0:04

What happened on September 23, 1999?

0:10

This is the day that the Mars Climate Orbiter

0:14

went on a mission to Mars and actually failed considerably.

0:18

This was this device that NASA sent over to Mars.

0:22

It was designed to measure the weather on Mars,

0:25

and also to serve as this communication device

0:28

for the Mars Polar Lander,

0:30

which was supposed to arrive a couple of months later.

0:32

It just completely failed.

0:34

It hit the atmosphere, burst into a million pieces,

0:39

leaving the folks who worked at NASA

0:41

befuddled, upset, pretty pissed off.

0:44

These are not them.

0:45

You have to use your imagination a little bit in this talk.

0:48

Now these things happen.

0:50

Sending things into space is tricky business,

0:53

and quite frankly, as a psychologist,

0:56

who am I to judge a bunch of very smart engineers

0:59

who work for NASA

1:00

for failing and having a bad day at work?

1:03

But what makes this story extra special and super fascinating

1:08

from my perspective

1:10

is that the entire failure comes down to one thing:

1:13

failed communication between these team members,

1:17

and more specifically, the people working on this project

1:21

were not talking to each other about the right stuff at the right time.

1:26

It really is that simple.

1:29

So I'm going to break this down for you.

1:31

So it all started when they had to calculate the flight path.

1:34

So any time you send something into space, you have to tell it where to go.

1:38

And to do so you have to calculate the flight path.

1:41

Now the folks working at NASA for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory,

1:44

they calculated the flight path using the metric system,

1:47

and so they had the newton as their unit of force.

1:50

Those working at Lockheed Martin,

1:52

they were using the pound as their unit of force.

1:55

When you're using these two different systems,

1:57

the whole thing was off by a factor of about 4.4.

2:00

Now at no point did the folks at NASA say,

2:03

"Hey guys, you're using the newton as a unit of force, right?"

2:06

"No, guys. We were using the pound."

2:09

That conversation never actually happened.

2:12

And so we have our first big communication mishap.

2:15

Two sets of teams failed to communicate about basic information

2:20

that seemed pretty obvious to everybody.

2:23

And just to put things into perspective,

2:25

imagine instead of sending something into space,

2:28

these folks were making a cake.

2:30

And if I thought I was using a pound of butter

2:34

and you thought we were using a kilogram of butter --

2:37

that's about 2.2 pounds of butter --

2:39

your cake would end up tasting pretty gross,

2:42

like this one looks here.

2:44

Now before we get too judgey about this -- it sounds pretty silly --

2:48

we do this all the time.

2:49

We walk into meetings.

2:51

You know, if we get lucky,

2:53

there's that annoying, overly conscientious person

2:56

who says things like, before we get started,

2:58

everyone, let's level set and talk about, you know,

3:02

whether there's ink in the printer at the newspaper we work

3:05

or whatever obvious thing they want to get on the same page with.

3:08

And we usually roll our eyes at this person

3:11

and we tell them to stop talking because we want the meeting to end soon,

3:14

and we want to get on to the important stuff.

3:16

And we say things like, "We've done this a million times,

3:19

do we really need to cover that kind of thing?"

3:21

And the answer is yes, we should have that 22nd conversation

3:24

so that our probe does not explode when it hits the atmosphere.

3:27

But we often do not do this.

3:30

Now the good news is this is NASA.

3:32

There is no single point of failure.

3:34

And so just because you miscalculate your flight path

3:37

doesn't mean the whole mission is going to actually end

3:41

in just a complete failure.

3:42

And so people started noticing things were wrong.

3:45

And the good news is you can actually recalculate a flight path.

3:49

So people started bringing this up in various meetings,

3:52

and they even had a conference about it.

3:54

But then there was a big mistake that happened.

3:56

Communication mishap number two.

3:58

The people holding that critical information

4:01

were ignored for a very dumb reason

4:03

that I'm pretty sure everyone in this room can recognize.

4:07

They did not fill out the right form.

4:09

Now all of us know that if you send an important message over Slack

4:14

and everybody was on email,

4:15

or over email and everybody was on Slack,

4:18

we just miss that critical information.

4:21

But we don't think that a failure to fill out the right form

4:25

is going to be the difference

4:26

between our mission to Mars failing and succeeding.

4:29

We think that critical information will eventually make its way

4:32

to the important people at the top.

4:34

But often this is not the case.

4:36

We get very married to our processes,

4:38

and these can actually be our Achilles heel

4:41

in really important group decision-making contexts.

4:44

Things didn't end here.

4:46

There were actually some last-ditch efforts to save this mission

4:49

that didn't go so well.

4:50

Someone got on the phone with another person.

4:53

They sounded urgent about fixing it,

4:55

but that person didn't actually recognize urgency.

4:58

I think the quote was something around like,

The Surprisingly Simple Reason Teams Fail | Tessa West | TED