Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life

by Ozan Varol

Near misses lead people to take unwise risks. Rather than urgency, near misses create complacency. In studies, people who have information about near misses make riskier decisions than those with no information about them.49 Even though the actual risk of failure remains the same after a near miss, our perception of the risk decreases.50 At NASA, the management interpreted each near miss not as a potential problem, but as data that confirmed its belief that O-ring damage or foam shedding weren’t risk factors and wouldn’t compromise the mission. The managers had a perfect string of successes. The rocket scientists sounding the alarm were crying wolf. The opposing data points didn’t arrive until disaster struck. Only then did NASA gather the troops to conduct a postmortem and investigate the warnings that had been concealed by success. By then, it was too late.