Dragos Bratasanu– Lightman Consulting

Modern Tokyo Times

Organizations prefer to invest more into building hard skills, technical knowledge, project management skills rather than in what has become known today as soft-skills, leadership wisdom, proficient communication and team building. Technical people focus so intently on their tasks that they fail to notice, much less manage their team’s social context.

However, the term ‘soft’ is unfair, since this expertise is so important yet so difficult to be developed. Unfortunately, failure to recognize the importance of team social context leads to severe problems in the organization, high financial losses and devastating effects on personal health and relationships. Unnoticed social shortfalls destroy even the best-managed programs and projects.

Tragic consequences follow when companies and organizations do not reach balance in their team and do not properly manage their social contexts. Now corporations have the opportunity to learn from world’s renowned space programs tools and techniques to manage and enhance their social contexts and performance.

Dr. Pellerin, former Director of Astrophysics at NASA and Professor of Leadership at the University of Colorado developed a successful system for measuring and enhancing the performance of teams by improving social context management. The examples were chosen from the aerospace industry because when accidents happen in this environment, investigations are extremely detailed, not limited by time and resources and they reach the root causes of the failure. What powerful lessons are for us to learn from the history of aerospace?

In 1986, NASA’s Space Shuttle Challenger exploded immediately after launch, taking the lives of six astronauts and a high-school teacher under the eyes of their families and friends. Authorities investigated the technical causes of this tragedy and the conclusions were startling.

“Frequently we find that failure effects and proximate causes are technical, but the root causes are social and psychological. My sense from experience is that 80-95% of failures are ultimately due to human error and miscommunication” declared Stephen Johnson from NASA in 2008.

The people involved in this project were world-renowned experts, Nobel Prize winners, and very smart and incredibly talented engineers. They knew how to build a spacecraft, how to send it into orbit and bring it back safely since they have done it several times before. However, the pressures from management and the leadership styles were so psychologically violent that engineers and scientists decided to launch the spacecraft although these technical problems were known in advance.

“More than 50% of the cost of a project is socially determined” – Dr. John Mather, Nobel Prize Winner and NASA Scientist

In the 1990s NASA launched the Hubble Telescope, a masterpiece of technology and innovation. This 1.7$ billion satellite was built to take images of universe’s distant objects. After many years of research and engineering, the satellite was sent into orbit with a flawed mirror – an error that could have been committed only by an amateur with no engineering experience. Extended investigations revealed that NASA’s management of its contractor had been so hostile that they would not report technical problems. They were simply worn out due to frustration, anger, threats and beatings. Many people have lost their careers because of these leadership failures, many graduating students have placed their futures on the data provided by Hubble, many have lost their reputations and some of them even lost their lives. Dr. Doug Broome, the brilliant manager of Hubble and Apollo missions took the public humiliation that followed very personally, fell ill with cancer and died within a few months.

In Any Project, What Creates the Biggest, Most Expensive Problems?

Technology or People?

The Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission released a few days ago a report on the Fukushima Crisis. Kiyoshi Kurokawa, the commission’s chairman declared that “it was a profoundly man-made disaster that could and should have been foreseen and prevented. Its effects could have been mitigated by a more effective human response”. In any project, the biggest, most expensive and dangerous problems are created by unmanaged, flawed social contexts.

Cutting Edge Space Technology For Building Teams, Reducing Risk of Failure and Enhancing Performance in Teams

Lightman Consulting is official provider of world-renowned 4-D system developed to deliver measurable capability and behavioral change in technical teams and organizations. To improve communication, performance, and morale among NASA’s technical teams, former NASA Director of Astrophysics Dr. Charles Pellerin developed the team building process described in “How NASA Builds Teams”— an approach that is proven on over 1500 teams, quantitative, and requires only a fraction of the time and resources of traditional training methods.

The 4-D process has boosted team performance in hundreds of NASA project teams, engineering teams, and management teams, including the people responsible for NASA’s most complex systems — the Space Shuttle, space telescopes, robots on Mars, and space missions.

“Great projects demand great leadership. The 4-D process has tools, attitudes and habits that will help make you a great project leader. It is really for any group that is tackling a challenging project, not just for NASA or space projects. When I developed and ran GPS, I wish it had been available to me”

Brad Parkinson, Chief Architect of the Global Positioning System GPS, Professor Emeritus Astronautics, Stanford University

Used by organizations across the world, the 4-D system has been shown to improve project and programme delivery and is especially useful for large scale or multiple projects and mission critical environments. Organizations around the world in many industries, notably aerospace, defense, engineering, energy, health and finance are successfully using the system today to evaluate and enhance performance. Moreover, these simple, logical processes appeal strongly to technical teams who eschew “touchy-feely” training. Some of the proven benefits of using this system are:

•            Assess the performance risk of a project team, as part of a health check

•          Help improve engagement between divisions

•          Enhance operational teams to generate creative, new ways of working

•          Change the context of a relationship with a important client

•          Improve performance and return

•          Identify key factors that limit high performance across your organization

•          Baseline current leadership behaviors

Lightman Consulting (www.lightman-consulting.com) is official provider of the renowned 4-D system used by technical teams around the world. 4-D measures four dimensions and eight key behaviors necessary and sufficient to create performing teams and individuals.

The eight behaviors that strengthen each of the four dimensions have been empirically proven to drive high performance, while their absence has been shown to result in major operational and project failures. It’s not only about increasing performance, but also about preventing failures and disasters.

A 15-minute online assessment of the team or the individuals supports straightforward, practical actions to be used to develop strength in every leadership dimension. Workshops and specific consulting can be provided as required, to help leaders take accountability and raise their performance and overall wellbeing.

‘Charlie Pellerin invented a way for team members to achieve superior business performance and in the process live richer and more compassionate lives. By teaching us how to understand our customer’s mindset and then to authentically shape our offering in response, he helped us win three major competitive proposals worth $9 billion.’

Greg Davidson, Director of Capture and Proposal Operations, Northrop Grumman Space Technology

Regardless of the nature of the team, whether operational, project or functional, a team development assessment (TDA) provides powerful insights into the behavioral norms with specific actions to drive required behavioral change. The power of this tool lies in the combination of general human behaviors with culturally driven actions required for the change. A TDA highlights the context in which the team is performing, and is used as the basis for team members to understand, take ownership and be responsible for improving team security and performance.

‘During my 45-year career, I found it crucial to have a high performing team in order to be a successful in the unforgiving business of space. I was frequently astounded at the effectiveness of Charlie’s process for building better teams. This book will be invaluable to anyone who is faced with the non-uncommon challenge of trying to get dissimilar people to work well together.’

Bill Townsend, Vice President & General Manager, Ball Aerospace. 

During the past 15 years, over 1500 NASA teams and corporations such as China Aerospace, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Ernst & Young, Ball Aerospace, Northrop Grumann, Canadian Space Agency and many others have benefited from the advanced capabilities of this system. It takes 15 minutes to evaluate the performance of the technical team, discover the key problems that need to be addressed and to find out what measures are needed to immediately make the required changes to drive performance and reduce risk. The cost of the program is lower than the industry average and the return of investment is guaranteed and proven to be manifold.

Dragos Bratasanu　

dragos@lightman-consulting.com　

www.lightman-consulting.com　

All images supplied by Lightman Consulting

Dragos Bratasanu, Lightman Consulting

Modern Tokyo Times

10 Strategic Paradigms for Advanced Corporate Efficiency and Success Intelligence (Part 2)

Part 2: On any given project, what gives you more problems, people or technology?

Is it possible to enhance (www.lightman-consulting.com) performance of a corporation, to increase profits, to skyrocket the sales, and in the same time remain in balance and keep a positive perspective? A large number of corporations believe this is a myth but recent studies show that actually the one cannot go without the other. You can achieve excellence in business as a leader, as a manager or entrepreneur by following one important rule: treat others, as you want to be treated by them. Especially, treat your employees, as you would want your supervisors to treat you. Napoleon Hill in his classic book “How To Sell Your Way Through Life” called it The Golden Rule. According to Hill, it is the only rule that can save companies, governmental organizations and even countries from collapse once they go down this path. It is very important to remember that Napoleon Hill wrote this principle after the economic crisis that hit America in the 1930s and it remained valid until this day, when history seems to be teaching us another powerful lesson.

“Of all the things I’ve done, the most vital is coordinating those who work with me, aiming their efforts at a certain goal” – Walt Disney

All business leaders openly recognize the importance of managing people within their organization but few go the extra mile of really understanding the psychological needs of their employees. Financial compensations are a good motivator to attract a person in your company, but are not enough to keep good people stay. Corporations today prefer to invest more into building hard skills, technical knowledge, project management skills rather than in what has become known today as soft-skills, leadership wisdom, proficient communication and team building. Unfortunately, failure to recognize the importance of soft skills leads to severe problems in the organization, high financial losses and devastating effects on personal health and relationships.

Let’s look over a few examples of how important it is for a business to balance the mind intelligence (IQ) with the emotional intelligence (EQ), to find the equilibrium between hard skills and soft skills and what are the consequences that follow when companies and organizations do not find this balance. These examples have been described in detail in Charlie Pellerin’s book, “How NASA Builds Teams”, a masterpiece of leadership wisdom and potential for corporations that want to thrive in the years to come. Dr. Pellerin, former Director of Astrophysics at NASA developed a successful system for measuring and enhancing the performance of teams by improving context management.

1.   During the period 1988-1998, a commercial Asian airliner had a crash rate of 17 times higher than the industry average. Investigators discovered that the root cause was the transference of the social hierarchy to the cockpit. The captain’s social status was so high in the minds of the co-pilots that nobody was able to communicate with him and the captain literally flew the plane by himself. No amount of individual training in flying skills would have helped. Now the company is safe because the relationships and the social environment have changed and there are two or three pilots with equal decision power. A typical plane crash involves seven consecutive human errors and these are rarely errors of knowledge of flying skills. These are errors of teamwork and communication.

2.   In 1986, NASA’s Space Shuttle Challenger exploded immediately after launch, taking the lives of seven astronauts right under the eyes of their families and friends. Authorities investigated the technical causes of this tragedy and the conclusions were startling. Stephen Johnson from NASA wrote in 2008: “Frequently we find that failure effects and proximate causes are technical, but the root causes are social and psychological. My sense from experience is that 80-95% of failures are ultimately due to human error and miscommunication”

“Teams do not go physically flat, they go mentally stale” – Vince Lombardi (1913-1970), football coach for the NFL

Remember that the people involved in this project were world-renowned experts, Nobel Prize winners, very smart and talented engineers. They knew how to build a spacecraft, how to send it into orbit and bring it back safely. They’ve done it before. However, the pressures from management, and the leadership styles were so psychologically violent that engineers and scientists decided to launch the spacecraft anyway, although these technical problems were known in advance.

3. The Hubble Telescope is a masterpiece of technology and innovation. This 1.7$ billion satellite was built to take images of universe’s distant objects. After many years of design and engineering, the satellite was sent into orbit with a flawed mirror – an error that could have been committed only by an amateur with no experience. Extended investigations revealed that NASA’s management of its contractor had been so hostile that they would not report technical problems. They were simply worn out due to frustration, anger, threats and beatings.

“Teamwork is the ability to work together toward a common vision…The ability to direct individual accomplishments toward organizational objectives. It is the fuel that allows common people to attain uncommon results.” – Andrew Carnegie

Deficient leadership skills, combined with deficient communication and ineffectual emotional management leads to important losses. As Dr. John Mather, NASA Scientist and Project Manager said, “Half of the cost of a project is socially determined”.

If these tragedies happen in the most brilliant teams of scientists and engineers in the world, may we imagine how much money, how many projects are lost by corporations due to emotional and psychological factors without even knowing it? The good news is that we now have the tools available to recognize, understand and bring creative solutions to these problems.

Today’s business environments around the world are encountering new problems that can be successfully solved only by using a new way of thinking, a totally unique intelligence. According to Ikujiro Nonaka, Professor Emeritus at Hitotsubashi University of Tokyo and Hirotaka Takeuchi, Professor at Harvard Business School, the corporations in the western culture operate on the philosophy that if a theory is not working, then something must be wrong with reality.

TEAM = Together Everyone Achieves More – Unknown

Leaders that will thrive in the near future in our high-tech, fast-paced world will have to reach higher levels of understanding, communication and interpersonal reasoning. The corporations of the future will have to balance hard skills and soft skills, to balance the intelligence of the mind with the intelligence of the heart in order to be successful. Our current and future challenges require the discovery and application of new inner assets that will help leaders develop reliable, sustainable and balanced decisions and actions. As we will learn to develop the intelligence of our hearts and the equilibrium between thoughts and emotions, we will find the power to move beyond anxiety, worry and stress into a leadership style based on mutual respect, appreciation and friendship. We will learn how to deal with today’s business models in a healthy, balanced way, we will create successful leaders that will accelerate performance and will grow the company together with its people, not at the cost of its people.

“No one can whistle a symphony. It takes an orchestra to play it” – H.E. Luccock

Dr. David Pendleton, from the University of Oxford, one of the professors leading Oxford’s High Performance Leadership Program declared that “There is an increasing body of evidence that coherent organization do better than their misaligned counterparts. They outperform the market and bring out the best in their people. We believe they outperform the market because they bring the best in their people”

A recent study at Cornell University’s Johnson Graduate School of Management that involved interviews with executives at Fortune 1000 companies, found that compassion and building team-work will be two of the most important characteristics business leaders will need for success a decade from now.

The intelligence of your hearts can solve all these problems. Combine the intelligence of your mind with the power of your emotions through your heart and your health will rapidly improve, your performance will increase, your team will work together wonderfully towards fulfilling outstanding, out-of-this-world goals.

Dragos Bratasanu, Lightman Consulting

dragos@lightman-consulting.com　

Images belong to Lightman Consulting

Please visit www.lightman-consulting.com

Contact at contact@lightman-consulting.com

http://moderntokyotimes.com/2012/05/08/10-strategic-paradigms-for-advanced-corporate-efficiency-and-success-intelligence/ Part 1 – Lightman Consulting