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Fifty five KRC, the talk station eight five Here fifty five KRC, you talk station. A very happy Friday to you intrigued about this book. I'm happy to welcome to the fifty five Carcy Morning Show, doctor Charles Kamara, author of the book We're going to be talking about Mission out of Control and astronauts Odyssey to Fix High Risk Organizations and Prevent Tragedy. He is, as the book suggests,
and astronaut. What a cool thing to say. You are research engineer and venor author, educator, Internationally recognized expert, invited speaker on subjects regarding engineering, engineering, design, innovation, safety, organizational behavior and education. He's got more than sixty technical publications, hold nine patents, and over twenty national and international awards
that could go on for hours on his background. He retired from NASA and May twenty nineteen after forty five years of continuous research as our continuous service as a research engineer technical manager at Langley re Search Center. Who's Director of Engineering at Johnson Space Center and Senior Advisor for Innovation and Engineering at Development at Langley. Welcome to the Morning Show, Doctor Kimarta. It is a pleasure to have you on today.
Good morning, Brian, thanks for having me.
I mean, I got it being an astronaut. To me, that's just fascinating, and you probably won't. You're a very small slice of the entire population. I'm just kind of wondering whether you would rather be referred to as astronaut doctor Charles Karmonda or doctor Astronaut Charles Commoner, because I would always want to put that in when I was introducing myself.
You know, Brian, most people call me Charlie.
There you go, Well, Charles mission, out of control, astronauts O honesty to fit the high risk organization and prevent tragedy. First off, what I think I have an understanding as to why what prompted you to write this book before we start talking about what the book is intended to do.
Well, as you said, I worked for NASSA for over forty five years and it was an amazing organization when I was a young researcher at massalignedly, but it changed. It lost its way. We stopped doing real applied research.
We started becoming a production organization, especially on the human space flight side, and we started just looking at operating vehicles and flying them in space, and we lost our touch with our research routs, and we lost our capability to actually understand when we had critical problems.
So am I to understand? You were on the team that led the investigation why the Columbia Space Shuttle blew up?
Well, I didn't lead the team. I led one of the teams that was investigating the technical cause of the problem, and that was the impact. And we used some of my good friends Matt Mellis and some of Kelly Carney and some of the great people at Glenn Research Center right there in Cleveland.
Okay, Well, when I was reading through the materials, I did write Boeing down here, because Boeing has been plugged with problems. They make the planes, but they don't, you know, like for example, let the air pilots know they change the software they have, you know, the poor performance in terms of manufacturing. They have a product, but they have breakdowns in manufacturing that obviously can lead and have led
to the loss of life. Is that sort of an illustration of the of the like a company to whom you would focus this book or directed their attention to this book.
Absolutely a lot of companies. It's a very similar problem because what we learned after the Columbia accident was that the primary cause of the of the of the accident was the culture. And what you saw after the seven thirty seven MAX accidents with Boeing is they came to the same conclusion. Boeing lost this way, just like National loss this way. Technical excellence was no longer and safety were no longer the key primary focus of the organization.
It got bobbed down with the bottom line market share profit. That's very similar but different reasons. Became very focused on production schedule and budget and keeping the programs alive, and it's become a loaded bureaucracy. And what I realized, what I learned in the research writing the book, is that what other people missed was there's a difference between technical excellence, technical people, good engineers, and what I call research engineers.
And so I described the elements that make up a good research, a good learning organization like what Boeing used to be, just like NASA was, and how that can lead to a very toxiculture which becomes psychologically unsafe. People are afraid to speak up, and then bad things happened and the accidents recur, just like Challenger and Columbia.
Well, you mentioned bottom line, profit share, market share, and profit all being primary dry and to the exclusion of perhaps this intense focus on perhaps safety. But on a similar note, I kind of think that maybe, like if you look at DEI departments, they're focused on culture, and they're focused on social issues and issues that transcend any given companies primary focus, which would be should be providing
a quality product and or service to their customers. Is that another form of sort of a lack of focus or improper direction that we could point to.
Well, diversity is good, right, it helps us create, It helps us come with very innovative solutions. But DEI and quoteas and getting away from merit talkers. Yeah, you know, a good research organization is knowledge is key, and you have deference to the people that have that expertise, and you always have to develop those skills and maintain those standards.
Well, are you concerned about the state of education in the United States because we seem to be turning out young people who just are taught to the test but not taught to critically think. I mean, it's one of the reasons why I love law school so much because it was a socratic method, that back and forth and that delving down and looking into and analyzing, you know, in that particular case, different areas of law. But it was a wonderful teaching method. We don't seem to be
teaching children logic and reason anymore? Is there a shortage of that? Is that part of the cultural problem here?
You're absolutely correct. When I was resigned that mathif was speaking up, I started diving into how do we train our young engineers and education in general around the United States. As matter of fact, I started a five oh one to three CE educational nonprofit cuts called the Ethic Education Foundation, where we used a challenge based learning approach. And yeah, absolutely correct. Lawyers do this. They think critically, They look
at all different sides of an argument. And you had this free environment where you could have this discourse, you could have these disagreements, but you relied on the facts and the knowledge and the knowledge that was verified by tests and analysis.
Okay, So in a corporate environment, moving away from you know, lawyers, you know, talking and advocating on behalf of their clients and sort of thinking around the different challenges they face but in a corporate environment, I think you alluded to it earlier, people have this reluctance to hold their hand of it and say no, no, that's a dumb idea because of the you know, am I going to lose my job? Am I going to embarrass my boss? I can't do that. I'm not going to be the one that cheeks up.
That's exactly what you're talking about, a psychological safety. Amianmentsid wrote a book to Feel this organization about this, and I talk about this in my books. How in a real true research culture, a true research environment, this is this is absolutely critical. And so when I spoke about my book and culture to the senior executives at Boeing and I told them how ugly the culture was in
the environment was NASAs. Their eyes were wide open. But people were coming up to me and saying, you know what, Charlie, the culture is worse at Bowing. And I didn't believe them. But that was six months before the first of the first y In Air crash of seven thirty seven, and then six months later that you had the Ethopian Allines crash and the body sell out of Boeing, And so what I was trying to tell the Bowie senior executives after the seven thirty seven crash, was that you need
to listen to your people. People are telling you there are major problems, but their voices are being muted and they're being canceled.
Well, part of me, let me ask you this, sir. And then again I guess is astronaut doctor Charles kamarda Mission out of Control and astronauts Odyssey to Fix High Risk Organizations and Prevent Tragedies? Sort of the subtitles suggests high risk organizations? Who did you write the book for? Was it for the public at large? Are you focusing on, you know, corporate culture and your leaders and executives within companies.
Originally I focused on it as a way to help fix NASA, but what I realized was when NASA wasn't listening, there were many organizations that have this very similar problem. And so the second half of the book I talk about ways that we could fix this problem, how we could use technology, how we could to train people differently, how we can build what I call these five key principles of a research culture.
Well, I guess there's probably you know, using Boeing as an illustration, and NASA's an illustration there. I would imagine there is a different mindset among the employees that in the private sector, Yeah, you run the risk of losing your job, you run the risk of getting fired for incompetence. But I would think in a government environment, you're less likely to face any well penalty for maybe not doing work or for maybe causing a problem or something. There's
a sort of a protection element in governm jobs. It seems to not exist in the private sector. Is there a distinction between them, and along the lines of what you're talking about, it's.
Not really, Because you know, I spoke up after I flew in space. I became director of engineering, and when I saw problems with safety, I spoke up in a flight readiness review and I was reassigned three days later. So, if you can imagine an astronaut being silenced, it can happen to anyone. And while you don't might lose your job, you might lose your position, you might lose your voice, and you're placed in a terrible situation where you no
longer can do the job that you loved. People will not treat you the same because you're no longer you're a piranha, you're a pariah, your persona non grata.
Fair enough, well, doctor, Obviously in the book, you identify the general concepts we're talking about the problem that we face, and I presume that you offer and outline solutions to these problems, practical solutions that people in the business world can incorporate.
Absolutely. I have key things for leaders to look for signs that the culture is going awry. I talk about technical use of technology to help us identify when an individual team, because it only takes one small team to be dysfunctional, like the team that was working on the ownings or the team that was analyzing the impact of foam on Columbia. You have one dysfunctional team and it
could cause a tragedy. So I highlight several ideas for how you build a psychologically safe environment, a knowledge based hierarchy where you encourage people to fail and learn by failure, and how you're transparent, how you share information openly and you encourage competing ideas.
I love the sound of it. It sounds practical and logical and reasonable to me. Astronaut doctor Charles Kamarta, author of Mission out of Control and astronauts Odyssey to Fix high risk organization and prevent tragedy. Doctor. We have your book on my blog page, fifty five KRC dot com. I sounds to me like there's a lot of business owners out there in my audience. I would love to get a copy of this, and I'm sure they will.
Well.
Thank you for spending time with my listeners and I today and identifying this problem so we can work on solutions, sir, That's what it's all about.
Thank you very much for having me Brian.
My pleasure, Absolutely, my pleasure. It's eight eighteen right now, fifty five KRC Detalk Station. Feel free to call. I had a couple of callers online as we went into the break. If you guys want to call back, Joe'll open up the phone lines and I'll be happy to talk with you. Otherwise I get to pick the subject matter five one, three, seven, four, nine, fifty five hundred, eight hundred eighty two to three talk pound five fifty on AT and T phones, fifty.
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