Idea fight

Houston, we have a problem.

Apollo 13 had more than a problem.

On April 13, 1970, nearly 322,000 kilometres from earth, Apollo 13 had a huge problem. At that point, space flight was considered fairly routine. This meant that the population at large wasn’t paying attention to the launch.

Moments earlier, back on earth, Mission Controller Sy Liebergot saw a low-pressure warning light from the hydrogen tank. It was believed that it indicated the hydrogen tank needed a “cyro stir“. A procedure to stop the supercold gas from settling into layers.

John “Jack” Swigert flipped the switch and moments later the spacecraft shook. Alarms rang out from everywhere and the oxygen pressure dropped and the power disappeared.

Swigert actually said Houston, we’ve had a problem but some artistic license was taken in 1995 Apollo 13 to the line people know today.

Decisions

On the ground, everyone went into full swing. Flight Director Gene Kranz knew his team, whose average age of 27 were determined to bring the astronauts home. He told an interviewer “Every person that was in this room lived to flaunt the odds. Watching and listening to your crew die is something that will impress upon your mind forever.”

NASA Engineer John Aaron was a gifted engineer and was off duty when the expulsion happened.

Many systems were failing simultaneously on the spacecraft. It wasn’t a situation of solving things one by one. A number of challenges had to be addressed at the same time. Primarily, oxygen and power. Oxygen to breathe and power to get them back.

Kranz got the whole team together and detailed what he thought should be done and Aaron told him he was wrong and why he thought he was wrong. Aaron was known as the “steely-eyed missile man” for saving the Apollo 12 mission from having to abort.

Kranz took the disagreement as a fight of ideas, understood that Aaron’s idea was better than his, and put Aaron in charge of rationing the power to get the boys home.

Idea Fight

Kranz demonstrated that the greatest outcomes happen when the best idea wins, not when your idea wins.

We often default to the loudest voice, the most persistent voice, the most charismatic voice, or maybe just the highest-paid person’s opinion (HiPPO, I do love that acronym).

Your responsibility as a leader is not to come up with the best idea, but to create an environment where the ideas can fight independently of who said them.

How do you do that?

Toyota’s Kaizen process searches for continuous improvement. One of the tenants of their system is that the person closest to the problem is probably best suited to solve the problem.

How many times does a high-up manager tell an employee actually doing the work how the work should be done, with no experience or frame of reference for how the job is done?

In the Toyota system, the person at the coal face is given a chance to test their improvement ideas and if they work they get sent to the rest of the company.

Another way to let ideas fight is to have people write things down anonymously. This takes out the popularity contest of the process. The ideas should stand for themselves.

You can have red teams and blue teams. You get put into a team and each team takes a side of the argument, either for or against an idea. This splits the good speakers into opposing teams so people aren’t swayed by who is speaking.

Run tests, have potential ideas deployed into sections of the business and see how they work.

Have the most junior people speak first. If a senior person speaks and says an idea counter to what a junior person is going to say then they will not mention it. Unless they are John Aaron of course.

Make your ideas stronger

When ideas have to fight to get through they are strengthened and the whole team benefits. It could be what offense to run against a particular team or what pricing strategy, or who your 4 marketing cohorts should be.

Having the ideas live and die by their merit and not the merit or authority of the speaker will create more interesting ideas getting raised and more ideas than fewer ideas win over the long term.