Dr. Charles Camarda - BOOK - Mission Out Of Control

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Your morning news, on the way to work and all
day in fault check.

Speaker 2 (00:04):
In throughout the day.

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Fifty five KRC, the talk station eight five Here fifty
five KRC, you talk station. A very happy Friday to
you intrigued about this book. I'm happy to welcome to
the fifty five Carcy Morning Show, doctor Charles Kamara, author
of the book We're going to be talking about Mission
out of Control and astronauts Odyssey to Fix High Risk

(00:26):
Organizations and Prevent Tragedy. He is, as the book suggests,
and astronaut. What a cool thing to say. You are
research engineer and venor author, educator, Internationally recognized expert, invited
speaker on subjects regarding engineering, engineering, design, innovation, safety, organizational
behavior and education. He's got more than sixty technical publications,
hold nine patents, and over twenty national and international awards

(00:49):
that could go on for hours on his background. He
retired from NASA and May twenty nineteen after forty five
years of continuous research as our continuous service as a
research engineer technical manager at Langley re Search Center. Who's
Director of Engineering at Johnson Space Center and Senior Advisor
for Innovation and Engineering at Development at Langley. Welcome to
the Morning Show, Doctor Kimarta. It is a pleasure to

(01:09):
have you on today.

Speaker 2 (01:12):
Good morning, Brian, thanks for having me.

Speaker 1 (01:15):
I mean, I got it being an astronaut. To me,
that's just fascinating, and you probably won't. You're a very
small slice of the entire population. I'm just kind of
wondering whether you would rather be referred to as astronaut
doctor Charles Karmonda or doctor Astronaut Charles Commoner, because I
would always want to put that in when I was
introducing myself.

Speaker 2 (01:34):
You know, Brian, most people call me Charlie.

Speaker 1 (01:36):
There you go, Well, Charles mission, out of control, astronauts
O honesty to fit the high risk organization and prevent tragedy.
First off, what I think I have an understanding as
to why what prompted you to write this book before
we start talking about what the book is intended to do.

Speaker 2 (01:53):
Well, as you said, I worked for NASSA for over
forty five years and it was an amazing organization when
I was a young researcher at massalignedly, but it changed.
It lost its way. We stopped doing real applied research.
We started becoming a production organization, especially on the human
space flight side, and we started just looking at operating

(02:15):
vehicles and flying them in space, and we lost our
touch with our research routs, and we lost our capability
to actually understand when we had critical problems.

Speaker 1 (02:27):
So am I to understand? You were on the team
that led the investigation why the Columbia Space Shuttle blew up?

Speaker 2 (02:36):
Well, I didn't lead the team. I led one of
the teams that was investigating the technical cause of the problem,
and that was the impact. And we used some of
my good friends Matt Mellis and some of Kelly Carney
and some of the great people at Glenn Research Center
right there in Cleveland.

Speaker 1 (02:56):
Okay, Well, when I was reading through the materials, I
did write Boeing down here, because Boeing has been plugged
with problems. They make the planes, but they don't, you know,
like for example, let the air pilots know they change
the software they have, you know, the poor performance in
terms of manufacturing. They have a product, but they have
breakdowns in manufacturing that obviously can lead and have led

(03:18):
to the loss of life. Is that sort of an
illustration of the of the like a company to whom
you would focus this book or directed their attention to
this book.

Speaker 2 (03:28):
Absolutely a lot of companies. It's a very similar problem
because what we learned after the Columbia accident was that
the primary cause of the of the of the accident
was the culture. And what you saw after the seven
thirty seven MAX accidents with Boeing is they came to
the same conclusion. Boeing lost this way, just like National

(03:48):
loss this way. Technical excellence was no longer and safety
were no longer the key primary focus of the organization.
It got bobbed down with the bottom line market share profit.
That's very similar but different reasons. Became very focused on

(04:09):
production schedule and budget and keeping the programs alive, and
it's become a loaded bureaucracy. And what I realized, what
I learned in the research writing the book, is that
what other people missed was there's a difference between technical excellence,
technical people, good engineers, and what I call research engineers.

(04:30):
And so I described the elements that make up a
good research, a good learning organization like what Boeing used
to be, just like NASA was, and how that can
lead to a very toxiculture which becomes psychologically unsafe. People
are afraid to speak up, and then bad things happened

(04:50):
and the accidents recur, just like Challenger and Columbia.

Speaker 1 (04:54):
Well, you mentioned bottom line, profit share, market share, and
profit all being primary dry and to the exclusion of
perhaps this intense focus on perhaps safety. But on a
similar note, I kind of think that maybe, like if
you look at DEI departments, they're focused on culture, and
they're focused on social issues and issues that transcend any

(05:16):
given companies primary focus, which would be should be providing
a quality product and or service to their customers. Is
that another form of sort of a lack of focus
or improper direction that we could point to.

Speaker 2 (05:31):
Well, diversity is good, right, it helps us create, It
helps us come with very innovative solutions. But DEI and
quoteas and getting away from merit talkers. Yeah, you know,
a good research organization is knowledge is key, and you
have deference to the people that have that expertise, and
you always have to develop those skills and maintain those standards.

Speaker 1 (05:54):
Well, are you concerned about the state of education in
the United States because we seem to be turning out
young people who just are taught to the test but
not taught to critically think. I mean, it's one of
the reasons why I love law school so much because
it was a socratic method, that back and forth and
that delving down and looking into and analyzing, you know,

(06:14):
in that particular case, different areas of law. But it
was a wonderful teaching method. We don't seem to be
teaching children logic and reason anymore? Is there a shortage
of that? Is that part of the cultural problem here?

Speaker 2 (06:26):
You're absolutely correct. When I was resigned that mathif was
speaking up, I started diving into how do we train
our young engineers and education in general around the United States.
As matter of fact, I started a five oh one
to three CE educational nonprofit cuts called the Ethic Education Foundation,
where we used a challenge based learning approach. And yeah,

(06:48):
absolutely correct. Lawyers do this. They think critically, They look
at all different sides of an argument. And you had
this free environment where you could have this discourse, you
could have these disagreements, but you relied on the facts
and the knowledge and the knowledge that was verified by
tests and analysis.

Speaker 1 (07:07):
Okay, So in a corporate environment, moving away from you know, lawyers,
you know, talking and advocating on behalf of their clients
and sort of thinking around the different challenges they face
but in a corporate environment, I think you alluded to
it earlier, people have this reluctance to hold their hand
of it and say no, no, that's a dumb idea because
of the you know, am I going to lose my job?

(07:27):
Am I going to embarrass my boss? I can't do that.
I'm not going to be the one that cheeks up.

Speaker 2 (07:32):
That's exactly what you're talking about, a psychological safety. Amianmentsid
wrote a book to Feel this organization about this, and
I talk about this in my books. How in a
real true research culture, a true research environment, this is
this is absolutely critical. And so when I spoke about
my book and culture to the senior executives at Boeing

(07:55):
and I told them how ugly the culture was in
the environment was NASAs. Their eyes were wide open. But
people were coming up to me and saying, you know what, Charlie,
the culture is worse at Bowing. And I didn't believe them.
But that was six months before the first of the
first y In Air crash of seven thirty seven, and

(08:16):
then six months later that you had the Ethopian Allines
crash and the body sell out of Boeing, And so
what I was trying to tell the Bowie senior executives
after the seven thirty seven crash, was that you need
to listen to your people. People are telling you there
are major problems, but their voices are being muted and
they're being canceled.

Speaker 1 (08:37):
Well, part of me, let me ask you this, sir.
And then again I guess is astronaut doctor Charles kamarda
Mission out of Control and astronauts Odyssey to Fix High
Risk Organizations and Prevent Tragedies? Sort of the subtitles suggests
high risk organizations? Who did you write the book for?
Was it for the public at large? Are you focusing on,
you know, corporate culture and your leaders and executives within companies.

Speaker 2 (09:01):
Originally I focused on it as a way to help
fix NASA, but what I realized was when NASA wasn't listening,
there were many organizations that have this very similar problem.
And so the second half of the book I talk
about ways that we could fix this problem, how we
could use technology, how we could to train people differently,
how we can build what I call these five key

(09:22):
principles of a research culture.

Speaker 1 (09:25):
Well, I guess there's probably you know, using Boeing as
an illustration, and NASA's an illustration there. I would imagine
there is a different mindset among the employees that in
the private sector, Yeah, you run the risk of losing
your job, you run the risk of getting fired for incompetence.
But I would think in a government environment, you're less

(09:47):
likely to face any well penalty for maybe not doing
work or for maybe causing a problem or something. There's
a sort of a protection element in governm jobs. It
seems to not exist in the private sector. Is there
a distinction between them, and along the lines of what
you're talking about, it's.

Speaker 2 (10:09):
Not really, Because you know, I spoke up after I
flew in space. I became director of engineering, and when
I saw problems with safety, I spoke up in a
flight readiness review and I was reassigned three days later. So,
if you can imagine an astronaut being silenced, it can
happen to anyone. And while you don't might lose your job,

(10:31):
you might lose your position, you might lose your voice,
and you're placed in a terrible situation where you no
longer can do the job that you loved. People will
not treat you the same because you're no longer you're
a piranha, you're a pariah, your persona non grata.

Speaker 1 (10:51):
Fair enough, well, doctor, Obviously in the book, you identify
the general concepts we're talking about the problem that we face,
and I presume that you offer and outline solutions to
these problems, practical solutions that people in the business world
can incorporate.

Speaker 2 (11:08):
Absolutely. I have key things for leaders to look for
signs that the culture is going awry. I talk about
technical use of technology to help us identify when an
individual team, because it only takes one small team to
be dysfunctional, like the team that was working on the

(11:29):
ownings or the team that was analyzing the impact of
foam on Columbia. You have one dysfunctional team and it
could cause a tragedy. So I highlight several ideas for
how you build a psychologically safe environment, a knowledge based
hierarchy where you encourage people to fail and learn by failure,

(11:52):
and how you're transparent, how you share information openly and
you encourage competing ideas.

Speaker 1 (11:59):
I love the sound of it. It sounds practical and
logical and reasonable to me. Astronaut doctor Charles Kamarta, author
of Mission out of Control and astronauts Odyssey to Fix
high risk organization and prevent tragedy. Doctor. We have your
book on my blog page, fifty five KRC dot com.
I sounds to me like there's a lot of business
owners out there in my audience. I would love to
get a copy of this, and I'm sure they will.

Speaker 2 (12:19):
Well.

Speaker 1 (12:19):
Thank you for spending time with my listeners and I
today and identifying this problem so we can work on solutions, sir,
That's what it's all about.

Speaker 2 (12:28):
Thank you very much for having me Brian.

Speaker 1 (12:30):
My pleasure, Absolutely, my pleasure. It's eight eighteen right now,
fifty five KRC Detalk Station. Feel free to call. I
had a couple of callers online as we went into
the break. If you guys want to call back, Joe'll
open up the phone lines and I'll be happy to
talk with you. Otherwise I get to pick the subject
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Speaker 2 (12:48):
Five KRC dot com.

Speaker 1 (12:50):
These times of massive inflation have people just like you strapped.

Speaker 2 (12:54):
As far as my debt, I was drowning in