MediaSpace Wiki

Organizational Spr2006 Sess13

Index Card Assignment due Friday

For your stakeholder, describe how you might find information about the ways in which your organization communicates with your stakeholder.

NASA's Culture and Climate; MSFC Culture and Climate

• Never one culture
  • Research and Engineering Climate - Langley, Ames, Lewis
  • Army Arsenal Concept - Engineering and Fabrication (Deep Technical Culture) - Redstone/Marshall, Kennedy SC
  • Contracting Culture - Air Force, Johnson SC
• Principles of NACA culture (competing colleges)
  • Seeking the truth through research and testing
  • Incrementalism
  • Research Publication
  • Exceptional People
    • Well-trained engineers/In-house technical capability
    • Hands-on experience/Not wanting to be managers
  • With Apollo, matrix management
    • Problem: Lack of lateral openness in the matrix (IO/RDO)
  • Lower salaries than industry
    • But strong organizational identification
      • Inherent positive emotional component
      • Unobtrusive concertive control
    • High Job Satisfaction
    • High Communication Satisfaction
  • Automatic Responsibility
  • Acceptance of Risk and Failure
    • Random Successes
    • The normalization of risk, the acceptance of failure, and the anticipation of trouble led to an atmosphere in which the things could be discussed openly.
  • Open communication was very much a part of early NASA culture.
    • Terministic Screens (Burke): Breaking down linguistic barriers
  • Frontier Mentality
  • Competing Topoi: Safety, Reliability, and Cost
    • MSFC always favored the first two over the third
    • Part of the process of avoiding foul compromises
• Of these elements, communication is constituative

Organization of The Manned Space Flight Center

• In many ways a very typical organization by today's standards
  • Hierarchical management
    • Preference given to existing successful managers (e.g. the German's)
  • A balance of in-house expertise and reliance on external contractors (business partners)
  • Matrix Management
    • Employee responsibilities to multiple managers
      • RDO ... technical management and evaluation
      • IO ... project management and contractor relationships
  • Lots of acronyms and specialized jargon
• But some very atypical traditions
  • A balance of openness and need to know information distribution
    • Monday Notes
      • Earthquake prediction
      • Feedback and redistribution
      • Organizational learning about problems and progress
      • Resolves many of the problems of upward communication
    • Mushroom Management
      • A commonplace organizational narrative
      • A principle reason why the control room fails
      • Only partially resolved by Monday Notes redistribution
      • A barrier to automatic responsibility
  • Encouragement of conflict and redundancy
    • Often resisted as an unnecessary cost
    • Or as a threat to the strategic power of a mission holder
  • Automatic responsibility
  • Penetration