The Right Kind of Crazy: A True Story of Teamwork, Leadership, and High-Stakes Innovation

by Adam Steltzner

That’s why I tell young engineers coming to the lab, “We’re not paid to do things right, we’re paid to do them just right enough.”

That sentiment holds true for engineering at large. Take this delightful test of any engineering effort: Does your device, your robot, your app do what it is supposed to? Does your fancy space-exploring robot work as you planned? Making things too complex, too overwrought, is one of the fastest ways to fail. In our designs we look for the simplest, lowest-risk way of solving a problem. Sometimes that solution looks brutish and maybe lowbrow. But if it works, we have done what we needed to do with the least risk and usually at the lowest cost.

When I started working EDL on MSL, the distributed-leadership process had sneaked back into place, with a wider set of leadership distributed around NASA centers. This meant a less clear vision of what our central risks were and what our design should be. We were exploring a wide range of possible EDL design elements, and we were not focused enough on narrowing the job to the minimum-risk solution, then moving forward. We needed a central command to get down to the essence of things—the hard truth—and then to act on it. But to refocus our effort and tighten our mutual understanding of the design and where our risks lay, we first had to get beyond the clash of cultures.

Only in an environment of imminent application are ideas made to compete in brutal mortal combat. Without really having to do a thing, we can’t learn to accept the simple (and the potentially ugly) truths that should guide all aspects of the thing’s design.

In reality, transitions are where the vast majority of the engineering comes into play, and they are the moments in which you are most likely to die. That’s why the use of transition as a verb is a dangerous indicator of arm’s-length engagement, like that all-too-familiar phrase from political ass covering: Mistakes were made.

Lower pitch meant that we had to be willing to give up a little altitude capability and performance, an act of conservatism that I thought we should accept for multiple reasons. Safety was the first consideration. But also, with more limited performance capability, we would be less tempted to grow in mass. Later we could twist the knobs and gain back a little performance if it was truly necessary.

Anytime someone is brought in to help a system that’s struggling, he needs to feel that the system is genuinely in distress in order to rev up the motivation to do the job. That’s how he generates a sense of purpose, sensing that his value is proportional to how messed up the current system is. If there isn’t a real problem, then the new guy brought in to straighten stuff out is just window dressing.

We couldn’t be like city-states, each with our own turf to worry about. We had to lead together, in a cross-pollinated way, being aggressive in our conversations while showing love and respect for the people. As for the ideas, we beat the crap out of them. Of course, this is harder to accomplish without day-to-day, physical proximity.

For me, trim tab was dead after about a minute and a half of conversation, but we weren’t looking to crush anything in single strokes. Part of respecting the human and looking at how we will fit the puzzle pieces together is allowing the people enough time to come to terms when an idea they hold dear has become a “dead idea walking.” So we delayed making the final decision until we’d had a couple more meetings and let the new reality settle in. Ultimately, rather than the trim tab, we went with a weight-offset approach to create lift.

But we’d also seen failure, and you learn a lot more from failure than from success.

Some people dread the kind of oversight our review board provided, seeing it as someone watching over their shoulders, breathing down their necks. I saw it as taking advantage of valuable, expert advice, and I saw the board members as advisers, not judges. I also find it a lot more intriguing and challenging to convince somebody who’s skeptical of something I’ve proposed than it is to convince myself that they don’t know what they’re talking about. The challenge of winning them over makes the person who doesn’t understand you much more interesting.

Even when you have a great team, and you are questioning deeply, and you are really cooking, you can still be wrong. You can always be wrong. I hope that I have learned that if even a whiff of possible wrongness is in the air, I should hunt it down. Try to make the most of the appearance of being wrong, until either you convince yourself and others that you really are right or you discover the error in your ways. Never leave a suspicion of error left undeveloped.

I paused for several long beats. What to do? Prosecute my position, or just move on? I suddenly realized that even if I could win this debate between myself and the head of NASA, winning points wasn’t the point. We were there to get approval for a single, very big idea. That’s all that mattered. The case I was making wasn’t something I’d cooked up overnight when I found out we were going to be called to account. This was a case that the entire team had developed over a period of years. It had been approved by our review board from the Aerospace Corporation and by our own EDL review board as well. It was all new to Mike, but the intellectual progression had been well exercised, and the weaknesses shored up. So I let the argument go—ideas should win, not people. Then I went on with my slides.

Showing these irrelevant and terrifying videos was a classic case of “selling past the close” and losing the deal as a result. Technical people sometimes have trouble with this, but you can’t get away with simply offering unfiltered information.

Speaking the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth is not enough. You also have to take responsibility for understanding what you’re saying, why you’re saying it, and the effect that hearing it is going to have on your listener. The truth is not just the collection of all the facts you may know in relation to a given subject. The truth means understanding the significance of those facts, the validity, the true representative nature of each of them, and being responsible for which ones should be shared in order to effectively convey, not just state, the truth.

Vomiting up all the facts onto the table has a way of clouding truth. Similarly, saying too much without helping the listener understand what is important and what is not is irresponsible. To really convey the point, one must prioritize the facts, sort the wheat from the chaff. Admittedly this selective editing process puts the editor in a dangerous position. It means that if you are not clear about your own motives and your ultima...

When I’m advising engineers how to explain things, I often say, “Sometimes to express the essence of a thing, you have to be willing to do violence to the fact of it.” This statement is supposed to arouse feelings of distress and anxiety. Yes, “Is he telling me to lie?” is the question I am trying to elicit. I most certainly am not, but I do want people to feel as culpable as if they were telling a lie. I want them to understand that to really communicate, you have to take...

To me, this whole experience of selling past the close and having to invest two more years in inconclusive testing reinforced two classic lawyering lessons about the control of information: You never ask a question you don’t know the answer to, and the battle is won or lost over which piece of evidence the jury is allowed to see.

We got into this situation not only because a question was framed the wrong way but because it was asked and answered by people who didn’t have the necessary insight into how the information would be used. They also didn’t have the visceral connection to the problem at hand that would contribute to the necessary insight.

Failure of communication like this is a fairly classic problem that occurs in any organization. The essential, critical information, even if written down (which we had also failed to do in this case), is often forgotten in later decision making when that occurs at an organizational or temporal distance far from when and where the critical essence was identified.

Some people might hear this story and blame a lack of documentation. They’re right, but that’s not the lesson I take away. I believe that the only way for a group to really hold on to the essence of the task at hand is for all the members of the team to feel deeply intellectually and emotionally invested in the same vision. A more cohesive team would have sensed the disconnect. The lesson I learned from this mistake was that you not only have to find something to love about each of your people; you have to extend that love far and wide to all the other divisions and departments that you depend on.

That’s the dream for systems integration. A more cohesive team exchanges information more efficiently and has a stake in the efforts of each of the elements within the team as a whole. The members look out for one another better and, in doing so, look out for the overarching interest of the project.

The problem also underscores the fact that there’s more to communication than asking the seemingly appropriate question and getting a seemingly appropriate answer. You have to get down to that deeper truth I keep talking about, the essence, which has to be shared within context and with connectivity, without which you’re vulnerable to all sorts of errors that will look oh-so-avoidable after the fact.

Upon each encounter with uncertainty, a given engineer will choose the more conservative path, meaning that he or she will assume the worst-case scenario. Then the engineer who comes next does the same thing and also assumes the worst. So I suspected that our aerothermal environment wasn’t going to be quite as bad as it was assumed to be, and I had hopes of being able to persuade some of our team’s aerothermal-domain experts to let go of the conservatism that had been baked in.

Engineering, as I’ve said before, is often not about being right, as in perfectly right, but being right enough. Frequently, when pushed for time, you do not have the luxury of looking for the absolute best solution. In situations like these, you have to balance performance with the greater certainty that comes from a bird in the hand.

This attracted us, since SLA had surprised us by failing not at the extremes but in the middle of the possible aerothermal conditions. Such behavior is what engineers like to call nonlinear, meaning it does not show a simple one-to-one relationship. We wanted a TPS solution so simple that it wouldn’t surprise us.

The lesson, if there is one, is that no one’s engineering judgment is foolproof. I believe in a determinant universe, one that (a) exists and (b) is ordered by laws that cannot be changed at will. The search for the truth about such a universe invariably involves building a model of all that we know, which is an adjacent or surrogate universe.

A careful balance needs to be struck between our confidence in the parts of the universe we know and our suspicion of the universe we don’t know. Drawing on Rumsfeldian parlance once again—your known knowns, your known unknowns, and your unknown unknowns, or “unk-unks”—I think the art of engineering, or being successful in business or life, for that matter, lies in how one finds the unk-unks and makes them “kn-unks,” and how one respects the possibility for more to be found . . . or never discovered.

In my experience, the older and/or wiser one gets, the better one is at judging the unk-unks, sensing them, getting a feel for how vast they may or may not be, and somehow managing them. This is all done, of course, without actual conscious, explicit description of or actual counting of them, since doing so would immediately thrust them into the kn-unk category. I’ve known many smart people, those guys who won the physics prizes back in high school and aced the exams at Caltech, who tend to underestimate the unk-unks. They are aware of their intelligence, and their model of the universe is one in which that intelligence will always prevail. I’ve been in rocket science for quite a while and endured its humbling tutelage, and yet at times I still find myself in their number.

This is not easy for me, personally. I don’t like it. I am frustrated by the fact that our new and novel system can be brought down by functional parts that our state-of-the-art system shares with every other spacecraft launched since the sixties.

There’s a similar challenge in appreciating the seemingly mundane when it comes to people. It’s all too easy to take for granted the workers who don’t spend their time exploring the theoretical frontier, the ones who are not flashy or flamboyant, who are not talkers, who have no interest in being like the sun shining on everyone, but who are nonetheless exceptionally good at tightening the bolts, checking the data registers, and making stuff work.

Not only do you need both types, but every type on every team needs sufficient self-awareness to know how the larger interaction is unfolding and how everyone’s job—no matter how solitary or relatively unglamorous—fits into the larger scheme of things.

we had a bottleneck in the person of an engineer whom I will call “Michael.” The number one sin that could get you on my shit list is failure to respect and speak the truth. The number two sin ...

Michael had a keen but perhaps fragile sense of ownership over his work. My challenge with him was that this sense of ownership translated into overly proprietary behavior. He wouldn’t teach, and he wouldn’t share—not with me and not with anyone I sent his way. In retrospect I think he felt that his power emanated from the fact that nobody else understood his job; if he opened up about it, he might lose his exclusive hold.

Of course, you always can do more than you think, and we probably would have been okay if he had left. But I didn’t have the courage to face my senior advisers and mentors, all of whom were telling me that it was my personal approach, my combination of in-your-face style and insufficient love of Michael’s subject matter—not Michael’s attitude—that was the problem. So he stayed, and matters went from bad to worse.

And caution gets most challenging in times of success. How many companies have failed with their second major product rollout, not long after the first stunning victory?

The people who build spacecraft to explore the solar system can do this job only if they don’t freak out when they’re in the Dark Room, that place where you know you have no solution to your problem. So you develop resilience in order to avoid panic. But the effort to be resilient and keep marching forward can sometimes mean that you don’t take reparative action when things really are as bad as they seem. You’re working hard to stay in calm mode when occasionally it’s appropriate to freak out and hit the alarm.

The fact was, we were simply too close to the problem, too invested, too wrapped up in it. We needed more time to step back, get our minds off the high-velocity treadmill, and get down to the deeper truth of the issues that were holding us back. What we needed was more space for the integration of conscious and subconscious. But what we also needed was a doubter, someone from the outside with a beginner’s mind, who could look at our progress and call out the truth, which happened to be “You need to rethink on a major scale.”

I’m the kind of person who can remember a few key laws from which one can derive the rest of the world’s behavior, but I have a poor capacity for disassociated facts. People like Ann have minds that are more list capable, better at attributing connections between otherwise disjointed items in their memories, remembering facts that are simply jumbled together in the box, with no overarching theory to link them.

This is where you come to appreciate that definition of genius (in this case, collective genius) as an infinite capacity for taking pains. Everything we were doing was hugely labor intensive, working it in finer and finer detail, double- and triple-checking in a regime that combined incredible tedium and incredible pressure. Anybody can come up with a wild idea. It’s this 99 percent perspiration—implementation—that’s in some sense the true test.

Work that contains that kind of inherent incentive is one of the most powerful drivers we have, for innovation and decision making founded on curiosity outperform the same based on fear. Evolutionary biologists talk about exploiting and exploring, the two complementary survival strategies that every anthill or beehive seems to understand. Every organism, or colony, or business, for that matter, needs to find the right balance between making the most of existing resources and the investment necessary to keep scouts out exploring the edge.

We explore as a gesture of our humanity. We do it because we can, and we do it as an affirmation of who and what we are. As a society, if we ever stop exploring, who will we be? I think we will be stagnant, not innovating, not building. It’s a formula not just for stagnation but for disaster. Which is why nurturing and supporting innate curiosity is still one of the most valuable survival tools we have.

We carried out this exploration and expansion in teams and in bands, but we didn’t do it in lockstep. Loyalty and cooperation were essential, but so were individualism and creative conflict. But keeping the conflict creative, rather than combustible, was the search for the truth that lets ideas win, not people. When we were most successful, it was because we were trying to find what was right, not to be right. Our curious search for truth and understanding makes us unique compared with the other creatures on this planet. Our search drives strange behaviors, creates strange inventions, and appears crazy at times, but it just might be the right kind of crazy.