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bjbj$ Audience Question: I think you build a solid case for our need for innovation.
Do you believe that we have removed the obstacles that we need to, to allow for that innovation
in our workplace? I believe that we have the most passionate and talented workforce. I
don t think we need to find those innovative people. I think we have them, but I personally
think we perhaps bury them a little bit and then it goes back to the risk. What s our
risk posture? So I m interested in what you think we need to do. Bobby Braun: I don t
think we re there, let me just be candid about that. So one of the things that I ve done
in these first few months is I ve travelled to almost all the centers. I need to admit
that I wanted to get to Goddard and my trip got cancelled, so I m going back out there.
I m coming Rob. Rob Strain told me that Goddard would be the last place I would go because
it s the closest and he was right, unfortunately. But I ve been all to the other centers at
this point and your preface is totally correct. They are strong, technically motivated, passionate,
caring people, strong engineers, strong scientists, at all of our centers. Frankly, going to the
centers has been among the best experiences of my time in this second stint here at NASA.
Just hearing the ideas, hearing the passion from people at the different centers. Things
that they want to work on, things that they think are possible, things that they ve kind
of kept a live somehow with little bits of funding here and little bits of funding here,
despite whatever program they were supposed to be working on ll say that. It s really
remarkable and so there s no doubt in my mind that we have the raw material, in other words
the talent, to be innovative. But what we need to do is remove those stumbling blocks
and right now, in my view, the agency is too process-oriented to allow that innovation
to flourish as well as it could. I mean sure, the innovation occurs sometimes. It occurs
despite our efforts to stop it in some cases. It occurs on its own in other cases, but one
of the things that my office is going to be doing is taking a hard look at NASA culture,
the systems engineering culture and the systems engineering rigor that is both required and
is sometimes stunted. We need to figure out a way, I don t have all the answers, OK, I
ll admit that. We need to figure out a way to have that rigor when we need it for our
flight projects to allow that creativity and that innovation, that spark of an idea to
get worked on and to allow that seed to flourish before we attack it and say what s wrong with
it and bring all the faulty agencies processes to bear on that idea. Now there hasn t been
a way to do this previously. There hasn t been a source of funding, but one of the things
we re planning is the Center Innovation Fund. The Center Innovation Fund is designed for
this purpose. Is designed to nurture and to grow innovation at each of the centers and
this fund is going to be managed not out of Headquarters, but it s going to be managed
locally at each of the ten centers by either the center director or the center chief technologist.
And they re going to invest in a portfolio of innovative ideas and either concepts or
process improvements or what have you. So there is actually a way to fund these kinds
of things now and what we need to then do is take a little care with our culture to
make sure that those really innovative ideas are given the time and the energy needed to
grow. Steve Altemus: I think I wanted to add a little bit to that. I agree. Our workforce
is a superior, highly motivated, capable workforce, innovative workforce. It is we have created
a culture in the agency and it s up to the leadership of the agency, us in the leadership
roles, to peel away those barriers that you re speaking about and allow the innovation
to flow up out of the organization. It s unshackling, I guess is the way to look at it. I started
a project, and Bobby was picking on me a little bit about getting things done with little
or no authority or money, I started a project back in November called Project M, right?
You know about that right? We re going to put a walking robot on the moon in 1,000 days
and we started with a LOX/methane lander, and an autonomous landing hazard avoidance
technology on a technology-rich project for the sake of demonstrating NASA s prowess and
can-do, innovative attitude. It s really bout my workforce and trying to get the workforce
latched onto the idea that shouldn t be in the vocabulary. They can do in spite of the
barriers that are in front of us and by having something like that as a motivating force
goes so much further than any kind of process improvement study or let s go rewrite this
particular document or let s go study this do a value stream mapping on this process.
If you go back and figure you ve got to get this done on an insanely possible schedule
with essentially no money, go find innovative ways to get it done in spite of all that stuff,
they ll find ways through and they ve uncovered a number of process insensibilities, I guess
you could call them. Where why does shipping take so long after it enters the loading docks?
Why does to get a computer take so long to move across a room? They just had so many
little things that got in their way, and then they just said well let me just find a way
around it because I have to get this job done. That forcing function is the key. So while
we have things like the Center Innovation Fund and some other ideas, the challenge for
us as leaders is going to be able to do this on a broader scale where we can have more
wholesale changes from that perspective as opposed to these brilliant pockets of innovation
that are occurring all over the agency every day. How do you stitch those together to create
something that s more powerful? Audience Question: I think you build a solid case for our need
for innovation hstephenson Normal.dot hstephenson Microsoft Office Word VALADOR Audience Question:
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