Brian Muirhead, chief engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, looked out at the audience of Paradigm’s Innovation Symposium and told them that in the next hour, he would make them all rocket scientists. Then he put them through seven minutes of sheer terror.

Risks and Rewards

Muirhead, who was chief engineer for the successful 2012 Curiosity landing on Mars, played a heart-pounding video that showed the lander’s final seven minutes before it landed. From entering the planet’s atmosphere at a blistering 13,000 mph to a successful landing, everything had to go right: heat shield separation, parachute deployment, rocket firing and deployment of a revolutionary sky crane to lower the rover to the surface. If anything didn’t work, it was game over.

“I remember NASA’s administrator telling me, ‘Brian, I want you to take risks but do not fail,’” said Muirhead. “How do you do that? To take a risk and not fail? The answer is to be innovative.”

Attendees listened intently as Muirhead illustrated how important  problem solving, teamwork and leadership are to NASA’s success. And to their own.

“You have to be creative about what you do and how you do it. That’s the key to success and taking risks and not failing,” he said. “That doesn’t mean you don’t fail sometimes. You learn a lot from failure, so you test, test, test. You want to bring your product to the marketplace fully tested.”

Leadership Facilitates Innovation

Muirhead went on to explain that innovation is a dynamic between three things: ideas, constraints and execution. He said that innovators are great idea people, but when those great ideas come up against limitations, they know to change. They actually get the work done, produce the product, implement the idea. That’s the essence of innovation –ideas, constraints and execution coalescing for a leader and team.

“Leadership has a lot of dimensions, but to me, it boils down to just two things: glue and grease,” he said.

The “glue,” Muirhead continued, is the role leaders play in formulating a team and a project. They create an environment that the project has to operate within, gather the resources and keep the team focused.

The “grease” is even more important. The grease is what leaders do to get the job done: cutting through the red tape, breaking down the barriers, giving the team the license to be innovative in what they do and how they do it.

“I’m willing to take risks that I want them to take and back them up, give them what we call ‘top cover.’ That’s really fundamental to my job as a leader.”

Building Collaborative Teams

Muirhead also took the time to talk about what he looks for when building a team. First, of course, was talent. Then ownership, what he described as a personal commitment to doing a job well and a similar commitment to the whole project. High performing teams are also committed to the success of each team member.

Next, he looks for trust and seeks to build personal relationships. “A team needs to trust each other that they’re going to do the job well. They need to trust the boss and I had to trust them.”

Finally, Muirhead told attendees what it really takes to solve creative problems: team diversity.

“You want people with different skills. You don’t want people with all the same background. You want people who maybe have a completely different background relative to the actual problem at hand because they’ll bring a different perspective.”

These differences make clear communication all the more important. Mutual understanding helps ensure risks are identified, shared, discussed and mitigated. When communication breaks down, problems can go unresolved and threaten the entire project. The Mars Climate Orbiter, for example, was lost in the Martian atmosphere because a navigator and his boss didn’t understand each other. The consequences of assumptions and other forms of miscommunication can be costly.

Our Mission

Muirhead concluded with an image taken from one of NASA’s rovers, looking up at the Martian sky. In the photo was a little blue dot – Earth. He imagined someday when a family of astronauts on Mars would go outside and the parents would point at the blue dot and say to their children, “That’s where we came from.”
Muirhead then leveled his gaze at the symposium’s attendees and said, “I want you to go out there and take risks. But do not fail.”