How NASA Builds Teams - Page 2
1. The basics of the 4-D system The 4-D system uses an X-Y coordinate system to simplify
The 4-D system simplifies leadership into the four dimensions
you must address and balance to be an effective leader:
1. Cultivating – you have to make everyone feel appreciated.
2. Including – you must make people’s opinions count.
3. Visioning – you have to think about possible futures.
4. Directing – you have to take action to make things happen.
Not only can 4-D be used to build good leaders but it is also a
solid team-building process. It measures the key driver of team
performance – the social context.
“I am convinced that half the cost of a project is socially
determined.”
– John Mather, NASA Nobel Laureate in physics
The Hubble Space Telescope cost NASA 15 years of work and
$1.7 billion of taxpayer money to put into space in 1980. Yet it
wasn’t until the Hubble was in orbit that it was discovered the
telescope’s mirror had a spherical aberration – making it unable
to be used for what it had been designed for in the first place.
When a Failure Review Board analyzed how this problem arose,
it was determined the aberration was caused by a misadjusted
null corrector manufactured by a contractor. What was worse,
however, was there had been hints of the mirror flaw in some
tests but smart technical people have not pursued these hints
rigorously enough to uncover the underlying problem.
This illustrated the point technical workers often focus so
intensively on the task at hand they fail to notice or manage the
larger social context within which their technology is required to
operate. This is the mental equivalent of concentrating so hard
on climbing the ladder nobody has stopped to ponder whether
the ladder is standing by the right wall. Social context always
plays a large role in how projects turn out:
n In one well-known study by Wilson and Kelling in 1982, they
showed crime increases in rental buildings in New York when
no one repairs broken windows. Unrepaired windows create a
context where people assume nobody cares and therefore
crime increases. This led to a massive experiment where
crime on New York subways was lowered by removing graffiti
and arresting fare jumpers.
n Many of the best and brightest people who serve as project
heads at NASA and other aerospace industry projects have
authority over multi-billion-dollar budgets and yet expect top
management to fire them within two years or less. They
believe cost overruns are inevitable and when they have to
make those cost overruns known, they will be fired for what
they are reporting.
n In the Hubble case, it was found NASA program managers
openly criticized and pressured the contractors to meet tight
delivery and cost budgets. As a result, the contractors felt they
could not report delays or problems in what they were working
on. They therefore responded by using guerilla tactics
including withholding troubling information. This ultimately led
the review board to conclude the problem with the Hubble
Space Telescope was a failure of leadership more than
anything else.
In order for context to be understood, measured and therefore
managed better, a simple tool was required which could be used
to analyze the performance of teams and leaders.
teams and leaders in this way:
X-axis How information is used to make a decision.
There are two ways to decide anything:
1. You can use emotions to make a decision.
2. You can base a decision solely on logic.
Y-axis How you choose the information you want to
use. There are two options available here:
1. You can measure information empirically.
2. You can intuit or use your imagination.
By combining this X-axis and Y-axis together, you come up with a
two-by-two matrix which represents the four core elements or
dimensions of leaders and high performance teams:
How How decisions get made
information is
conveyed Emotional Logical
C V
Intuited Cultivating Visioning
I D
Sensed Including Directing
The four dimensions are:
C Cultivating (emotional, intuited) embraces deep feelings for
an idealized world. Actions in this dimension are concerned
with addressing the interests of others and making them feel
understood and appreciated.
I Including (emotional, sensed) is about building relationships
with others. Actions in this dimension focuses on making
others feel like they are part of a team and injecting integrity
by ensuring everyone keeps their commitments.
V Visioning (logical, intuited) is blue sky thinking about possible
futures. Leader’s actions in this dimension would be to
articulate a bright future while at the same time
acknowledging difficult realities facing the team at present.
D Directing (logical, sensing) is thinking and organizing.
Leader’s actions in this dimension are all management –
planning, organizing, controlling the output of the group.
“Social (that is, relating to the interactions of people) context
drives behavior and perception. Flawed social contexts cause
space disasters, airplanes to crash, and dysfunctional families.
You can manage your contribution to your work and family
context by managing your behaviors.”
– Charles Pellerin
“The 4-D System is all about replacing the lists of ‘what matters’
for team and leadership excellence with a system akin to a law of
physics. Here is an interesting aspect of how physics works. We
can never prove a law of physics. All we can do is apply laws and
fail to disprove them in enough applications that we have faith in
their predictive powers. The 4-D system analyzes leaders and
teams with sufficient repeatability that I have faith in continuing
its use.”
– Charles Pellerin