Scanning the blogosphere and traditional media, I hear the sound of the blade being sharpened as we lead the usual suspects to the block; careerist bureaucrats, penny-pinchers in Congress, a public unwilling to bear the true cost of the space spectacle it seems to want.
Let me stake out a contrarian position.
First, I’m not a “Shit happens” kind of person. No one who has survived twenty years riding high-performance motorcycles without scars can be. My response to that is typically “Shit is what happens to people who say ‘Shit happens'”.
But we’re blaming participants – we’ll find some hapless administrator who OK’ed a new cost-saving procedure, or who ignored an engineer’s risk assessment, and hang the poor bastard – when we ought to blaming the system.
The reality is that a system like NASA’s is inevitably brittle. To expect that you can build an organization that employs tens of thousands of men and women and spends billions of dollars every year and expect it to be peopled and run by selfless, cooly rational altruists is to admit that you still believe in the Tooth Fairy.
While I’m sure the rose-colored rear view mirror suggests that NASA in the 60’s was such a place, I’m willing to bet that a view taken at that time would have disagreed. And, in truth, it was a smaller and simpler place, where people worked on larger, cruder systems.
The kind of bureaucratic boggling is inevitable in monolithic projects at the scale of the Shuttle program, and we should stop wasting our time making believe that the fault is with the individual flawed judgments we will doubtless find at the root of this tragedy, and recognize that we are dealing with “the warped wood of humanity”, and act accordingly.
I’m dealing with an infinitely simpler problem at a client’s where they have grown a bureaucratic, ineffective software development culture. My Sancho Panza – the young guy I’ve been given to work with – wants to burn it down and start over…to sweep it away in a revolution that will bring purity and clarity of purpose to the institution. I see myself twenty years ago in him, and I’ve seen enough failure…both of selling revolution, and of the revolutions themselves when I’ve won…that I’m looking for a different path.
We can sacrifice a few goats and keep going as we are, or we can sweep the buildings clean and repopulate the corridors of power with people who will, in short order, start acting like the people there today. Or we can do something truly revolutionary, and accept our limitations and find ways to meet our dreams while working within them.
Sounds like an interesting topic to work with for a while.