It’s not rocket science, or is it?

I just finished a book titled Innovation the NASA Way.  Those guys were seriously smart, and not because they had money to spend on tech gear. The computer power that sent men to the Moon was less than 1% of the processing power in your smart phone.

What NASA used was people power to go to the Moon, and beyond.

The byline of the book (which is by Rod Pyle) is “Harnessing the Power of Your Organization for Breakthrough Success”.  That sounds easy enough. We just have to locate the power, throw on a harness, saddle up and gallop off. If only!

These days we’ve come to think of the power as being in the technology. We have apps for this and integrated solutions for that. The cloud does this and our data analytics feeds us information for that. We are so brilliantly and instantly informed and connected we feel powerful.

But is that the real power in your enterprise? Are we missing something here?

NASA had none of these clever systems and it figured out and undertook the most complex projects ever conceived by mankind.  It did it like this. It took each project and broke it down into steps: what is the problem; who can solve it; when do we pull all the pieces together; and how do we measure and test it to make it better. 

Then it formed teams around each project making sure that each team had people that were good at each of the What, Who, When and How steps. NASA figured out that each person is naturally better at one or two of these processes and it makes sense to get them to concentrate their “firepower” on that strength. 

The next really clever thing they did was make sure that different teams working on different projects got to see what the others were doing. That meant that the strengths in each team were leveraged across the whole enterprise instead of being locked up in individual projects. The team process became a collective process which became an enterprise outcome.  This was a game changing amplification of value with zero additional bottom line cost. Truly innovative thinking.

So if they did this in the 1960’s and 70’s why don’t we all do it now?  Well, many organisations think they are. We train our people, don’t we? We listen to new ideas.  We encourage innovation. Sometimes we even get in a consultant.

That’s great but for the majority nothing much changes. That’s because there’s a way to do it so you just keep up, and a way to do it so you shoot for the stars.  “To infinity and beyond!” as Buzz Lightyear would say. Now there’s an action figure with ambition!

The moral of the story is that you don’t need to be a rocket scientist to make your business the best it can be in the NASA way.  Please get in touch with us if you’d like to know how.