options for Change in Reading, Mass., thinks O'Keefe is part of the problem. She would immediately replace him and at least half his lieutenants with people "who really get it and who really also are modeling by example."

"He's not part of a new moving-forward vision of safety and how things are going to operate, he's really looking at cost cutting, and cost cutting was part of the old regime," Slobodnik said. "Can people change 180 degrees? Sure, I guess I believe that, but I think it's going way against any sort of odds."

What's urgently needed, she said, is "a new sheriff in town" -- someone like retired Army Gen. Wesley Clark, a possible Democratic presidential contender, or Jack Welch, General Electric's former chief executive officer. The next six months are critical if NASA is to overhaul its culture, she noted.

Functional changes

Boston College sociologist Diane Vaughan, author of the 1996 book "The Challenger Launch Decision," is also pessimistic but believes ditching O'Keefe at this point would be a mistake.

"If you replace the leader, it gives the idea that you change the cast of characters, you've fixed the system, and it obscures all the problems in the system and you don't really want to go there this time," Vaughan said. "You really want the system to be fixed."

To have insisted on a cultural transformation at NASA before space shuttle flights resume -- whenever that is -- almost certainly would have resulted in cosmetic changes, said retired Navy Adm. Harold Gehman Jr., the investigation board's chairman.

"We know that the diligence and vigilance that are associated with the flight that's close to the accident will be so intense that nothing will be overlooked," Gehman said. "But the history of all big bureaucracies and the history of NASA indicates that that diligence and vigilance atrophy with time, and they slip back into their old habits again. We want to put in real functional changes -- not just changing the name plates on the doors or rearranging the chairs in the meeting."

He added: "It's going to take both organizational change and strong leadership to change the culture and NASA's going to have to have some help from Congress and the White House -- and even then it will be hard. But it can be done. I've seen it done."

One corporate psychologist puts NASA's underlying institutional problems on a par with the Enron debacle and the recent massive power outage in the Northeast.

Christina Williams, managing director of RHR International's Dallas office, said all three represent large-scale failures involving a series of uninformed decisions and miscommunication, not just technical breakdowns. In NASA's case, public scrutiny is especially intense and the hurdles are especially difficult.

"It's saying, at what level is, quote, good enough and what does good look like," said Williams, who coached NASA executives on leadership development a few years ago.

Nobel Prize-winning physicist Douglas Osheroff, an investigation board member, insisted in the final editing that the accident report call for culture change in strong, direct language. The chapter listing the recommendations -- none of which mentions the word "culture" -- stresses at the beginning: "NASA's culture must change."

Is that likely? "If I were betting," Osheroff said, "I would probably bet no."

But, he noted: "There's one big difference right now. It is unquestionably true that if NASA loses another orbiter, we are out of human spaceflight for a long time. The stakes are really high."

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