Astromanager LLC

Our latest blog post:

Month: March 2010

  • Learn from your mistakes

    I was recently sitting in on an oversight meeting of Gemini management.  Most of the meeting was spent in executive (ie. private) sessions, but during one of the two public sessions, one main topic was to explore how and what we have learned from past mistakes.  This discussion made me realize that learning from mistakes is not an easy thing to do for many institutions. I’m not saying here that Gemini is doing all these things wrong, but I have seen all these issues first hand at various places, including Gemini. I’m sure that if asked, most people would say that they, personally, learn from their mistakes.  Yet, institutions and corporations often don’t.  Why not?

    For one, you first have to be willing to acknowledge the mistake. This step can be a key roadblock for some. If you don’t have an atmosphere where honest inward looking thought and speech is encouraged, mistakes get covered up, denied, assigned to something else, and not brought out as potential lessons and means for improvement.  If you believe in hiding bad news in an (ultimately futile) effort to look good, then you will never learn from mistakes.

    Second, you need an environment where the mistake is viewed in context of the system that allowed the mistake to happen and that allowed its effect to be as big as it was.   What you don’t need is an environment of blame – where mistakes are dealt with admonishments of “don’t do that again”. What you need is a faultless exploration of what in the system could be changed to prevent future similar mistakes.  Making and acknowledging mistakes is not about placing blame, but about fixing the system. People will always make mistakes, but you want the system in which they work to be as fault-tolerant, and fault-preventive (if I can coin a new compound word) as possible.

    Mistakes will be made as a natural part of the learning and improvement process. It’s what you do with them that is important. Are your mistakes opportunities for improvement, or shameful things you hide and ignore?

    Finally, you have to really broaden your horizons and fix the system, not the symptom.  To make up a hypothetical example, if an instrument is damaged because a heating circuit failed (OK, the event is not so hypothetical, but the implicit bad response outlined below is), you could simply decide to remove the heating circuit from the instrument when it’s repaired.  That fixes the symptom and you certainly must address the symptom, or you look really foolish if the same accident happens again, but you can’t stop there.  What allowed this single point of failure to exist in the first place?  What allowed the failure to occur unnoticed?  Was there real-time monitoring?  Was anyone overseeing the project? Was anyone contacted? Was there a timer on the heater?  Are other possible single-point failures being identified and backed up and/or isolated by a fail-safe or some other subsystem?  If you don’t start asking yourself these types of questions, there will be no learning from your mistakes.  On the other hand, if you  are not afraid  to take a rigorously honest look at what other similar vulnerabilities might exist, if you are willing to go beyond placing individual blame and look at how the process allowed both the single point failure to exist in the first place and for the eventual failure to go unnoticed and un-contained, then you are probably on a continual course of improvement and empowerment.  Isn’t that a better place to be than only a few instances of bad luck away from a repeat of a mistake you chose not to learn from?

    Scot remembers several bits of advice he received about mistakes. His water-skiing cousin told him if he wasn’t  falling, he wasn’t trying hard enough. His graduate advisor told him “wisdom is that sinking feeling that you’ve made this mistake before.” He learned from these people and others that making mistakes is part of life.  Making the same mistake twice, doesn’t have to be.

  • The CEO of the Container Store on the vital nature of open communications.

    A colleague sent me a link to an interview with Kip Tindell, Chief Executive of the Container Store. In the interview, Kip describes how important it is to his company to have a policy of full disclosure, open communications, and transparency with his employees. It helps promote team work and motivates the best employees. Here’s a small excerpt from the interview:

    The way we create a place where people do want to come to work is primarily through two key points. One of our foundation principles is that leadership and communication are the same thing. Communication is leadership. So we believe in just relentlessly trying to communicate everything to every single employee at all times, and we’re very open. We share everything. We believe in complete transparency. There’s never a reason, we believe, to keep the information from an employee, except for individual salaries.

    I always make it a point to give the same presentation I give at the board meeting to the staff, and then that trickles down to everybody in the company. I know that occasionally some of that information falls into the wrong hands, but that’s a small price to pay for having employees who know they know just about everything.

    This concept has nothing to do with astronomy management, unless you consider that astronomers and other staff members are usually people, too, and that Kip Tindell’s approach is about getting the most out of people and forming the best team you can with the people you have.

    I wonder if I could find similar articles confessing the benefits of hiding information and keeping secrets from employees and customers. I bet not, but it would be an interesting exercise.

    Anyhow, you can read all the interview here.

  • The never-ending battle between big and small science in astronomy

    When you hear the thundering herd behind you, it’s time to move on to a new field. That’s advice I often heard from my graduate advisers. While you might call this a “small science” mindset, they went on to found the Whole Earth Telescope (WET), an international collaboration of astronomers at more than a dozen observatories around the world that coordinated observations to follow variable (white dwarf) stars continuously for up to two weeks at a time, clearly a “big science” approach. The WET was initially very successful, and began to falter only later as it struggled to transition from a bunch of astronomers doing what they needed to do to get their science addressed, to an institution looking to continually justify its funding and purpose.

    I recently finished Giant Telescopes by Patrick McCray, a book basically about the origins of the Gemini Observatory. I was struck at how many of the same arguments that were in the community decades before Gemini, persisted up to and through its construction and are still being debated today. Principally, the question of private vs. public and big science vs. little science. In my earlier posting about The role and need for an international observatory, I gave some of my thoughts on the first question so here, I want to at least introduce the latter.

    A few years back, Simon White and Rocky Kolb submitted a set of papers, each championing for the big science or little science models for astronomy. There was even a pseudo-debate between them at the 2008 AAS meeting (http://aas.org/taxonomy/term/27 – session 87 – where you can see a video of the discussion). Simon White’s paper was Fundamentalist physics: why Dark Energy is bad for Astronomy while Rocky Kolb’s, issued in response, was entitled A Thousand Invisible Cords Binding Astronomy and High-Energy Physics. The context for this particular discussion was Dark Energy, but the underlying issue was really whether or not astronomy should be done in a big science or little science approach.

    An artistic interpretation of the crystallized white dwarf star, BPM 37093, observed by the WET.BPM 37093 is so massive, that theory predicts its core, mostly carbon and oxygen, is crystallized. Here on Earth, crystallized carbon is called diamond. Observations of the oscillations of this star with the Whole Earth Telescope were consistent with this interpretation and placed strong limits on the amount of crystallization within the star, a diamond in the sky.

    I don’t think this argument will ever really die since we will always have competing projects that are each done best under a different model. The solution is going to be to continue to adapt and be aware of the compromises and needs necessary to keep both approaches viable. One interesting moment in the 2008 AAS “debate” was when an audience member asked what each would like to adopt from the other side. Simon White said of high energy physics “managing large projects” while Rocky Kolb said of astronomy “making data public”. What I liked about this question and its responses was that it acknowledged that we don’t have to simply emulate the high energy physics big science model, nor steadfastly stick to astronomy’s traditional small science mode, but we can learn from both and make something better than either alone. The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), like the WET, is a good example of this kind of approach. A core group of people inspired and really implemented the survey, with formal management and technical support partially adopted from the particle physics world. The SDSS used both public and private funding and made all the data publicly available after a short proprietary period. This melding of approaches helped make the SDSS one of the most successful projects of its type and certainly helped pave the way for even larger projects like the LSST and PanSTARRS.

    So the question isn’t big science vs. small science in astronomy, but how do we create an environment where both can exist, cooperate, and thrive? With 30m telescopes, 8m surveys, and pushes to build large, wide-field survey imagers and spectrographs, astronomy must learn to embrace big science, although we can do so on our own terms, not necessarily on those laid before us by other fields and previous projects. This debate is similar to the one on public vs. private facilities. A true strength of the astronomy community is that both public and private facilities have been successful. That both are continuing to debate why they each need more resources than the other means the community is relatively healthy. The next hurdle in both these arenas will be how to ensure the appropriate levels of cooperation between each community. How do you motivate private funding when the data become public to all? How do you (or do you?) justify public funding when the resulting data remain private? How do you make sure individual contributions are visible and not an anonymous contribution to a juggernaut project? How do you handle risk in a extremely delicate, risk-adverse, funding environment, especially in a field which traditionally pushes at the outer limits of available technology, a fundamentally risky task?

    I’ll try to address some possible answers to these questions in future posts.

    Starting off with the Whole Earth Telescope, then onto the SDSS, Subaru, and now Gemini, Scot has been involved in increasingly “larger” science, but has always managed to come away with his own “small” science projects within each. He particularly enjoyed doubling the number of known white dwarf stars from SDSS data of largely failed attempts to find Quasars!

  • Don’t demotivate. Communicate!

    After a recent post here, a friend sent me a link to this old article from the Harvard Business School, entitled Why Your Employees Are Losing Motivation. I hate to keep saying the same thing here, but boy does this article hit a few nails smack on their heads.  Your best employees, the ones you really want to attract and retain, are already motivated – you just have to keep them that way.  (Actually, most all your employees are likely motivated to do well.)  This article points to several ways “traditional management” demotivates employees, all of which are good points, but the one that I think is often hardest to re-train managers to do is to really communicate with their employees.  To quote from this article:

    Communicate fully. One of the most counterproductive rules in business is to distribute information on the basis of “need to know.” It is usually a way of severely, unnecessarily, and destructively restricting the flow of information in an organization.

    A command-and-control style is a sure-fire path to demotivation.

    Workers’ frustration with an absence of adequate communication is one of the most negative findings we see expressed on employee attitude surveys. What employees need to do their jobs and what makes them feel respected and included dictate that very few restrictions be placed by managers on the flow of information. Hold nothing back of interest to employees except those very few items that are absolutely confidential.

    As another colleague said to me recently, this problem becomes particularly acute when your employees happen to be people long-trained to be inquisitive, to search for solutions, and to solve problems- your average observatory staff member, in other words.  Keep these people out of the loop so you remain “in charge” and “in control” and you quickly lose anyone to be in charge and in control of.

    Promoting open communications is really not hard; it doesn’t take much time and it is not overly burdensome on either the managers or their employees.  First, meetings where issues are discussed and/or decisions made should be open to all to attend. Few will actually take the time away from their schedules to attend, but they will appreciate knowing they can and any that do attend obviously have  passion for the subject and you’d be wide to keep them engaged.  Second, distribute notes, minutes, or a list of decisions for meetings. I think this is best done in a fashion that allows people to pull the information from a web site or mail archive when they want it, but make it available. Three, managers should talk with their employees about results from these and other management meetings.  No sense in everyone losing time at a meeting if one person can do and share the results with the rest of the team.  Fourth, tell people the good and the bad.  Tell people what’s in progress and what might be as well as what has been settled. Informing someone after a decision is made counts for much less than does discussing the process and the possibilities as they occur.  No one likes surprises and no one likes to feel their input is not wanted or considered when heard.  Fifth, ask people what they want to know, what their concerns are.  Ask them what it is they want in their jobs.  You’ll be surprised at how easy it is to keep employees happy when you simply ask them what it takes to keep them happy.  Why guess at the answer when you get the teacher’s guide for the asking?

    When Scot was growing it up, it was occasionally said that he talked to much. At home, in school,…. As he grew up, though, he learned that we often get and convey more information more effectively by listening vs. talking.

Big Science Boards Books Budgets Business Change Management Classes Communications Community Competition Conflict Crucibles Emotions Employee Development fire-fighting Fun Gemini GTD Hiring Impostors International Introduction Leadership Management Management Corollary Matrix Mauna Kea Federation Mistakes Politics Productivity Project Management Scientist Dilemma SDSS Social Media Videos Whole Earth Telescope