PREFACE BY FRANK CHAPMAN

TEST PILOT AIRBUS A380, A350

The New Frontier

ENGINEERING of Leadership and

Team Performance
Inspiration and Lessons
You Don’t Want to Learn
SUCCESS the Hard Way

Dragos Bratasanu
www.SuccessEngineer.org
 ”As institutions become
more complex and global,
there is increasing need
to understand the human
dynamic of social context.
This is a timely book,
an essential read.”

R. Gopalakrishnan
Director, Tata Sons Limited
 I dedicate this book to
Dr. Charles Pellerin
for helping me grow
into the person I am today
 ENGINEERING SUCCESS copyright info

Copyright © 2014 by Dragos Bratasanu. All Rights Reserved

copyright info

Disclaimer – The National Aeronautics and Space Administration NASA

has neither endorsed, sponsored nor authorized this publication. The views
expressed herein are solely those of the Author and do not necessarily
represent the views of NASA.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system

or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording scanning or otherwise without prior written
permission of the owner.

Requests to the owner should be addressed at [email protected]

Limit of Liability / Disclaimer of Warranty

While the author and the owner have used their best efforts in preparing
this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to
the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically
disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular
purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives
or written sales materials. The advice and strategies contained herein may
not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a professional
where appropriate. Neither the owner, the publisher nor the author shall
be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including
but not limited to special, incidental, consequential or other damages.

4  WHAT MAKES YOU FAIL www.SuccessEngineer.org

 ENGINEERING SUCCESS Acknowledgment

Special gratitude goes to Dr. Charles Pellerin, President of 4-D Systems,

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

for his continuous and invaluable support with my career in the aerospace
industry and for endorsing me to deliver the 4-D System worldwide. My
profound thankfulness goes to Dr. Ed Hoffman, NASA Chief Knowledge
Officer, Dr. Scott Hubbard, Professor at Stanford University, Dr. Guy Andre
Boy, Professor at Florida Institute of Technology, Dr. Stephen Johnson,
Manager at NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, Chris Stott, President &
CEO ManSat, and Dr. Dorin Prunariu, Cosmonaut for their contributions and
for their infinite help with my projects.

Immense gratitude goes to Walter Scott, Founder and CTO of DigitalGlobe

Inc. for his generosity and support for me to attend the International Space
University. 

I wouldn’t be where I am today without the continuous support of Dr. Marius

PISO, President & CEO of the Romanian Space Agency. Thank you for
believing in me.

This book would have never seen the light of day without the research work
and consulting of Horatiu Bahnean, without my film crew Razvan Dimitriu
and Dan Stefan and without Emanuel Dumitrescu, my brilliant graphic
designer. Thank you for spending your valuable time to design this book.

Deep thankfulness to my two friends who carefully reviewed this book – Lauren
Herold and Dr. Michael Johnson. Their efforts are wholeheartedly appreciated.

Last but not least, all my love to Alina for her infinite patience and love in my life.

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 ENGINEERING SUCCESS Table of contents

PART 1
table of contents

DECODING FAILURE
AND YOUR BUSINESS 9
THE INVISIBLE SOCIAL FIELDS 12
THE HIDDEN DANGERS 13
BEYOND-THE-SKY LEADERSHIP 14
THE BOOK OF REVELATIONS – MISSION FAILED 15
»» NASA Space Shuttle Challenger 17
»» Hubble Space Telescope - A two billion dollar failure 21
»» NASA Mars Program - Two failures for the price of one 23
»» Social failures in aviation 24
»» The failure event chain 26
»» The crash of the government 27

PART 2
THE POWER OF CONTEXT 30
SOCIAL EVIDENCE - LEADERS, FRIENDS & OTHER DANGERS 33

PART 3
THE FOUR DIMENSIONS
OF SUCCESS 36
THE FOUR FUNDAMENTAL HUMAN NEEDS 38
CONNECTING THE DOTS - FROM HUMAN NEEDS TO DISASTER 40
THE FOUR FUNDAMENTAL BEHAVIORS 40

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PART 4
THE LEGACY OF THE BRAVE 47
HUBBLE SPACE TELESCOPE - THE REPAIR MISSION 48
US AIRWAYS FLIGHT 1549 - MIRACLE ON THE HUDSON 49

Your future 51
HOW TO DO A SOCIAL HEALTH CHECK
OF YOUR TEAM 53

BIBLIOGRAPHY 61

ABOUT THE AUTHOR 65

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 ENGINEERING SUCCESS PREFACE

Having been involved in the aerospace industry all my adult life and in
Preface

particular being involved with a profession whereby the safety of many

people, including myself, is at stake, I was very interested to read this book
and learn. Many years ago a particular CEO and mentor of mine once told
me that, in order to succeed in management, it was not necessarily just
the business education or technical ability which were paramount but the
importance of choosing your teams and nurturing relationships within them.
In his words: “developing personal relationships is the key to success”.

As we encounter life’s challenges, I am sure that we can all relate to the way in which
we, personally, react to those around us both positively and negatively. Dragos
Bratasanu’s book, “Engineering Success”, emphasises the nature of these aspects
of interrelationships and the human psyche and how they can affect the outcomes
from the simplest to the most complex of projects.

Wherever one works in the hierarchical chain, this book illuminates essential
elements to unlocking the maximum potential from your teams, based upon
both quantitative and qualitative analysis. The results achieved and feedback
from some of the major players in the aerospace business confirm the added
value when team building following Dragos’s guidelines. I recommend this
book as one that should not just be read once and left on the library shelf. It
should provide the basis for continual self-appraisal and guidance in order
to maximise the benefits and successes for both to the reader and his/her
colleagues.

Frank Chapman
A350XWB Project Test Pilot
Airbus SAS

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1
PART 1

DECODING
FAILURE
AND YOUR
BUSINESS
ENGINEERING SUCCESS DECODING FAILURE AND YOUR BUSINESS

You and your team members are worth a better future.

But what has the present in store for you? If you are leading a project or a company,
you might be familiar with today’s global situation. Organizations around the world are
facing ongoing problems that require immediate attention and action from within. The
fast technological advances and paradigm shifts, expansive competition and unstable
markets, combined with accelerated demographic movements and a volatile global
economy have created a world that has become more competitive and stressful than
ever before. And be assured, stress is taking its toll on you and everyone around.

Factors such as inefficient leadership, poor communication, multitasking, rapid changes

in direction and governance and confusion between management and leadership in an
unstable global economy amplify the negative effects of stress on health, performance,
efficiency and overall wellbeing. Such causes ultimately poison customer relationships
and can lead to severe financial and technological losses.

Predictions look quite dark for the years to come, as the pressure on the individual is
only set to increase. Several key questions emerge from this dilemma. How can you
deal with today’s business models in a healthy, balanced way? How can you create
powerful leaders that accelerate performance of a company together with its people,
not at the cost of its people? How can you reduce the effects of stress on your body,
enhance your relationships, maximize your potential and your overall quality of life
and wellbeing? Is it possible to enhance performance, to increase profits, minimize
the risk of technical failure, while at the same time remaining in balance and keeping
a positive perspective? Sadly a great number of people believe this is a myth. However,
recent studies show that these two conflicting paradigms can and need to exist together
within organizations.

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The reality is that you bring in good people on your team, you invest in them, you give
them the resources to succeed, you reward them for their brilliance, you provide them
with technical and personal development training tools and logically you expect to
get the best results. But even so, failure lurks in every decision, hides in the missing
pieces of information, and waits for the moment when a simple chain of normal events
triggers disaster. What are you missing? Let me ask this question again.

What are you really missing?

We rely on our education, on our judgment and our intuition to make decisions, but
sometimes we find ourselves in the most dangerous scenario we can be in as individuals
or as team, when we don’t know that we don’t know but we believe we do know. We go
through all the steps of a chain of normal events and end up picking up the pieces of
a dramatic failure. What went wrong?

You and your team deserve to know the answer.

What invisible force drives us to make all the right decisions and still fail? Nobody can
escape this latent force, It constantly affects you and everyone around you, your team
members and your loved ones. Very few people in the world have learned how to recognize
it, how to manage it and how to turn it around to work for them, rather than against them.
Once understood and properly managed, this powerful force will take you and your team
to previously unattainable peaks of outstanding success. This force has been decoded
and brilliantly explained by the very best minds at NASA, by leaders who have achieved
out-of-this-world goals, by teams who have learned powerful lessons through expensive
and tragic failures. In this book, we reveal the solution to you. Applied almost exclusively
for the last 15 years at NASA, we guarantee with scientific certainty that it works. Open
your mind to the possibilities disclosed in this book and your business, your professional
achievements, your projects and even your personal life will benefit.

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THE INVISIBLE
SOCIAL FIELDS
This invisible force makes the difference between success and failure and between
mediocre achievements and ground-breaking realizations. This invisible influence is
called social context.

Leaders today prefer to invest more into building “hard skills”, technical knowledge
and project management skills rather than in what has become known today as ”soft
skills” which include leadership, proficient communication and team building. Technical
people focus so intently on their tasks that they fail to notice, much less manage their
team’s social context. However, the term ‘soft’ is unfair, since this expertise is so
important yet so difficult to develop. Ultimately, failure to recognize the importance
of team social context leads to severe problems in the organization, high financial
losses and devastating effects on personal health and relationships. Unnoticed social
shortfalls destroy even the best-managed programs and projects.

In this book we are offering you a new and precise method of taming this unseen and
powerful force. Once understood and properly managed, the social field of your team
will accelerate your journey to the achievements and financial returns you deserve.

In this age of increased complexity, advanced technology and super speeds, managing
the invisible social field is not a variable that you might consider. It is a must. The benefits
of implementing this new philosophy into your business far outweigh the efforts and
costs of including a new parameter in your operating policy.

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In the following chapters you will understand the steps to identify, evaluate, manage,
control and enhance the social context of your team. Historical evidence and investigations
will reveal to you all aspects of this invisible force of influence, what these lessons
mean to you and their impact on your business and your life.

THE HIDDEN
DANGERS
We must emphasize from the start the effects of applying the Social Context
Management processes. By using all the instruments provided, not only will you drive
up the performance of your team and reduce the risk of failure, you will also control
and eliminate two dangers that constantly hover silently over your team and had no
remedy until now.

The first danger is what Yale University sociologist Charles Perrow called “normal
accidents.” Normal accidents are not accidents that happen frequently, but rather
failures that occur in the normal functionality of a system. These types of accidents are
not caused by crass negligence, incompetence, or a major system malfunction. These
mishaps appear when a combination of minor errors, harmless in and by themselves,
creates a chain of events with catastrophic outcomes.

The second threat that you will be able to significantly reduce or even completely eliminate
is “risk homeostasis.” Gerald Wilde, in his book Target Risk explains this phenomenon
by demonstrating how, as human beings we have a tendency to compensate for lower
risk in one area by taking a greater risk in another. Therefore, making a system safer
on one side opens the door to higher risk taking on the other side. For example, when

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taxi drivers equipped their cars with ABS (anti-lock braking system) for the purpose of
making braking safer, they started driving faster and taking sharp turns more quickly,
thus unconsciously “spending” the new safety margin offered by ABS.

Due to their elusive nature, these dangers are almost impossible to predict, but are
manageable. How can you protect yourself and your business from something that
you can’t see coming, something that until now became visible only after the damage
was done? The answer comes from high above.

BEYOND-THE-SKY
LEADERSHIP
Space exploration has always been the greatest vision of humanity. But beyond the
dreams, beyond the technological advancements, beyond the scientific discoveries, the
people working in this environment have bequeathed us something far more important
than the technology they built in the process. The honored visionaries that put men on
the moon, flew the Space Shuttle, built the International Space Station and sent robots
to Mars have left behind clear evidence that whatever we see in our imagination and
believe our hearts, we can transform into reality. They left behind a process of thinking
that allowed them to bring into reality everything they imagined. As Robert Goddard,
the father of the American rocketry said, “It is difficult to say what is impossible, for
the dream of yesterday is the work of today and the reality of tomorrow.” I think we can
all agree that aerospace, aviation and space flights are probably the most inspiring
ideals of humanity. But why should you and your business care?

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Aerospace projects usually are developed over many years, sometimes even decades, and
they involve a very long series of details that have to perfectly fit together at the end. The
smallest error in this complex series of events and milestones can create a disaster that
nobody can recover from once the spacecraft has left the Earth’s atmosphere. Industries
today are more complex than ever before. To take an idea from concept to the market,
you must go through a whole array of scientific, engineering and commercial filters. The
technical risk and the social risk are constantly increasing in our complex world. The
great majority of engineers, scientists and managers successfully focus and manage
the technical risk. But how do you deal with the invisible forces that drive the social risk?

What leads to success in today’s highly complex environment? Dr. Ed Hoffman, NASA
Chief Knowledge Officer and Director of NASA APPEL (Academy of Program / Project
& Engineering Leadership) answers this question in an interview for our company:

“In our project-based world we must work together and we must constantly learn. Professional
teams must constantly learn because the problems and risks that threaten your projects
are constantly changing and evolving. A project is about the technical expertise and you
have to get that right. A project is about the budget you have to manage and control, and a
project is about time and logistics.

But people who are truly successful go beyond that. You need to understand that any project
comes down to multidisciplinary expertise. As a manager, you must welcome and accommodate
people with a variety of different skills – engineers in various disciplines, scientists who have
different questions and hypotheses, financial people, marketing people, and you must learn
how to successfully integrate these diverse elements into a successful team.

Most of the times people are highly competent at their jobs, but if social context - the
invisible social constructs created by your team members - is unmanaged, chances are
you will fail. The social context is the force field that shifts the balance of information

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sharing and open communication one way or another in your team. You might find it easy
to get along with people who think like you and to create a social environment of mutual
respect and understanding in which everybody is giving their best. But it is not so easy to
work with people who don’t think like you, who haven’t been schooled the same way, with
people from different backgrounds, different values and coming from different societies,
or indeed people who speak different languages. You have to create a social context that
keeps these people together and you have to keep them on target. If you succeed at doing
that you will be very successful”.

With the same technology and the same teams, the key discriminator between expensive
and tragic failures and brilliant successes is not technical. That key is the social context
and leadership. That key is you.

THE BOOK
OF REVELATIONS –
MISSION FAILED
“Blessed is he that read and they that hear the words
of this prophecy, and keep those things which are written therein.”
Revelation 1:3

History has revealed time and time again that failure opens the door to the most
powerful lessons and discoveries – but it does so only if you have the courage to accept
reality and look failure in the eye. Aerospace leaders are forced to do exactly this. In
this environment, when accidents happen, when projects fail, the ensuing investigations

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are thorough and all-consuming. Investigators do not stop at the obvious technical
effects but go beyond them and discover the social shortfalls that triggered the failure.
The people who conduct failure investigations are very skeptical, very questioning.
They ask all the questions you don’t want them to ask. Again and again they discover
that the social context, this invisible force, is the root cause of failures and disasters.
The aerospace industry had to learn severe and sometimes tragic lessons that can
now be applied in all industries to mitigate risk and avoid project failures. There is a
common saying that smart people learn from their mistakes. But wise people learn
from the mistakes of others. Let’s investigate together some of the most expensive and
devastating failures in history and what lessons you can implement to avoid similar
disasters in your business.

n asa S P A C E S H U T T L E CH A L L E NG E R

In 1986, NASA Space Shuttle Challenger exploded 73 seconds after launch, killing all
seven astronauts onboard. This was the first mission of NASA with a civilian as part of
the crew, aiming to take space exploration further into the minds and hearts of the entire
world. The explosion was caused by a faulty rubber sealing that allowed pressurized
hot gas within the solid rocket motor to vent out. This caused a structural failure of
the external tank and consequently the aerodynamic forces broke up the orbiter.

The failure review board identified the technical cause relatively easy – a technical
error of not understanding the properties of rubber at low temperatures. But how
could some of the best engineers in the world not understand the properties of the
rubber, after so many successful flights?

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Sociologist Diane Vaughan, professor at Columbia University and member of the failure
review board discovered that the engineers did actually understand the properties of
the rubber very thoroughly and they even warned NASA about the danger of explosion.
The real question was why did NASA launch when all the evidence suggested they
should not?

At the time, the Space Shuttle was the national transportation system for all U.S.
payloads. Therefore, a delay with a launch would delay all other payloads. NASA
was under enormous pressure to keep all launches within schedule. This immense
pressure created at NASA a social field in which managers unconsciously began
requiring evermore persuasive evidence to delay a launch than allow it to continue.
So as the social context changed again and again with increased political pressure,
it got to the point where almost nothing would delay or stop a shuttle launch. Diane
Vaughan revealed that the root cause of this tragedy was the subconscious change
in perception at NASA. She continued to say that these social forces are invisible and
unacknowledged, they can never be changed and you can never deal with them.

“There is only one driving reason that a potentially dangerous system would be allowed
to fly” declared chief astronaut John. W. Young in the aftermath of this disaster: “launch
schedule pressure”.

What happened to the very skilled NASA launch team was what is now known as
“normalization of deviance”. Normalization of deviance is a social effect almost
impossible to perceive if you don’t know where to look. People within a group become
so accustomed to a deviant behavior that they fail to notice it as being deviant and
regard it as normal. As the deviant behavior occurs more often, people adapt to it
and eventually make it a habit. A deviant behavior that takes people away slowly and
naturally from their standard of excellence will surely lead to failure.

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Dr. Ed Hoffman explains that people have the tendency to normalize. As individuals, as
project teams, as organizations we have clear standards of excellence. We set these
standards from the beginning and then expect nothing short of the very best. However, as
the project advances we encounter various problems. If the solutions to these problems
are not exactly what we initially wanted but the technology still works and we don’t have
a failure, they tend to become the new standard. Very slowly we begin to believe that if
a technology works even with a lower than expected quality, we accept it and this lower
quality eventually becomes the standard. And then it starts slipping away from our
standards of excellence until it crosses a threshold and turns into a failure.

The technology used on Space Shuttle Challenger had shown problems in the past.
Engineers had solid evidence that technology would fail during this flight and some
even tried to stop the launch the day before. But social context is more powerful than
evidence and reason. NASA launch managers unconsciously signed off on something
that they knew was problematic. The root cause of this tragedy was a flawed social
context, the social field at NASA and the effect was technical.

Could this disaster have been prevented? Could that “invisible and unacknowledged
forces” have been foreseen? At that time, no. Now, absolutely yes!

“Frequently we find that failure effects and proximate causes

are technical, but the root causes are social and psychological.
My sense from experience is that 80-95% of failures
are ultimately due to human error and miscommunication.”
Dr. Stephen Johnson, NASA

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Normalization of deviance is the root cause of many failures, some of them resulting
in catastrophic losses. The mental process that allows this social pattern to form
is incredibly simple. This is why you do not see the real danger until it is too late.
Normalization of deviance is a dangerous shortcut that allows you to succeed one time,
two times or three times and eventually begins to look like the normal approach for your
goal. In your mind, the risk factor diminishes every time you find yourself unscathed
at the end of this new path. But the danger is always there – you have simply taught
yourself ways to ignore it and apparently with solid evidence. An invisible pattern like
this claimed the lives of 32 passengers on board Costa Concordia, the cruise ship that
crashed off the coast of Italy on January 13, 2012.

Like many others before him, Francesco Schettino - the captain of Costa Concordia -
decided to deviate from the approved navigation plan and pass very closely to an island
in the Mediterranean Sea. This behavior was nothing other than an unofficial near-
shore salute to the local islanders and had become a tradition (i.e. habit) for cruise
ships sailing in the region. Nothing had happened in the past and everybody assumed
it was safe to sail there - until that fateful day when Costa Concordia hit a reef. The
collision caused a temporary power blackout when water flooded the engine’s room.
Even though he knew the ship was severely damaged, the captain did not call for help
or order abandon ship. Instead, he tried to resume the original course and return to
port. This maneuver failed, the ship partially sank and 32 people lost their lives.

Deviating from the standard route had become a normal, accepted behavior. This wasn’t
a deliberate act on the part of the crew. They had slowly fallen into this invisible social
pattern that put them at risk. The root cause of this tragedy was the subconscious shift
in perception created by the social environment in which the captain operated. This
social context regarded breaking the rules as normal and it unconsciously affected
the captain’s decisions.

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Another example of normalization of deviance is the famous Isabella Stewart Gardner

Museum theft that took place in 1990. On the morning of March 18th, two robbers dressed
as Boston police officers gained entrance into the museum and stole paintings valued
at 500 million dollars. The security guard on duty simply let them in without asking any
questions. “I felt compelled to obey a police officer’s demand,” he said. He did so even
though the security manual clearly stated that absolutely nobody is allowed into the
Gardner museum after hours without prior permission from the management. Violation
of procedures and protocols is a classic example of normalized deviant behaviors, a minor
social error that causes enormous financial losses. Combined with our subconscious
and automatic response to authority – in this case the police officers – this behavior can
be very dangerous in high-risk industries.

H U BB L E S P A C E T E L E S COP E –
A T W O B I L L I ON D O L L A R F A I L U R E

Hubble Space Telescope is a masterpiece of technology and innovation and was named
by National Geographic the “holy grail of space exploration.” You have probably enjoyed
the beautiful images of the universe taken by Hubble. But what is the real story of the
Hubble Space Telescope?

The development of Hubble Space Telescope was one of the most difficult projects
at NASA. The teams were faced with many technical problems, extensive delays and
constant overruns. Finally, on April 24th 1990, Hubble Space Telescope was launched.
The rocket took the telescope to the right orbit, Hubble deployed and… nothing. The
two billion dollar, state-of-the-art telescope was faulty and completely useless.

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The failure review board spent five months investigating this disaster and discovered
the primary mirror was flawed due to a technical error in the development phase. The
question then asked was how the best scientists and engineers in the world could make
such an amateurish error? Why did these experts rationalize away all the evidence and
tests that showed them that something might be wrong with the mirror?

This story clearly reveals the contrast between the amount of effort we put into developing
ourselves as individuals through courses and training versus the attention we give to
the invisible social field we create and sustain in our team. The failure review board
discovered that the contractor had been under enormous stress and criticism from
NASA for overruns and delays. They unconsciously engaged in tactics to encourage
withholding of troubling information. The contractor never mentioned to NASA the
evidence and erroneous measurements that might have saved the mission. The root
cause of the Hubble mirror failure was the invisible social field, the social construct
that prevented important communication to NASA and important communication within
the technical group. This failure could have been avoided if NASA leaders had paid
more attention to what happened with Space Shuttle Challenger several years before
and applied that wisdom now, but they hadn’t.

What are the lessons for you? What are the implications for your projects, what can
happen if your team members subconsciously and automatically decide to hide important
data from you because they feel they can’t tell the truth without reprisals? What are
the implications for your projects if they withhold troublesome information from you?
What if your contractors unconsciously choose to hide information from you and you
discover this only when it is too late?

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N A S A M A R S PROGR A M –
T W O F A I L U R E S FOR T H E PR I C E OF ON E

A failure can make or break any team and a failure can break even you. A failure gives
you the option to lie, deny or decline your responsibility, and the option to be honest
and have the courage to look reality in the eye and make a real difference.

Professor Scott Hubbard from Stanford University is a brilliant leader who transformed
a black list of mission failures into multiple mission successes with the NASA Mars
Program. Using the same technology and almost the same people, Professor Hubbard
managed to succeed where others before him have only crashed and burned. What
was the key discriminator that allowed these missions to become successful and how
can you integrate it in your projects?

The two Mars missions that were launched in 1998 were built by a team attempting to complete
a project without the proper resources. They failed. These missions were being pressed by the
NASA administrator into what he called “faster, better, cheaper.” He pressed them very hard,
on a limited budget, an absolutely fixed schedule and rigid requirements. And so, when faced
with the task of building two spacecraft for the price of one, the team started taking foolish
risks. The difference between prudent, calculated risk and foolish risk is a key discriminator
when embarking on a bold and innovative project. The team had started taking foolish risks
and as a consequence both of the missions disappeared in late 1999. That was the point where
I was brought in by NASA to “fix the mess” as they said.

Many of these same team members were involved in the next missions, which were
successful. Under my direction, the team collectively put systems engineering back into
the system. The lesson: You can squeeze one part - if you squeeze on the budget you better
relax the schedule or relax the requirements. You can’t squeeze all three past a certain
point and expect to be successful.

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“More than 50% of the cost of a project is socially determined”.

Dr. John Mather, NASA scientist and Nobel Prize winner

You are probably thinking right now that these failures happened in the space industry
because the projects were very difficult. It is true - there is a high degree of risk involved,
the technologies are new and missions are very complex. Let’s leave the space sector
and go to an industry that can impact all of us – the aviation industry. What powerful
lessons can we draw from the tragic failures in this field?

S OC I A L F A I L U R E S I N A V I A T I ON

“Thou Shall Not Criticize Your Superior Officer”

The Gospel

In the 1990s Korean Airlines had a crash rate of 17 times higher than the industry
average. The situation got so bad that the president of South Korea was afraid to fly
on Korean Airlines. What do you think allowed this problem to go on for 4 years?

The company had made the same erroneous assumption technical people often make
- they assumed the crashes were caused by the pilots’ individual flying skills. But this
assumption was disproved by science. The pilots were tested in simulators, in which
they were faced with difficult conditions and complex situations, and their competence
was clearly proven again and again. The Korean Air pilots were as skilled and competent
as other pilots from any airline company in the world. Finally, experts from a subsidiary
of Boeing discovered the root cause of these disasters.

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ENGINEERING SUCCESS DECODING FAILURE AND YOUR BUSINESS

Investigations revealed that the root cause of the crashes was the transference of the
Korean social hierarchy into the cockpit. Korean Airlines had unknowingly imported
Confucianism into their flying teams. In Confucian society you can’t criticize an older
person. Moreover, the pilots were trained as military pilots and there was a rank
differential between them and the copilots. When the captain was flying the plane the
first officer could not criticize or even inform him of any mistakes the captain had made.
The captain’s social status was so high that nobody was able to directly communicate
with him and he literally flew the plane all by himself. Due to the deeply entrenched
social norms and to save the honor, the first officer was unable to criticize and correct
errors made by a senior pilot. The root cause was again the flawed invisible social
context that prevented important communication in the cockpit.

No amount of individual training in flying skills would have helped. Poor crew
communication and long-standing rules of social and military hierarchy crashed these
planes. The principal investigator of one of these accidents said something which can
highlight the power of the social context to automatically and subconsciously drive our
thinking and behaviors. He said that in all these cases of crashing, in order to save the
honor, the co-pilot knew he was dying and he didn’t say a word.

Malcolm Gladwell in his famous book Outliers – The Story of Success clearly shows that
the list of countries with the highest respect for authority - reaching even the point of
blind obedience - and the list of countries with the highest number of plane crashes,
are practically identical.

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T H E F A I L U R E E V E N T CH A I N

The first thing a leader does when he or she joins an organization is to say: “we will
change the culture”. But rarely does one know how to truly evaluate the existing culture
and to say “this is our culture now, this is how we want it to be and these are the steps
that we need to take to change that culture”. One of the greatest challenges leaders
have to face today is to understand the connection between culture and failure and to
then make the necessary improvements to culture to ensure reduced risk and high
performance. To make this connection you need to understand the nature of failures.
Failure is generally the outcome of a chain of events that is made more likely by various
contributing factors. Dr. Stephen Johnson, NASA Manager and Scientist discovered
that frequently the failure effects and the proximate causes are technical, but the root
causes and contributing factors are social or psychological. 80-95% of failures are
ultimately caused by human errors or miscommunication. The root causes are social
and psychological, the effects are technical. Contrary to the popular belief, it is the
very banality of these causes that makes them so difficult to find.

FAILURE EVENT CHAIN

CONTRIBUTING FACTORS ROOT CAUSES
SOCIAL SOCIAL
Overambitious schedule Individual mistakes
Power asymmetry Misunderstandings
Weak safety organization Miscommunication
Overconfidence Flawed leadership

FAILURE EFFECTS PROXIMATE CAUSES

TECHNICAL TECHNICAL
Explosion Operator Bad Command
Crash Mechanical Failure
Data loss Structure failure
Catastrophic effects Broken parts

Credits: Dr. Stephen Johnson, NASA (used with permission)

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Think deeply about how culture affects your organization, your team, your own decisions
and behaviors. Grasping and understanding the enormous power of the social context
over thinking and over your decisions is the first step you must undertake to increase
safety, team efficiency and ultimately improve your leadership skills. What are the
implications for your projects if people who hold valuable information in your team
or in your company feel they cannot tell the truth without reprisals and unknowingly
hide information from you? What are the financial losses that emerge from people
withholding data from you? The most important question that you need to ask is: “What
is the real cost of failure in your business?” In all high-risk industries, this isn’t an
issue of insurance or cost reduction. This is a matter of life and death.

T H E CR A S H OF T H E GO V E RN M E N T

In 2010, in heavy fog and low visibility, the aircraft carrying the Polish president and
other government officials failed to make the runway and crashed into a wooded area
during the final approach to an airport in Russia. All 96 passengers and crew died.

The proximate technical cause of the accident is clear. Visibility was extremely low due
to fog. The pilot tried an initial approach to determine if they could safely land before
committing themselves. By using the radio altimeter, they misjudged the altitude and
the terrain, the plane hit the trees and crashed in the forest. Prior to this, the ground
crew had warned them that they did not have the conditions to land, but the controller
did not have the authority to turn the plane around. The question was - why did the
best military pilots of Poland attempt to land the plane, ignoring warnings about the
weather and disregarding the warnings of the flight controller?

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The root cause of this accident was social - the pressure put by the government officials
on the pilots to land the plane as soon as possible at that specific airport. According to
aviation laws, nobody is allowed into the cockpit during critical moments such as takeoff
and landing. Below a certain altitude, pilots should be isolated so they can focus on
their tasks. One of the government officials broke this law and went into the cockpit to
check if they would be landing on time. His presence there changed the social context -
this automatically and unconsciously affected the crew’s critical thinking and decisions
to land the plane. Why did the captain try to land the plane under these conditions?
“He probably didn’t want to lose his job,” said one of the members of the investigation
committee. Nobody wants to disappoint a president and the presence of one of the
officials in the cockpit unconsciously influenced the decision and the communication
of the crew. The root cause of this tragedy was the flawed social context created in
the cockpit that led to poor decision-making and in the end, lead to the death of 96
people. The vast majority of root causes, if pursued far enough, are individual and
group mistakes. This is the most important discovery and lesson of this book.

Social contexts and not individual abilities drive performance and risk.
Dr. Charles Pellerin, NASA Director

The explosion of the nuclear reactor at Fukushima in Japan, the tragic gas explosions
in Guadalajara Mexico, the chemical disaster at Bhopal in India, the Amagasaki train
crash in Japan, the plane crash that lead to the death of the entire Yaroslavl hockey team
in Russia, the crash of the Asiana flight in San Francisco and even the sinking of the
Titanic are just a few examples in which the social context made the difference between
life and death. All these people found themselves in the worst possible scenario: what
they thought they knew wasn’t actually what they needed to know. These failures
have several things in common: initially they appeared to have a technical failure as
the root cause. However, the individuals working on these projects were technically
competent, in many cases they were the most technically qualified engineers, pilots

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and managers in the world. Thus, individuals’ technical abilities were not the root
cause of the failures. Second, these mishaps were all avoidable. The real root cause of
these failures was team-level social context. These causes can be avoided at minimal
cost using our management instruments, as explained in the last section of this book.

The Library of Babel is a short story by Jorge Luis Borges that entertains the idea
that all human knowledge is captured in a strange library. The only problem is that
the library is so full of junk that nobody can find anything. This is a useful metaphor
for the world and the times we are living in – there is so much information, so much
knowledge, so many techniques and so many tools, that it can be overwhelming. One
of the key issues for us is to be able to identify the right lessons, the right knowledge.
What is it that you really need in order to succeed?

One of the biggest challenges is to discover the latent social structures of your team,
to decode and manage the invisible social field that drives performance and risk, to
understand the profound implications of failing to manage the social context and to
immediately use the software and methodology available to measure, benchmark and
improve the social environment to avoid project failures, financial losses and even
disaster. You will learn how to access the instruments in the last section of this book.

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2
PART 2

The power
of context
ENGINEERING SUCCESS The power of context

The social context is the force that pushes us to new heights as individuals and as teams
but is also the force that may invisibly cause failures and financial losses, if mishandled.
But what exactly is social context? The social context is the invisible, unacknowledged
and immeasurable force field created by the behavior of each individual. If you regard
the behavior of each individual as a force, the social context is the invisible field created
by all these forces coming together.

The social context unconsciously drives your behaviors. You automatically adapt to the
social environment in business and in your everyday life. It is easy to understand that
“When in Rome, do as the Romans do” and it is perfectly OK to synchronize yourself
with the social field created by others around you. The real problems emerge when
the social field is flawed and instead of driving performance, it drives failure. Then you
simply and unknowingly become part of the problem.

Really think about this for a moment – Would you naturally and automatically have
different behaviors, or instantly change your behaviors and adapt to the following
contexts?

1. When you are giving or receiving a marriage proposal?

2. When you are having dinner with your parents-in-law?
3. When you are going out to the bar to watch the game with the guys?
4. What about when you are having your annual review with your bosses?
5. What if you are on a plane that is being hijacked?

In all these cases, do you adapt your behaviors to the context? If you don’t adapt to the
context, do you get punished? The answer is yes. Adapting to the social context is an
subconscious and natural decision we all make.

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Do you think that a team member who is constantly beat down for bringing in bad news
to his leader will unconsciously adapt and withhold subsequent important information
in order to avoid criticism and reprisals? Do you think team members who are under
constant pressure will unconsciously hide information to avoid even more stressful
situations?

The copilots flying with Korean Airlines subconsciously adapted to the context and
withheld valuable information in order to save the honor of their captain. The engineers
working on Hubble Space Telescope rationalized problems away and never informed
NASA in order to avoid more recriminations and frustrations.

The Hubble Investigation Board reported to the Congress that a leadership failure caused
the flawed mirror of the $2B telescope. NASA’s management of its contractors had been
so hostile that they would not report technical problems if they could rationalize them
away. They were simply tired of accusations. Dr. Charles Pellerin, NASA’s Director of
Astrophysics and the leader of the Hubble development team writes in his book How
NASA Builds Teams, “The management created a social context that put these good
people in bad places. NASA managers […] relentlessly criticized and pressured the
contractors. The contractors, operating from a place of relative powerlessness engaged
in guerilla tactics by withholding troubling information”. Adapting to the social context
is an subconscious and natural decision we all make. What is the social context in your
team? As leaders, we have to know exactly what our team members are adapting to
and if necessary, make the proper adjustments. You will now discover the leadership
and social context management secrets of some of the leading organizations in the
world, how they successfully manage their highly complex project teams and how you
can use these techniques to engineer your own personal and professional success.

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SOCIAL EVIDENCE –
FRIENDS, RELATIVES,
COLLEAGUES &
OTHER DANGERS
Scientific studies demonstrate that our decisions are more the result of the social
context in which we find ourselves, rather than the result of our own independent
thinking or values. I know, we want to be independent, but it’s not how nature works.
Many times we take our cue from the people around us. We determine the right actions
based on what the others are doing, we look for answers outside ourselves. Social
evidence is critical in moments of uncertainty - when we are not sure what we have
to do - we automatically and unconsciously look for evidence around us – how are the
people around us behaving? We automatically assume that they must know something
we don’t and follow them. Unfortunately, most of the times they don’t know any better
and they do the same, they look around for social evidence in us. 

We see an action as appropriate when others are doing it and usually this method
works and keeps us socially acceptable. This is both the good news and the bad news.
If you are looking for evidence in people who empower you, who support you and who
push you to take you goals further - this is perfectly fine. In times of doubt, a group
who believes in you when you don’t believe in yourself is a brilliant choice and these
people are a real blessing. Unfortunately, there are cases when you surrender your
thinking and adapt to the social proof, to the social evidence of what others are doing
or saying. As humans, we unconsciously embrace the group’s beliefs and behaviors
without questioning them or surrender to their opinions. Researchers reported that in

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the face of leadership and authority, most of us bypass our thinking and simply obey
the requests. When this happens, danger is not far behind.

Consider for example the case of the “rectal ear ache” reported by Cohen and Davis.
A nurse put eardrops into a patient’s rectum as treatment for an ear infection, simply
because she read on the prescription “place in R ear”. Both the nurse and the patient
did not question at all this course of treatment and never even suspected that ”R ear”
was the abbreviation for ”Right Ear”. This was a minor mishap and a story most of us
find hilarious. However, we must remember that in many situations when a legitimate
authority had spoken, even common sense thinking can become irrelevant. The next
story is another clear example of how we unconsciously adapt our behaviors to the
context, only this time the outcome revealed one of the worst tragedies in history.

November 18th, 1978. Jonestown, Guyana. On this fateful day, 909 people committed
suicide in the jungle of South America simply because their spiritual leader told them to
do so. Jim Jones was the leader of the Peoples’ Temple, a cult-like organization founded
on a social doctrine. He led over 1000 Americans away from their families and friends
into the forests of Guyana where he established a self-sustaining community. Jones
grew to believe that the US Government was “out to get him” and he was convinced
that people living in his small community wanted to destroy him with the support of
the international media. Without external monitoring, Jim Jones’s obsessions and
paranoia flourished. Because we all adapt to the social context and we look up to our
leaders for solutions, he managed to transfer his mental state of fear and persecution
to all his followers. So on November 18th 1978 when Jones gathered his people and
told them to commit revolutionary suicide, only very few listened to the voice of reason
and ran away. But 909 people did not – they followed the social evidence, accepted
the delusion as reality, drank the poison and died. Even when over 250 children were
poisoned, nobody objected. The leading investigator of this case declared that if they

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haven’t been removed from the social context in the United States and moved to the
jungle in South America, this tragedy would have never happened.

You can’t fight the social context - you can become aware of the influence the social
context has on you and make a conscious choice to follow your own thinking, your own
reason and your own heart. Social context trumps reason and social context drives your
behaviors with an influence akin to an invisible force. We naturally adapt our behaviors
to the context. And as all these painful lessons show, the social context can make the
difference between life and death.

If the social context is powerful enough to drive performance and risk but it is
immeasurable and invisible, how can you discover it and manage it? How can we reduce
the risk of failure in technical teams? Finally, the solution to decode this mysterious
field called social context came from the very best minds at NASA and is now available
to industries worldwide through our company at www.SuccessEngineer.org

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3
PART 3

THE FOUR
DIMENSIONS
OF SUCCESS
ENGINEERING SUCCESS The four dimensions of success

Every year there are thousands of articles, books and programs about leadership.
Many of these books have, justifiably, become bestsellers and reading them is a
pleasant and educative experience. They share stories and they present the 4 things
leaders do, the 5 things teams do, the 10 things successful organizations do, etc. But
business books cannot trigger behavioral change which is the only thing that matters.
In times of stress you can never remember the 3 things, 4 things or 5 things leaders
are supposed to do and actually do them. Dr. Charles Pellerin, top NASA executive,
renowned leadership professor and award winning consultant actually observed that
these kind of books are in fact worse than useless and do more harm because they
leave you with the impression that you are doing something, when in fact you are not.

Reality is much more simple than we believe. Managing the social context – the primary
force driving success and failure in a team, and triggering sustainable behavioral
change – the primary challenge leaders face when managing people, comes down to
four fundamental needs we all have as humans. Meeting these four fundamental human
needs is necessary and sufficient to create highly performing, low-risk social contexts.
What are the four fundamental human needs and how can you address them?

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THE FOUR FUNDAMENTAL

HUMAN NEEDS
T h e n eed t o Feel V alued

We all need to feel valued and inherently appreciated. Please note the word need. If you
have ever been in a relationship in which you didn’t feel appreciated or valued, one way
or another you left that relationship. Making a person feel valued is the best way you can
reward them for the work they’ve done. When employees know that their contribution is
appreciated, when they know that their efforts make a difference they will find personal
gratification in the success of the group. This in turn will stimulate them to give their
best in the future and constantly improve their performance in the team.

T h e n eed t o Bel o n g

We all need to feel that we belong to a team, to a family, to a group, to a dream, to a vision
bigger than us. Having a sense of belonging is our second fundamental human need
and gives us a sense of purpose, a sense of contributing to the world. Have you ever felt
excluded? If so, you then know how painful exclusion is. People who feel excluded get
angry and act out their anger in the team. No man is an island, no person can function
isolated from the group. We are all connected and exclusion is therefore an unnatural
behavior that goes against our innate fundamental needs. When you create a team,
any kind of team, inclusion is fundamental. Without every member feeling deeply that
he or she belongs to that group there is no team.

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T h e Need f o r H o p e

We all need to have hope. We need to wake up in the morning, expect a positive future
and have something meaningful to live for. Medical doctors revealed that the single
most important parameter, the key discriminator between people who die and people
who recover after having their first heart attack is hope, having a sense of purpose, a
sense of fulfillment. We all need to see in our minds and believe in our hearts in the
image of a better tomorrow. Isn’t this what we all want? As a team leader, you must
carefully tend to this aspect because failing to do so will generate an extremely low
commitment on the part of your team members.

T h e Need f o r Ce r tai n t y

We all need to have a sense of certainty, to know that we have something certain in life,
to know that we have the ability to succeed. Hope can only get you so far and it has to
be sustained by predictable, positive outcomes.

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CONNECTING THE DOTS -

FROM HUMAN NEEDS
TO DISASTER
These four fundamental human needs are universal, they transcend all cultures. What
is the connection between human needs and business failures, air disasters, gas
explosions, train crashes and financial losses? The connection between the human
needs and risk of failure is the following. Human needs, whether they are met or
not, trigger different behaviors. You behave differently in an environment where your
fundamental human needs are met than in an environment where they are not. Your
human needs automatically trigger your behaviors. Behaviors come together like
forces and create the social context of your team. And the social context drives the
risk of failure. To reduce risk and increase performance all these four human needs
must be addressed.

THE FOUR FUNDAMENTAL

BEHAVIORS
How do you meet the fundamental human needs and create an optimum social context?
There are four key behaviors addressing the four human needs that you need to master
in your team and in your life.

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Ha b ituall y E x p r ess
A ut h e n ti c A p p r e c iati o n

Habitually expressing authentic appreciation addresses the fundamental need of people

to feel valued. This is the most important behavior of all because it creates a social
context in which people feel valued, and if they feel valued they give their best. More
importantly, in this context they will feel they can tell you the truth.

Appreciation is the basic and most important tool managers have available to
motivate people to perform better. Researchers analyzed 1 million employees, from
450 companies and studied the direct correlation of appreciation with productivity,
profitability, employee retention and customer loyalty. The results? Every single
individual wants honesty, appreciation and to be included in the team. After investigating
over 2000 highly technical teams, Dr. Charles Pellerin revealed that appreciation is the
most important behavior teams need to master to guarantee project success.

During the summer of 2000, the pilots of United Airlines’ went on a strike that caused
terrible delays. In an unofficial discussion about the cause of the strike, pilots declared
that the strike wasn’t really about the money. It was about the lack of trust in the
management and feeling unappreciated.

“As we express our gratitude, we must never forget that the highest
appreciation is not to utter words, but to live by them.”
- President John F. Kennedy

Some leaders have the false impression that expressing authentic appreciation may
be interpreted as a sign of weakness. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Indeed,
the exact opposite is true. Showing your colleagues that their work means something
to you, that their efforts are valued demonstrates high character. Expressing authentic

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appreciation doesn’t cost you anything and the outcomes are simply wonderful.
Habitually expressing authentic appreciation creates a social context in which people
feel their intelligence is respected, they feel they are making a contribution. They will
not have to adapt to a social field that automatically punishes them for bringing forth
any problems they discover and reveal. Some team leaders still believe that you have to
rule with an iron fist and nothing emotional like “You’ve done great work at this meeting”
or “Thank you for staying after hours to finish this project” should transpire. If you are
such leader, the time has come for you to rethink your strategy, simply because you
are losing ground, you are driving the risk of failure higher and you are also damaging
your health in the process.

Appreciation is a combination of thankfulness, admiration and approval. Appreciation

has incredible effects on your personal health. When you are thankful, the body’s
systems become coherent, the heart and the brain synchronize and you maximize
the energy levels available. You begin to see and acknowledge the positive things you
have in your life and it is easier for you to get through more challenging times. Dr.
Dean Ornish from the University of California Medical School said that appreciation
is the only known factor in medicine with a great positive impact on the quality of life,
drastically reducing the incidence of disease and the probability of premature death.

A p p r o p r iatel y I n c lude Ot h e r s

Only an inclusive social environment can trigger high performance. People are social
beings and naturally have the need to be part of a group. Intentional or unintentional
exclusion - being left out - simply hurts. Leaders must promote and sustain the behavior
of inclusion because it addresses our second most important fundamental human need.

Make sure that nobody is ever left out - left out of meetings, important discussions,
rewards or even office events. The key to this behavior is personal attention. When

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you talk to somebody, talk to the person, pay attention to what he or she is saying and
make eye contact. Do not read or write emails or do something else. And the most
important thing – Listen. Listen to your colleagues because most of the time they just
want to share their point of view, they want to feel heard and they don’t necessarily
want to win the argument with you.

Another way to include people and build a social context of trust is by sharing something
personal. This demonstrates a willingness to be open and vulnerable, you can be friendly
and professional in the same time. Do you think that people who feel valued and included
perform much better, especially in high-level tasks like problem solving and creativity?

A dd r ess U n p leasa n t Realit y

The only way you will solve the problems you face in your team, in your family and in
your life is to do something that is very unnatural for people to do. You have to accept
and face reality as it is. Accept the problems and deal with them head on. Most people
either lie to themselves about the problems they have, or make them much worse than
they are and lose the power to make a change. Addressing uncomfortable reality is hard
because fear creeps in. But remember, the cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you
seek, as Joseph Campbell once said.. Until we accept our fears we cannot overcome
them and until we embrace our demons we cannot heal them. We don’t run from fear,
we go through fear. As we embrace our problems, as we embrace our darkest fears,
as we accept that we are vulnerable we create resilience within ourselves. When you
address and acknowledge unpleasant realities, your creativity begins to soar and you
come up with apparently magical solutions to problems.

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Most people accept living unhappy lives because it is the only way they know, they
refuse to be open to the new emerging possibilities and refuse to make positive changes.
Because they are afraid of being outside their own comfort zone and don’t risk anything,
they live lives that are far less fulfilling than they could actually have. Optimistic, reality-
grounded visions can create the impossible. 

The first step in creating a life filled with passion, excitement and purpose, the first
step in solving any problem is: Define and accept reality! Don’t make it worse because
you then loose your power to take action, don’t ignore it and don’t lie about it. If you
pretend it doesn’t exist, there’s nothing you can do about it.

Decide what you want to do, accept the boundaries, the limits and the box you find
yourself inside and start building with the limited resources you have available. And
if you have nothing, start building with your bare hands because others will join you
and support you once you start. When you face a difficult moment with your team, or
even with your family, answer together the following questions:

1. Where are we?

2. How did we get in this situation?
3. What do we want to create from this point onwards?
4. What is the plan to make this happen?

Take action immediately. As Richard Feynman – Nobel Prize Winner and internationally
acclaimed physicists said following the NASA Challenger explosion – “For a successful
technology to work, reality must take precedence over public relations because nature
cannot be fooled.”

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Cla r i f y R o les , A c c o u n ta b ilit y

a n d A ut h o r it y

Team members need to clarify and communicate what others can expect of them. It is
mandatory for you and your team to clarify roles, accountability and authority. People
need to know what they have to do, what is their responsibility, what results they need
to deliver and what authority they have over the project.

1. Roles: the functions of a person in their context

2. Accountability: the results individuals must deliver
3. Authority: the power granted to individuals, generally through delegation

Roles, accountability and authority powerfully influence the context of the team. Of the
three, accountability - the results one must deliver - is the most important of all. Most
people need to change their focus from tasks to results. Let’s say for example you ask
an employee to bring you a piece of information from somebody working in another
organization. He comes back and says, “I called - there’s no reply, I sent an email and
left a message” - did he deliver the result? No! He focused on the task but failed to
provide the result. Once you shift your focus from tasks to results, you stop only when
you achieve what you have in mind. Tasks mean nothing, results are everything.

Ineffective clarification of roles, accountability and authority affects industries at

all levels. One of the main causes of the global financial crisis in 2009 was a lack of
accountability and authority.

Dr. Werner von Braun was the key mind behind the success of the NASA Apollo program.
Von Braun was a charismatic visionary, an extraordinary manager, a technical leader
and a cultured, charming man. How did he successfully build the rocket that put men
on the moon in 1969?

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Von Braun used a policy of “automatic responsibility” – any team member that identified
a problem was required to take the responsibility for solving that problem. If the person
didn’t have the necessary skills or authority to solve the problem, he was responsible
and accountable to put the situation in the hands of people who could find the optimum
solution.

To summarize, then, habitually express authentic appreciation, show an inclusive

attitude towards people, address the unpleasant reality and clarify roles, accountability
and authority. Remember – when one of these four behaviors is omitted, people fill it
with their most toxic and poisonous thoughts and emotions. Take action immediately
and you will see a major shift in your team’s social environment, the risk of failure
will dramatically drop and your performance and success will skyrocket. This is how
NASA builds their highly-technical teams, this is how aerospace companies guarantee
their state-of-the-art technologies to work and this is how Fortune 500 companies
lead the market in their field. The next chapter will give you the necessary evidence
to understand how a powerful social context drives out-of-this-world success.

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4
PART 4

LEGACY
OF THE BRAVE
ENGINEERING SUCCESS Legacy of the brave

HUBBLE SPACE
TELESCOPE –
THE REPAIR MISSION
At the time of the Hubble mirror failure nobody wanted to be associated with the project.
How did Dr. Charles Pellerin, NASA’s Director of Astrophysics at the time get the best
people in the world to work on the servicing mission and fix the telescope?

First of all, I started with authentic appreciation. I called everybody by saying “You know, you
are the absolute best person in the world to do this work for the Hubble servicing mission”.
After that I included the person I was talking to: “I would really like to have you as a member
of this really important team”. Then, I expressed my commitment to the mission: “You need to
understand that I am 100% committed to fix this telescope and I am not going to let anything
stand in the way of our success”. And then I made my request: “Would you join my team?”
Every person I called came to work and repair the best space telescope in history. Today,
Hubble science operations are in the 20th year. Nobody could have imagined this after all
we’ve been through but this is the social context of success. (Dr. Charles Pellerin, 2013)

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ENGINEERING SUCCESS Legacy of the brave

US AIRWAYS FLIGHT 1549 –

MIRACLE ON THE HUDSON
At the beginning of this book you’ve seen how a flawed social context led to the crash of
the airplane and to the death of the Polish president and many government officials. In
that case, the social context in the cockpit drove the pilots to make the wrong decisions
and the mission had a tragic outcome. But is it possible for a perfect social context to
save the lives of hundreds of people even when technology fails?

On January 15th 2009, domestic flight 1549 took off from La Guardia Airport in New
York City with 155 passengers and crew on board. One minute and 30 seconds into the
flight the airplane hit a flock of birds. Both engines of the Airbus A320 were damaged
and all attempts to restart the engines failed. The airplane was crashing.

The control tower at La Guardia Airport received the message - “Mayday, Mayday. This
is Cactus 1549. We’ve hit birds, we have lost thrust in both engines”. Everybody was
on high alert looking for solutions. Returning to La Guardia was the first option taken
into consideration, impossible for an airplane with no working engines. Diverting to
another nearby airport was also impossible. Captain Chesley B. Sullenberger had to
make the hardest decision of his life. His words hit the ears of his copilot and the flight
controller: “We’re going to be in the Hudson”. The 150 scared passengers received an
even shorter message, but equally shocking: “Brace for impact!” 30 seconds later the
airplane crash-landed into the freezing waters of the river Hudson.

After such an event you can only imagine the headlines in the next day’s newspapers.
But something here was different, something changed the next day’s headlines from “Air

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ENGINEERING SUCCESS Legacy of the brave

disaster claims 155 lives” to an unbelievable “Miracle on the Hudson”. Every passenger
on that plane walked out alive - only a few minor injuries to report.

Investigations later revealed that the captain and the copilot made all the right decisions
and communicated perfectly with each other. Had they tried to return to La Guardia
the plane would have crashed before reaching the airport in a highly populated area.
Even the most extensive training does not prepare pilots for water landings due to the
limitations of the simulators. However, the pilots in charge of Flight 1549 made the
only decision that saved the lives of everyone on board.

Even the most reliable technologies can sometimes fail. The social context inside the
cockpit allowed these brave pilots to assess correctly the situation, find the appropriate
measures and execute them flawlessly, all in a matter of seconds.

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F
final

your future
ENGINEERING SUCCESS Your Future

If you came so far with the reading, we want to congratulate you for being a great
leader and it is an honor for us to serve you. Over 15 years of leadership excellence in
some of the most complex projects in the world - and beyond our world - combined
with hard, expensive and tragic lessons have yielded up the following conclusions for
your consideration:

»» Social context and NOT individual abilities drives

performance, success or failure of a team or a project.

»» The ROOT causes of project failures are social – management

mistakes, miscommunication, flawed organizational culture.

»» Social context is created by the invisible, unacknowledged

and immeasurable behavioral forces that act on a team.

»» To create a highly performing social context you need to

habitually express authentic appreciation, appropriately
include team members, define and address unpleasant
reality and clarify roles, accountability and authority.

»» Failure is not an option but it is constantly a possibility. You manage

your success by managing both the technical and the social risk.

The old ways of doing business, the classics in terms of relating to others no longer
work. This book offered you a new filter to use when you look at the world. This book
is a scientific paper based on research and intensive experimentation. As with all
scientific achievements, this book comes as a response to an urgent need – the need
to be the best at what you are doing.

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ENGINEERING SUCCESS Your Future

Remember that the power to change lies in your hands. You now have the knowledge
and the tools you need to shape your reality, the social environment you work and live
in. The old paradigms of achieving your goals have become obsolete. More and more
enterprises understand the invisible force called social context and willingly choose
to manage and control it. They understand how dangerous failing to manage the social
context is and they enjoy the tremendous benefits it promises in their personal and
professional lives. They are moving forward in the market at ever increasing speeds.
Falling behind is not an option. You and your team deserve this great opportunity. Both
success and failure lie in your next decision.

HOW TO DO
THE SOCIAL HEALTH CHECK
OF YOUR TEAM?
You can immediately apply the knowledge offered by this book by using our online
and offline toolset. Discover more at www.SuccessEngineer.org or contact us at
[email protected] to get access to the system.

The 4-D System has been developed by Dr. Charles Pellerin. Dr. Pellerin was NASA’s
Director of Astrophysics for a decade, launching 12 satellites with a budget of $750
Million / year and led one of the largest scientific programs in history. He invented the
Great Observatories Program that garnered over $8 Billion for space astrophysics.
NASA awarded him the Outstanding Leadership Medal and the American Astronautical
Society recently gave him their highest award, the Space Flight Award. Dr. Pellerin
led the initial Hubble Space Telescope repair mission for which NASA awarded him

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ENGINEERING SUCCESS Your Future

a second Outstanding Leadership Medal, an honor bestowed on less than 50 people

including astronauts in NASA’s History. He is the author of the book “How NASA Builds
Teams” (Wiley, 2009)

The 4-D system is a team behavioral assessment and development solution for project
teams, leaders and managers. The 4-D model works from the perspective of peers and
offers a tool to benchmark your team against the very best at NASA. It follows through
with straightforward, practical actions that can then be used to develop strength in every
dimension by focusing on each behavioral norm. The program is so powerful because it
changes the social context in which people work. The 4-D System is specifically designed
to address technical people working in complex, high-risk environments. NASA’s most
complex projects and programs – the Space Shuttle, space telescopes and human space
flight missions have used this system with great success to reduce the risk of failure in
their teams. To meet the challenges created by applying a leadership system to technical
minds, the system works in 3 clear, logical and incremental steps.

STE P 1 – S OC I A L R I S K M A N A G E M E N T
S E M I N A R / K E YNO T E

The first step in successfully managing and improving the social context and reducing
the risk of failure in your organization is for the management teams to understand
these critical points:

1. What is social context and what is social risk.

2. How social context drives performance and risk.
3. How to decode the social context, measure and manage it with
the 4-D system.

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ENGINEERING SUCCESS Your Future

This is accomplished through an interactive, intensive presentation in which participants

discover the power of social context using examples from aviation, aerospace,
transportation, nuclear, gas and automotive industries, and engage in decoding their
social context using NASA’s Failure Event Chain (NASA ASK Magazine January 26,
2012: Volume 5, Issue 1).

Critical Learning Points & Outcomes for Leaders, Managers & Project Teams

»» Discover the clear chain between human

behaviors and technical disasters

»» Investigate disasters using NASA’s Failure Event Chain

»» Discover why projects get delayed and fail

due to unnoticed social reasons

»» Discover what four key behaviors leaders need to develop

and why failure to do so will lead to project failures

»» Understand how to join this elite group of no more than

30% of the competent managers in the world

»» How to analyze the latent culture and mindset of a team

and how to change the social constructs according to the
project phases in order to complete on time and budget

»» How to change a toxic relationship with a customer/

sponsor in less than 60 minutes

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ENGINEERING SUCCESS Your Future

»» How to avoid the four critical behaviors that

throw teams into death spirals

»» How to boost creativity, innovation and problem solving

through the only parameter missed or avoided by most
leaders and team members – addressing reality

“I was somewhat circumspect of how well this would work given my

previous experiences with this type of thing. I have to admit that it was
time well spent and I’ve really been impressed by the process and results” 
Rick Grammier, Project Manager of the more than $1 Billion JUNO Project, NASA JPL

STE P 2 - T E A M D E V E L OP M E N T
ASSESSMENT - TDA

Regardless of the nature of the team, whether operational, project or functional, a team
development assessment (TDA) provides powerful insights into the behavioral norms
with specific actions to drive the required behavioral change. A TDA decodes the social
context and the latent behaviors into four clear, easy to understand dimensions. The
power of this online instrument lies in the combination of general human behaviors with
culturally driven actions required for change. A TDA highlights the context in which the
team is performing, and is used as the basis for team members to understand, take
ownership and be responsible for improving team security and performance.

»» A TDA is an online assessment instrument to

evaluate the social context of a team

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ENGINEERING SUCCESS Your Future

»» TDA assesses the performance risk of a

project as part of a health check

»» Benchmarks your team against 300 NASA

and Fortune 500 aerospace teams

»» Identifies key factors that limit / enhance high

performance across your organization

»» TDAs are mandatory BEFORE the TEAM workshops.

»» TDAs are NOT required before presentations for general audiences

TEAM = a group of people that work together and interact long enough to develop
common behavioral norms. They DO NOT have to work together on a specific project
(5-25 people)

The TDA is a fundamentally important part of the process because it decodes the social
context of the team into manageable parts and offers a perspective over the most
dangerous issues that require immediate attention. Just as you do a health check and
find out the diagnosis before prescribing the medical treatment, teams need to have
this health check performed before the workshops. TDAs are required before any team
workshop to avoid unpleasant scenarios.

‘As a NASA program manager, I saw our teams make quantum leaps
in improvement using the 4-D system. Later, as a senior NASA leader,
I witnessed an organization-wide transformation
as the 4-D team-building system took root in our culture.’
Rex D. Geveden, Former Chief Engineer, NASA

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ENGINEERING SUCCESS Your Future

STE P 3 – W OR K S HOP S

After the first two steps have been successfully completed, the third step of the 4-D
process is to focus and solve the critical and the most important issues discovered
through the TDAs. These workshops are done exclusively with teams of people who
work together because we are applying our processes to solve together with them
their own problems and challenges.

Critical Learning Points & Outcomes for Leaders, Managers & Project Teams

»» Discover the clear chain between human

behaviors and technical disasters

»» Investigate disasters using NASA’s Failure Event Chain

»» Discover why projects get delayed and fail

due to unnoticed social reasons

»» Discover what four key behaviors leaders need to develop and

why failure to do so will lead to project failures or financial losses

»» How to analyze the latent culture and social constructs

of their team and how to change the mindsets according to
the project phases in order to complete on time and budget

»» Understand how to join this elite group of no more

than 30% of the competent managers in the world

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ENGINEERING SUCCESS Your Future

»» How to change toxic relationships with customers/

sponsors in less than 60 minutes

»» How to avoid the four critical behaviors that

throw teams into death spirals

»» How to boost creativity, innovation and problem solving

through the only parameter that is missed or unconsciously
avoided by most people – addressing reality.

»» How to match your culture with the customer’s

mindset to win contracts

»» How to understand and solve problems arising

from mismatching mindsets between sponsors,
project managers, team members, contractors and subcontractors

»» How to match a proposal team’s culture to the

customer’s mindset to guarantee a winning proposal

»» How to discover the latent social signatures of a request for

proposal and how to match the proposal to the customer’s culture

»» How to recover troubled projects due to

apparently irreversible social factors

»» The seven deadly “sins” of leaders, project

managers and organizations

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ENGINEERING SUCCESS Your Future

The 4-D System Has Received the

INTERNATIONAL COACH FEDERATION AWARD for
“ENHANCED BUSINESS EXCELLENCE AND RESULTS”

5000%
WITH DOCUMENTED

RETURN-ON-INVESTMENT

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 ENGINEERING SUCCESS Bibliography

1. How NASA Builds Teams,

bibliography

Charles Pellerin, Ph.D., Wiley 2009

2. Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion,

Robert Cialdini, PhD, Collins Business Essentials 1993

3. The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and

Deviance at NASA,
Diane Vaughan, University of Chicago Press, 1996

4. Exploring Mars: Chronicles from a Decade of Discovery,

Scott Hubbard, The University of Arizona Press, 2011

5. Inviting disaster: Lessons from the Edge of Technology,

James R. Chiles, Harper Collins, 2012

6. NASA’s First 50 Years: Historical Perspectives,

National Aeronautics and Space Administration, 2011

7. Outliers – The Story of Success,

Malcolm Gladwell, NY: Hachette, 2008

8. Normal Accidents – Living with High-Risk Technologies,

Charles Perrow, Princeton University Press, 1999

9. Target Risk 2 - A New Psychology of Safety and Health,

Gerald Wilde, PDE Publications, 1994

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ENGINEERING SUCCESS Bibliography

10. Success, Failure and NASA Culture,

Dr. Stephen Johnson, NASA ASK Magazine, Volume 5, Issue 1, January
26, 2012

11. Report of the PRESIDENTIAL COMMISSION on the Space Shuttle

Challenger Accident,
Rogers Commission, 1986

12. The Hubble Space Telescope Optical Systems Failure Report,

Lew Allen, NASA Technical Report NASA-TM-103443, 1990

13. Mars Climate Orbiter Mishap Investigation Board Phase 1 Report,

NASA, 1999

14. Report on the Loss of the Mars Polar Lander and Deep Space 2
Missions,
NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, 2000

15. Sinking the Unsinkable: Lessons for Leadership,

Pedro Ribeiro, NASA ASK Magazine, 2013

16. Managing Projects Large and Small – The Fundamental Skills for
Delivering on Budget and on Time,
Harvard Business Essentials, Harvard Business Review Press, 2004

17. What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures, Who Can Be Blamed For
a Disaster Like Challenger Explosion? No One and We’d Better Get
Used to It,
Malcolm Gladwell, Penguin Books, 2013

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ENGINEERING SUCCESS Bibliography

18. What Other People Say May Change What You See,
Sandssra Blakeslee, New York Times, June 28, 2005

19. Broken Windows,

George Kelling and James Wilson, The Atlanic, 2008

20. An Exploration of Flawed First-line Supervision,

Mary Milliken-Davies, PhD dissertation, University of Tulsa, 1992

21. Measures of Leadership,

Mary Milliken-Davies, West Orange NJ Leadership Library of America
Inc, 1990

22. NOAA N-PRIME Mishap Investigation Final Report, 2004

63  WHAT MAKES YOU FAIL table of contents www.SuccessEngineer.org

 ENGINEERING SUCCESS Contact

Schedule your team development assessment:

contact info

[email protected]

Speaking engagements, keynotes and workshops:

[email protected]

Questions, ideas and suggestions:

[email protected]

Directly contact the author:

[email protected]

64  WHAT MAKES YOU FAIL table of contents www.SuccessEngineer.org

 about
the
author

Dragos Bratasanu is an internationally renowned award winning space scientist and consultant.
He is the Founder & President of Success Engineering, company focused on providing cutting-edge
sustainable solutions for enhancing personal and organizational success. Dragos is a worldwide
official provider of NASA’s Social Risk Management & Leadership Program, offering international
clients access to the same tools and techniques used by NASA in their highly complex projects.

Dragos is a PhD candidate in space sciences at the University of Siegen in Germany and a graduate
of the Business & Management Department at the International Space University Space Studies
Program 2012 hosted by Florida Institute of Technology and NASA Kennedy Space Center. 

For his
research and scientific achievements Dragos received several international awards from entities
like the European Space Agency ESA, European Union Satellite Center EUSC, DigitalGlobe Inc.
USA, IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society in Canada, International Society of Remote
Sensing in Australia. He is member of several international research committees and invited
peer reviewer for leading scientific journals and publications.  

Dragos is presently a National Geographic collaborator and the producer of The Amazing Future
& You movie. As a speaker, he has been on stage on five continents - Europe, North America, Asia,
Australia and Antarctica. Drawing from his experience as a space scientist, combined with state-
of-the-art discoveries in leadership intelligence, Dragos bridges the languages of science and
spirituality to support people reveal their wonderful potential locked within their minds and hearts.