Leading, learning and lessons from the Challenger explosion

Do you remember where you were when the Challenger space shuttle exploded?

That horrible day in 1986, when seven crew members—including a beloved school teacher—perished in front of a stunned nation, is a prime example of a team decision that failed miserably, according to Harvard Business School’s Amy Edmonson. And by examining what went wrong, Edmonson helped delegates attending an afternoon workshop at the 2010 Union Delegate Conference see what it takes to communicate as a team the right way—and how to step up as a leader, regardless of your position on the team.

“Learning is a team sport,” says Edmonson, “and organizations only learn when their teams learn.”

At Kaiser Permanente, teams have to make difficult decisions all the time. Difficult decisions—defined as situations where there are different points of view, the stakes are high, and there is uncertainty about what will happen in the future—are the ones most in need of teamwork but it’s also the hardest time to actually work as a team.

“So what’s a team to do?” Edmonson wondered. But not for nothing has she been teaching at Harvard for 14 years.

She went on to show clips from a TV movie about the Challenger disaster that showed a crucial conference call the night before the fatal launch, asking participants to keep an eye out for places where communication broke down between NASA decision-makers and engineers from the firm that built the O-rings that failed. The men attacked each other personally, didn’t have the data they needed and were too afraid to ask for it, and engaged in a nasty power struggle. The results, as we know, were tragic.

To make better decisions as a work team, Edmonson says we have to shift from the advocacy paradigm evident in the Challenger movie—where we see a decision as a contest, with a winner and a loser—to a problem-solving paradigm. This is all about collaboration, testing and evaluating, being open to alternatives, and ending up with collective ownership.

“This takes leadership,” she says. “You have to make it happen.”

Oh, sure. How's a leader to do that? Edmonson had answers. A leader must:

• Manage themselves. “Reflect on your reactions, cultivate self-awareness in action, look for the ‘sense,’ not the ‘non-sense’ in what the other person says.”
• Manage the conversation: “Express curiosity, invite dissent”—yes, invite it—“conduct thought experiments, play out scenarios.”
• Remember, she says, “a good decision is at least partly a synthesis of different perspectives.”

Lorraine Rowe liked the sound of that. An SEIU UHW-West member from Antelope Valley, Calif., Rowe says acknowledging that insight will help break down barriers to good team communication.

“At the beginning of a meeting,” says Rowe, “a leader could say, ‘We want the final decision to reflect some ideas from everyone involved.’ People are reticent to bring things up sometimes. Saying that would put people at ease and encourage them to participate.”

A lead lab assistant and chief steward, Rowe says she will tell her labor and management partners that “it would be more effective if we knocked down the barriers in the beginning.”

“I am not giving you cocktail party tips,” Edmonson says. “This is for the workplace.”