A project of any complexity is an effort to harness multidisciplinary expertise to solve challenges for the benefit of people.
- Location 47
-

Projects run on knowledge—a combination of learning and experience that enables people to perform tasks. A project can have all the resources in the world, but without the necessary knowledge it is doomed. There are plenty of other reasons that projects fail, but lack of know-how almost guarantees a bad outcome.
- Location 50
-

Three leitmotifs recur throughout this book. The first is that projects are fundamentally about how teams work and learn together to get things done. Project teams are not like professional sports teams that play games with clearly defined rules. Project teams may rely on repeatable processes to design, build, test, and deliver products or services, but innovation, whether incremental or radical, depends on team learning. As Arie de Geus of Royal Dutch Shell Group writes, “The ability to learn faster than your competitors may be the only sustainable competitive advantage.”1
- Location 57
-

Second, the local level is where the action happens. Innovations and breakthroughs that lead to project success rarely come from the top of large, centralized organizations. If anything, a burdensome bureaucracy will spur a project team to expend considerable time and energy finding ways to work around it. This is nothing new—the agile movement that began two decades ago has brought widespread recognition to the benefits of decentralized decision-making—but the implications for knowledge often go unnoticed.
- Location 62
-

The governance of knowledge and projects in large organizations is typically most effective when it empowers people working at the local level to…
- Location 65
-

Finally, projects don’t operate in a vacuum. They exist within organizations that are responsible to stakeholders, whether they are corporations accountable to shareholders or government agencies accountable to political leaders and the public. A project’s…
- Location 67
-

The traditional project management “iron triangle” of cost, schedule, and scope does little to articulate the differences between a project that delivers a sidewalk versus another that delivers a supercollider, let alone accounting for elements like knowledge,…
- Location 71
-

There is a symbiotic relationship between an organization that pursues its mission through projects and the teams and individual members that execute them. The organization supports its teams and individuals by providing resources and infrastructure for knowledge and learning as well as a culture that shapes the work environment. This enables teams and individuals to learn and acquire the knowledge…
- Location 74
-
- [note::Organization -> Knowledge/project infastructure + culture
Team/Individual -> Knowledge acquisition + project execution]

We approach project complexity through the lens of knowledge and learning needs, identifying three project models—micro, macro, and global—that each…
- Location 78
-

A micro project seeks to solve a problem that is finite and primarily technical in nature. The challenge can be simple or difficult, but the solution comes as a result of having the… ... A micro project can be a straightforward software project such as delivering a feature for a website, or it can require a great deal of innovation (think of an ambitious R&D initiative), but in either case the project team has the…
- Location 80
-

A macro project focuses on a problem that can only be solved by involving a significant part of an organization, ranging from a division or large business unit to the entire enterprise. The need for technical knowledge cannot be divorced from the organizational knowledge required to gain support for changes in resources, authority, or norms and behaviors. Mastery of organizational politics is necessary to secure buy-in from key decision makers and neutralize pockets of resistance.
- Location 96
-

A global project addresses a vast societal challenge. This can be a public health problem like eradicating smallpox, or a knowledge quest such as unraveling scientific mysteries of the universe through a shared laboratory or observatory.
- Location 109
-

These projects are inherently political, and they call for practical wisdom about the way the world works (the Greeks called this worldliness phronesis—wisdom and prudence acting in the world) in combination with metis and episteme. They are akin to a three-dimensional chess game: critical knowledge can be identified at global, organizational, and local levels. Global knowledge—an understanding of a project’s political dimension—is necessary to manage relationships among governments, corporations, universities, and other key stakeholders. Organizational knowledge is unique since the organization itself has to be created to execute the project. And local knowledge within the project is still just as essential as it is for a project with a narrower scope.
- Location 112
-

As these models suggest, technical knowledge is critical but insufficient unless the problem is essentially technical and the project team is empowered with the authority to solve it without interference. In our experience, complex projects rarely, if ever, have a purely technical focus. Yet few organizations acknowledge their need for organizational or political knowledge.
- Location 126
- technical knowledge, organizational_knowledge, 1todo evernote, political knowledge, knowledge,

We offer three archetypes for organizations that accomplish their work through projects while acknowledging that most large organizations are hybrids that combine elements of more than one of these models.
- Location 133
-

A complex project-based organization is in the one-and-only business. These are organizations like NASA or CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, that solve fundamentally novel problems. Cost and schedule are measured in terms of the project life cycle rather than a unit of production (e.g., the time and dollars required to manufacture a single automobile in a mass-production operation). The customer, which in the case of NASA or CERN is often a team of scientists seeking to run highly sophisticated experiments and collect data, is typically involved throughout the life cycle because of the complexity of the problem. Success is impossible without significant technology development and innovation.
- Location 135
-

A mass-production organization is a manufacturer working at scale, whether it makes cars or candy bars. Problems in production are measured, scored for criticality, and tracked until resolved. These organizations use lean or agile methodologies to improve quality and efficiency and have a separate research and development (R&D) function focused on breakthrough innovations. Customer feedback informs the design and production process, but the point of sale is where most customers enter the picture.
- Location 140
-

An entrepreneurial organization in this framework is something like a pure software-as-a-service (SaaS) organization, for example. The minimum viable product provides the initial basis for continuous testing and improvement, which is informed by ongoing customer feedback. Since there are no per-unit physical capital costs as there are with cars or candy bars, the unit cost goes down with every subsequent sale.
- Location 144
-

Since knowledge is inherently social, the structure of an organization plays a huge role in its approach to knowledge development, retention, and transfer.
- Location 148
-

Three Models for Project-Based Organizations
- Location 151
-

Knowledge is a social phenomenon. Team dynamics and organizational considerations including governance, incentives, and culture can either promote or inhibit the learning and collaboration necessary for project success. There isn’t a neat algorithm for optimal performance in project-based organizations; the intangibles make all the difference.
- Location 173
-

A smart mission recognizes that few things go as planned, and that both learning and unlearning are essential. It understands that knowledge creation happens at the team level, and therefore works to design and sustain a strong, inclusive team that collaborates effectively. It is conscious of the culture it develops and maintains. Above all, it values people, and offers them the opportunity to be part of something that has meaning and purpose.
- Location 185
-

Larry is one of the world’s leading authorities on the subject of knowledge in organizations, having written nine books and more than 50 articles and consulted with more than 300 organizations around the globe on the topic. Matthew has run a consultancy focused on learning and development for over a decade and has written widely about leadership, communication, and influence.
- Location 192
-

Ed and Larry teach in Columbia University’s Information and Knowledge Strategy program, and all three authors currently serve as senior advisers to the Project Management Institute.
- Location 196
- information strategy, knowledge, knowledge strategy, project management, information, 1action, 1resource/graduate-program,

Learning is the other side of the coin from knowledge: it is an activity whereby knowledge is specifically taught and transferred to others. Most organizations emphasize learning at an individual level, which is insufficient in a context that demands team learning and organizational infrastructure and support.
- Location 215
- learning infrastructure, knowledge, learning,

Efforts to improve knowledge sharing and learning cannot be successful unless the organization values and recognizes the importance of these activities. This understanding comes from the culture of the organization.
- Location 223
-
- [note::Sad but true :(]

1. Arie de Geus, “Planning as Learning,” Harvard Business Review 66, no. 2 (March–April 1988): 70–74, https://hbr.org/1988/03/planning-as-learning.
- Location 240
-

2. Rick Waghorn, “Distance Learning,” Project (February 2009), 12–14, https://www.nasa.gov/pdf/321075main_Project_Magazine_excerpt.pdf.
- Location 242
- learning, asychronous_communication,

Knowledge is the source of wealth. Applied to tasks we already know, it becomes productivity. Applied to tasks that are new, it becomes innovation. —Peter F. Drucker, Peter F. Drucker on Practical Leadership
- Location 248
- productivity, knowledge, innovation,
- [note::Relationship between knowledge and innovation]

Ed shared his concerns openly and explained that his focus would be on the people side of the equation, saying, “There are many in the knowledge management community who see knowledge management from a technology, process, and tools perspective. That is important, but it will not be my starting point.”
- Location 275
-

Knowledge is not information, although information can be seen as a piece of knowledge when it is added to an individual’s store of know-what. Knowledge isn’t data or wisdom either. A few years ago, Larry was asked by a reporter for a quick definition that would help people understand the differences between these terms. He came up with this: Let’s say you plan to make a fine dinner for someone you care for. The letters in a printed recipe are data, the recipe is information, knowledge is the ability to cook, and wisdom is marrying a good cook.
- Location 296
-

Working knowledge is a mix of explicit and tacit knowledge, or know-what and know-how, with a stronger dose of the latter.
- Location 303
-

Knowledge is a slippery word because it describes something that is basically intangible, though the outcomes of it are often plain to see, and those outcomes enable us to determine its value and best uses. Whether we are discussing a car, medicine, legal advice, or the space shuttle, we can value its performance and outcome without trying to meticulously identify the knowledge that went into creating it. But it is useful and important to understand the sources of an organization’s knowledge to get a better grip on what it does and doesn’t know, and how to use that knowledge in a more effective way.
- Location 310
-

Knowledge is profoundly social. Individual knowledge is important, but it pales in comparison to the knowledge of a group. This can be true of a team, network, community of practice, or any other aggregate unit where there is a generalized common goal, vocabulary, understanding, and purpose.
- Location 315
- knowledge, 1todo evernote,

Ideas about the nature of knowledge are deeply influenced by the culture of the person using it. “We find knowledge inseparable from the knower,” says Naoki Ogiwara, managing director of a Tokyo-based global consulting firm that specializes in knowledge.2 He notes that in East Asian cultures, knowledge is viewed “not as a thing to be measured, but an attribute or force within us.” In Western cultures and those regions most influenced by the West, knowledge is often thought of as something that can be expressed in a rule or an algorithm, or embedded in a form external to the knower. These two very different understandings of how knowledge is manifested have created some difficulties in communications about how to successfully manage knowledge.
- Location 319
-

Working knowledge can be embodied in people and embedded in processes and routines. When a new idea enters an organization it is evaluated, and if deemed valuable, it takes root as a part of the way work is organized and performed until a better idea supersedes it. It becomes part of the set of routines and processes that allows an organization to operate.
- Location 344
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When organizations decide to actively engage with knowledge, they generally focus on three activities: knowledge development, knowledge retention, and knowledge transfer and diffusion. All of these activities are critical to any organization, but their value and the time spent on any of them largely depend on the organization’s products or services. Most organizations in our experience choose one or maybe two of these activities to focus on.
- Location 350
-

Knowledge development focuses on how knowledge comes into an organization, is evaluated, and becomes part of an organization’s stock of working knowledge. This can be done by forming an alliance with a firm that has needed knowledge, buying that firm outright, hiring consultants or other advisors, or creating a team or task force to identify new sources of knowledge.
- Location 354
- knowledge, knowledge development,

Knowledge retention is usually associated with training and internal learning processes in order to embody knowledge in chosen employees. The effectiveness of these processes is mixed. As we explain in chapter 2, a great deal of knowledge retention happens directly and informally among employees as circumstances allow. But a growing trend in knowledge retention is the development of academies and corporate universities.
- Location 369
-

Knowledge transfer or diffusion describes how knowledge gets intentionally shared among people or groups. This can happen at any level and degree of cardinality within an organization, whether it’s one-to-one, one-to-many, or team-to-team. Many managers, organization theorists, and economists assume that if part of an organization (e.g., a division or team) has some knowledge, it is known by the whole organization. Needless to say, this isn’t true. For varied reasons, knowledge is sticky—it tends to remain where it has been developed.6
- Location 379
- knowledge, knowledge_transfer, knowledge diffusion, knowledge stickiness,

Many knowledge-sharing efforts overlook the impediments to transferring knowledge, such as the reliability of the knowledge being transferred, logistical factors, the sheer difficulties of communicating and appropriating what is often complex and tacit, and the transaction costs that transferring knowledge can entail. We have learned that a great deal of knowledge transfer happens informally through casual or spontaneous conversations that spark new connections. A critical lesson shared in an email (or worse, a lessons-learned database) is less likely to find its audience than if it is shared in a discussion that allows listeners to prod, question, and evaluate the knowledge before deciding to act on it.
- Location 384
-
- [note::Very curious to hear more about the last sentence. Why is a lessons learned database ill-advised?]

This should not be misinterpreted as a dismissal of the importance of documentation. Ray Ryan, a senior software engineer at Square, emphasizes the importance of capturing ideas in writing to facilitate knowledge transfer through dialogue. “The main thing is to write things down, teach others to write things down, and be willing to read what others have written down,” he says. “The conversations we have are about the documents.”7 The critical distinction is that knowledge captured in writing is most likely to prove its value when it spurs conversation.
- Location 389
-

One way to encourage knowledge transfer is to build social infrastructures that allow employees to share what they know. Organizations that provide spaces to learn demonstrate a different level of understanding about the inherently social nature of knowledge. This concept is well known in Japan, and there is a Japanese word, ba, that is used to describe a space where common meaning is created.
- Location 394
-

Beyond physical spaces, events can offer a different kind of space for knowledge transfer. NASA has used this approach extensively, combining internal and external speakers to stir the pot of knowledge circulation while leaving ample time for talking, informal meetings, and conversation. Convening a workshop to reflect on and capture lessons learned from a project is a common example.
- Location 409
-

Another way to transfer and diffuse knowledge is to relocate employees who have specific knowledge to places where this knowledge is needed. While this sounds simple, it has proven to be problematic since global firms often meet resistance when shuffling workers across the globe. Another impediment to this is that knowledge is not only sticky, as noted previously, but it is often context dependent: an idea may work well in one occupational or geographical context but not in another.
- Location 415
- knowledge_transfer, knowledge diffusion, context dependence,

Though it would seem self-evident that “capturing” or even roughly identifying all the knowledge in any organization of size would be absurd, if not impossible, it has been attempted by several organizations. Much of this absurdity stems from three fallacies. The most common is the myth that enterprise-wide software promoted by vendors and consultants can either catalog the knowledge of the organization or serve as a portal for individual employees to share their knowledge. The latter, while having some value, is based on the false premise that individual knowledge is the most important unit of analysis in an organization. The second fallacy is the belief (again promoted by technology vendors and consultants) that organizational knowledge is an objective, tangible “thing” that can be identified, manipulated, and harnessed in encyclopedic form. ... Trying to document individual knowledge in a large industrial enterprise is futile. ... The third misguided notion is that knowledge can be captured. This idea, which still has some currency, conflates knowledge with information. In the 1990s, there was a popular belief that if an organization could deliver the right information to the right person at the right time, the firm would prosper forever. This is a category error based on a misunderstanding of the nature of knowledge. Library-like information management systems can be incredibly useful, but they don’t have much to do with knowledge.
- Location 424
-

Not all knowledge is critical for effective performance capability. Much depends on an organization’s products or services, the complexity involved with product or service delivery, and the competitiveness of the market. NASA used the term “mission-critical knowledge” to describe this distinction. The process of identifying what’s truly critical doesn’t need to be difficult. The best way we know to explore this is through a series of questions, such as “What do we know that enables us to do well?” and “What do we need to know that we don’t know right now?” See the “Putting Knowledge to Work” section at the end of this chapter for a list of questions that can serve as a starting point.
- Location 456
-

The level of granularity is also important to consider. What is the unit of analysis when evaluating critical knowledge? It is almost never an individual, since knowledge is a social activity. ... The unit of analysis is often driven by organizational incentives. In organizations that reward employees for publishing reports, for instance, the report becomes the unit of analysis rather than the team that produces the report.
- Location 462
-
- [note::Having trouble understanding this]

Since knowledge is social, the transaction cost is primarily a function of the total time it takes to identify, locate, evaluate, and adapt knowledge. The time it takes to search for a source of knowledge represents a relatively small part of the total cost. Larry and his colleague Al Jacobson found that 80 percent of the time spent acquiring new knowledge is consumed by the process of eliciting it from people and then adapting it for a specific context.17 The real drivers of the cost are social.
- Location 492
- context, knowledge, knowledge economics, knowledge transfer, cost drivers, knowlege acquisition,
- [note::Does this imply that the highest leverage way of reducing knowledge-related costs are not in actually identifying where one can get the knowledge but actually eliciting it from the source and applying it to their context? I'm not quite clear if that's what this is saying.]

As he planned to convene the first in-person meeting of the NASA knowledge communities—employees who already had some responsibility for knowledge in specific parts of the organization—Ed aimed to secure agreement on a set of guiding principles that were broad enough to feel inclusive and specific enough to result in positive change. By the end of that meeting, the community had reached consensus on five points that would ultimately serve as the kernel for an agency-wide governance model for knowledge: We recognize that knowledge is embedded in the flow of all the work we do in order to get real results. We foster community-wide knowledge acquisition, access, sharing, and reuse. We respect local customs while enhancing organizational norms. We strive to operationalize and brand knowledge so that it resonates with all stakeholders—what it is, what it isn’t, and how to use it effectively. We collaborate across organizational boundaries, remove stovepipes, and continuously measure our effectiveness (people, process, systems).
- Location 506
-

It is useful to stress here that the governance structure for managing organizational knowledge needs to fit the culture and the strategy of the organization as well as the national or regional culture in which it is located. Some organizations such as intelligence agencies have a strong need for monarchy, and organizations that have a number of disparate major products or decentralized sites may be best suited for feudalism.
- Location 523
-

Knowledge is a profoundly social and human activity. It may be represented in a process, rule, or system, but it is basically a human activity. It includes judgment, discernment, and a rich understanding that isn’t yet accessible to machines, except as instructed by humans.
- Location 536
- 1social/post-queue, knowledge,

Knowledge is its own thing. It is not anything else. Knowledge isn’t information or data or wisdom. It’s a way of understanding a bounded subject that allows practitioners to act on that understanding.
- Location 538
- action, information, wisdom, data, knowledge, understanding, 1todo evernote,

Knowledge is temporal. It changes as new knowledge is developed and displaces old knowledge. This has always been true since the dawn of human achievements. Even with the most established knowledge, such as Newton’s laws, questions have been raised about their “truth” value, and several of them have been modified in the last century.
- Location 541
-

Knowledge can be observed and understood but not captured. It is always largely tacit, and this type of tacit know-how can’t be readily documented or captured by observation.
- Location 544
-

Knowledge is expensive. It takes time, energy, and focus to become knowledgeable in a subject. There are no shortcuts to knowledge. One may have flash intuitions, but even those are dependent on prior knowledge for their efficacy.
- Location 546
-

People, ideas, and things are all that we have. (This is a simple way of summarizing a powerful concept identified by economist Paul Romer.) A century ago, the world ran primarily on things—tangible objects ranging from pairs of shoes to barrels of oil. Things are still important, but our global economy is increasingly based on ideas that can be captured in algorithms, apps, drug developments, and financial tools, to name just a few examples.
- Location 549
-

There is no individual knowledge—only individual memories. No one has useful knowledge that isn’t known by others. Knowledge is a social…
- Location 552
-

Knowledge can be best understood and characterized as “know-what and know-how.” Most people know that Paris is the capital of France—that is know-what. But an understanding of French culture or even the…
- Location 554
-

Experience doesn’t automatically turn into knowledge. It needs to be framed and…
- Location 557
- experience, knowledge,

Knowledge is an interdisciplinary subject. It can be approached and analyzed from almost all the social sciences and many of the humanities. The challenge is that the vocabularies and research agendas of the various disciplines within the social sciences and humanities make it…
- Location 558
-

Pick a unit of analysis that corresponds to places or structures that can be identified as knowledge hubs or hot spots that have an impact on business outcomes or strategy. There is usually some focused aggregate, such as a team, network, community, branch, division, or department. It is helpful to limit the unit to no more than…
- Location 565
- unit of analysis, knowledge hubs, knowledge management,

Identify critical knowledge, keeping in mind that knowledge is social and intangible rather than a “thing” that can be captured. These questions can serve as a starting point for discussion: Strengths: What gives us a competitive advantage? What do we know that enables us to do well? What do we know that sets us apart from others? Gaps: What opportunities and vulnerabilities can we see? What do we need to know that we don’t know right now? What do we need to learn to do differently? What do we know now that we could lose in the future? Development: How do we develop new knowledge? Innovation: Where do new ideas come from? How well does the organization innovate? How well does the team innovate? Learning How well does the organization support learning? How well does the team support learning? Problem-solving How well does the organization solve unexpected problems? How well does the project team solve unexpected problems? Retention: How do we embed what we know in order to keep it? Transfer: How do we share what we know across…
- Location 568
-

Identify a governance model for knowledge that reflects the structure of your organization. Federated models are increasingly the norm in large, decentralized organizations. Centralized models (e.g., “monarchies”) can work in settings where it’s impossible to reach the consensus needed in a federated model as long as the culture and incentives foster open…
- Location 595
-

Remember that ideas don’t speak for themselves. Organizations are not meritocracies when it comes to adopting ideas. The decision makers in a hierarchy make the decisions, and their motives are almost always more complex than the pure potential value of the idea. Even before an idea reaches the C-suite, it…
- Location 599
-

Robert Gibbons and Laurence Prusak, “Knowledge, Stories, and Culture in Organizations,” AEA Papers and Proceedings 110 (2020):187–192, https://doi.org/10.1257/pandp.20201091.
- Location 610
- 1resource/paper, organizational culture, organizational stories,

NASA Academy of Program/Project & Engineering Leadership, “Collaborative Problem-Solving: The STS-119 Flow Control Valve Issue,” NASA, April 2013, https://appel.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/468375main_STS-119_flow_control_valve.pdf.
- Location 614
-

Gabriel Szulanski, Sticky Knowledge: Barriers to Knowing in the Firm (London: SAGE Publications, 2003), 2.
- Location 618
-

Ikujiro Nonaka and Noboru Konno, “The Concept of ‘Ba’: Building a Foundation for Knowledge Creation,” California Management Review 40, no. 3 (Spring 1988): 40–54, https://home.business.utah.edu/actme/7410/Nonaka+1998.pdf.
- Location 621
-

Thomas H. Davenport and Laurence Prusak, Working Knowledge: How Organizations Manage What They Know (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1998), 7. See also Richard F. Meyer, Michael G. Rukstad, Peter J. Coughlan, and Stephan A. Jansen, “DaimlerChrysler Post-Merger Integration,” Case, Harvard Business Publishing, last revised December 1, 2005, https://hbsp.harvard.edu/product/703417-PDF-ENG.
- Location 639
-

Al Jacobson and Laurence Prusak, “The Cost of Knowledge,” Harvard Business Review 84, no. 11 (November 2006), https://hbr.org/2006/11/the-cost-of-knowledge
- Location 649
-

Thomas H. Davenport, R. G. Eccles, and Laurence Prusak, “Information Politics,” Sloan Management Review 34, no. 1 (1992): 53–65.
- Location 651
-

In times of drastic change, it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves beautifully equipped to live in a world that no longer exists. —Eric Hoffer, Reflections on the Human Condition
- Location 660
-

The starting point for learning is an experience or problem. This experience leads to reflection on what is happening, followed by the development of an abstract hypothesis to address the experience or problem. The final step is action through experimentation, which leads to new experiences, creating a cycle. Without experience, learning becomes a series of disconnected abstract concepts.2
- Location 699
- action, learning, experimentation, experience,
- [note::This points to the necessity of applying the knowledge I've gained through my readings. Without actually utilizing the information I've read about project management and systems, it's going to be difficult to develop a deep conceptual understanding of these topics.]

Learning often meets resistance because it demands changes in mindset, skill, and performance. These changes can be difficult and even painful, and as a result they elicit strong emotions. The emotional dimension of learning generally receives little attention unless it falls under the banner of “change management,” but learning is always more than a purely cognitive experience.
- Location 703
-

Training traditionally implies a classroom exercise where a fellow employee or a consultant teaches the processes, routines, technologies, or expected behaviors of the organization. In recent years much of this work has migrated to online courses, but the substance hasn’t changed significantly. The main faults with this model in a project context are threefold: these activities rarely reflect the way employees actually learn, there is little room for substantive discussion and feedback, and there is almost no integration with the learning done at other levels in the organization.
- Location 708
- applied learning, knowledge sharing, interactive learning, training, learning,

Fortunately, training represents just one of many ways to learn in a professional setting. Rotational assignments, hands-on opportunities, problem challenges and contests (e.g., hackathons), storytelling forums, and partnership programs with universities can all provide valuable learning experiences for individuals.
- Location 715
-

Katie Smith Milway and Amy Saxton identify three challenges to organizational learning: lack of clarity around measures of organizational knowledge and related outcomes, poor incentives for learning, and uncertainty about the best ways to create and transfer knowledge across an organization.
- Location 727
-

While individual learning gets the lion’s share of attention, savvy organizations have recognized the value in approaching learning as an integrated effort that happens at all three levels: Organizational—promoting sustainable performance and innovation Team—enabling project success Individual—building competence, capability, and confidence
- Location 738
-

This experience points to a central requirement for successful learning and knowledge systems: they have to be closely aligned with and managed by senior leadership. They cannot operate as an HR function that’s disconnected from corporate strategy. Leadership sponsorship and engagement are essential. At NASA’s academy, leaders from engineering, project management, safety, business, and science were responsible for identifying critical capabilities, designing learning events, and serving as faculty. At such educational events, senior executives would be exposed to conversations about the practitioners’ reality—both the good and the bad.
- Location 773
-

An organization uses a combination of signals and incentives to send a message about the value of learning. At a high level, organizational efforts generally boil down to 1) investments in learning infrastructure, and 2) reinforcement through culture.
- Location 780
- signals, organizational learning, organizational culture, incentives, learning infrastructure, organizational infrastructure,

The primary dimensions of learning infrastructure include integration, resources, time and space, and networks.
- Location 785
-

Larry’s research into knowledge networks with Katrina Pugh identified four distinct goals that these networks can have: coordination, learning/innovation, translation/local adaptation, and support of individual members.9 Given the range of these goals, there’s no single best way for an organization to develop and leverage networks. Successful networks reflect culture and a shared sense of mission. McKinsey’s thousands of consultants around the globe are expected to return a call from any other consultant in the company within 24 hours.10 Experience with this kind of responsiveness in a network fosters a strong sense of reciprocity.
- Location 814
-

Software developers of all ages around the globe rely on Stack Overflow, a network of 10 million registered users who troubleshoot problems and share solutions with each other. Learning is increasingly an outside-in opportunity.
- Location 830
-

Infrastructure can only take an organization so far. The presence of a learning culture is the real indication that learning matters. It’s one thing to own exercise equipment, but it’s another to use it every day as a matter of habit. Some of the hallmarks of a learning culture include recognition, leadership support and participation, iterative experimentation, unlearning behaviors that have impeded learning, and connection.
- Location 836
-

Organizations can also recognize learning through events that explicitly acknowledge and even celebrate the importance of getting things wrong. ... The World Bank has hosted FAILfaires (failure fairs) to share lessons about approaches that haven’t worked.11 ... The World Bank is not alone among large organizations in adopting this approach; other organizations, including the Gates Foundation, have held failure festivals.
- Location 846
-

Psychological safety is oxygen for a learning organization; it’s impossible to imagine one without it. At firms like Bridgewater Associates, which practices a kind of radical transparency that’s uncommon in most corporate settings, the focus is on building a culture where mistakes are aired rather than airbrushed.
- Location 868
-

Before rolling out top-down company-wide initiatives, experienced leaders in learning organizations run experiments to figure out what works best in a given context. In short, they think big and start small. At NASA, Ed ran initial knowledge-sharing events and publications as pilot programs, and only established knowledge sharing as a formal business line of the project academy once the offerings were relatively mature. ... Particularly in situations involving technology, limited test runs with small groups of practitioners can save countless time, money, and frustration.
- Location 871
-

In order for an organization to shift direction and adopt a learning posture, the people within the organization have to unlearn behaviors and habits that have held the organization back in the past. For example, if people have guarded knowledge rather than shared it or elevated team loyalty over transparency with the broader organization, these norms have to change to create space for learning to happen.
- Location 885
-

As Edgar Schein has noted, learning anxiety—the fear of trying something new—can only be overcome by either a greater survival anxiety (e.g., the prospect of job loss for failing to adapt) or an increase in psychological safety that reduces the resistance to change.
- Location 887
-

A novel approach to unlearning is the Friction Project, an initiative by Stanford professors Bob Sutton and Huggy Rao that seeks to “understand the causes and cures for destructive organizational friction.”15 It has studied firms such as AstraZeneca, which made an organization-wide commitment to simplification in order to free up hundreds of thousands of wasted hours that could be put to more constructive uses.
- Location 891
-

Where learning is concerned, connection must come before content. A key aspect of our colleague Nancy Dixon’s life-long work is research that underscores the need for relationships, trust, and connection.17 Once the question “Who is this?” has been answered, then people can focus on “What are they saying?”
- Location 898
-

Efforts to promote team learning should consider big-picture issues like project relevance, cultural factors that promote safety to challenge the status quo, and resources such as space and time and targeted support.
- Location 943
- group learning,

At the other extreme, an ad hoc team assembled to promote a hastily approved change initiative that’s not supported by senior leadership stands little chance of learning to enhance its performance. This may sound obvious, but anyone who has worked in a large, bureaucratic organization has probably witnessed a team that was doomed to fail before its kickoff meeting. There can be any number of reasons for this, from ill-conceived ideas to political naivete, but the end result is always the same if a team’s mission is not respected by the organization’s leaders.
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-

Chris Argyris, one of the most influential theorists of organizational development, argued for a different characteristic of learning teams and organizations, which he dubbed “double-loop” learning.22 This is what happens when teams go beyond learning that simply addresses a problem with a linear solution (single-loop learning) and respond instead by delving deeply into context and questioning the underlying values, beliefs, and norms that frame the problem. Seen from this vantage point, project reviews are places for argument, exchange, and exploration, and risk management is a tool for learning to understand the likelihood of failure.
- Location 959
- post-mortem, double-loop learning, organizational theory, organizational development, problem solving, 1action,
- [note::Follow Chris Argyris's work]

What ultimately makes individuals effective in a project organization? At a series of NASA knowledge-sharing events from 2007 to 2009, Ed asked 275 senior practitioners a simple question: “How do you learn to do your job?”
- Location 1009
- c1,

Ed and Matt collated these responses and ultimately identified four key dimensions of effectiveness: Ability—a combination of natural aptitude and the capability to incorporate new knowledge and learn from experience. Attitude—motivation, curiosity, a growth mindset, and the willingness to work as a member of a team. Assignments—core on-the-job learning experiences that lead to personal development. Alliances—relationships that enable an individual to succeed within the organization. These “4 A’s” provide a lens for thinking about individual development as a process that is both personal and social. Ability and attitude are personal qualities, while alliances and assignments are both rooted in relationships with others.
- Location 1012
-
- [note::Similar to CAMPS model of job satisfaction?]

Promote leaders as teachers, which contributes in many ways to the value of learning. Under Ed’s leadership, the NASA project academy always invited executives, engineers, and scientists to present at events ranging from training courses and knowledge forums to conferences.
- Location 1037
- organizational learning, organizational values,

Establish reflective leadership as a clear goal.
- Location 1041
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Approach training as a conversation that makes productive use of argument and dissent. Training often turns off smart people. Asking people to share their own experiences and perspective gives them a voice and helps to foster inclusion and appreciation.
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Create spaces and places where learning takes place. NASA provided many places where people would come together for the purpose of learning, sharing, and growing. In recent years, young professionals at NASA have solicited leadership support to establish workspaces that enable co-creation, collaboration, sharing, and networking.30
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Learn in small gatherings and communities. When people learn together, they get better at working together. This goes beyond intelligence to social capital. Spending significant time together in a learning environment will lead to profound work relationships for life if the event has been designed correctly. This includes providing opportunities for eating, drinking, and socializing together.
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Learning is not overhead. It is the ultimate competitive advantage for every leader, team, and organization. The best teams and organizations clearly articulate the requirement for learning, reflection, and knowledge sharing as part of mission strategy and success. What NASA has done well is to create expectations, requirements, policies, executive sponsorship, and resources for exceptional learning opportunities. Learning is not a “nice-to-have” perk that can be cut when funding becomes tight.
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A diversity of voices is vital. One of the first principles for the NASA project academy was to offer a way, not the way, to enable project success. When learning is shared from a variety of perspectives, people understand that they are free to accept, question, improve on, or tailor for their own context. Psychological safety reassures them that all voices are welcome.
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-

4. Katie Smith Milway and Amy Saxton, “The Challenge of Organizational Learning,” Stanford Social Innovation Review 9, no. 3 (Summer 2011): 44–49.
- Location 1070
- 1resource/article, organizational learning,

7. Matthew Parsons, Effective Knowledge Management of Law Firms (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 16.
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9. Katrina Pugh and Laurence Prusak, “Designing Effective Knowledge Networks,” Sloan Management Review 55, no. 1 (Fall 2013): 79–88.
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10. Tom Peters, The Tom Peters Seminar: Crazy Times Call for Crazy Organizations (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 171.
- Location 1089
- 1resource,

11. Michael Trucano, “Running Your Own FAILfaire,” World Bank, EduTech blog, November 17, 2011, https://blogs.worldbank.org/edutech/failfaire-internal.
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-

12. Ronald Bledlow, Bernd Carette, Jana Kuehnel, and Daniela Pittig, “Learning from Others’ Failures: The Effectiveness of Failure Stories for Managerial Learning,” Academy of Management Learning and Education 16, no. 1 (2017): 40, Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School of Business, https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/lkcsb_research_all/16.
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14. This interview with Edgar Schein captures the point succinctly: Diane L. Coutu, “Edgar Schein: The Anxiety of Learning—the Darker Side of Organizational Learning,” Harvard Business School Working Knowledge, April 15, 2002, https://hbswk.hbs.edu/archive/edgar-schein-the-anxiety-of-learning-the-darker-side-of-organizational-learning.
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15. See this description of the Friction Project: https://www.bobsutton.net/friction-project/, accessed October 7, 2021.
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-

Nancy Dixon, Common Knowledge: How Companies Thrive by Sharing What They Know (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2000).
- Location 1108
- organizational_knowledge, knowledge sharing, 1resource/book,

20. Amy C. Edmondson, Richard M. J. Bohmer, and Gary P. Pisano, “Speeding Up Team Learning,” Harvard Business Review 79, no. 9 (October 2001): 125–134, https://hbr.org/2001/10/speeding-up-team-learning.
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-

21. Charles Duhigg, “What Google Learned from Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team,” New York Times Magazine, February 25, 2016, MM20.
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22. Chris Argyris, “Teaching Smart People How to Learn,” Harvard Business Review (May–June 1991): 99–109.
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24. James G. March, The Ambiguities of Experience (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010), 115.
- Location 1124
- 1resource/book, organizational learning,

28. Reid Hoffman, Ben Casnocha, and Chris Yeh, The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2014), chap. 2, Kindle.
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-

29. Lynn Crawford, “Beyond Competence: Developing Managers of Complex Projects,” in Proceedings of AIPM National Conference (Sydney: Australian Institute of Project Management, October 2010), 6.
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30. See, for instance, NASA Academy of Program/Project & Engineering Leadership, “The Space to Collaborate, the Space to Share,” ASK the Academy 5, no. 3 (March 6, 2012), https://appel.nasa.gov/2012/03/26/5-3_space_collaborate-html/.
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-

The failure of a seal on Challenger’s solid rocket boosters, which initiated a sudden series of events resulting in the loss of the shuttle and its crew, did not surprise engineers who had cautioned NASA officials just a day earlier against launching at such cold temperatures. Several previous shuttle flights had experienced problems with the solid rocket booster’s O-rings failing to seal properly. The night before the launch, Roger Boisjoly, an engineer at Morton Thiokol, the manufacturer of the solid rocket boosters, had argued forcefully in telephone meetings with leaders from NASA and his own company against launching at temperatures below 53 degrees. Boisjoly had written a memo six months earlier warning of the consequences of an O-ring failure: “The result would be a catastrophe of the highest order—loss of human life.”1
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-
- [note::Wow - what an awful disregard for safety]

Allan McDonald, a Morton Thiokol official who had refused to go along with his management’s decision to confirm in writing for NASA that it would be safe to launch Challenger into freezing temperatures, recounted intimidating remarks made in the teleconferences the night before the launch.4 McDonald had stood his ground in the face of tremendous pressure, but his account spoke to a lack of psychological safety that needed to be addressed. An organization that disregarded the advice of its technical experts had to change more than its management structure. It had to come to grips with the human dimension of this difficult story and learn from it.
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-

A 1988 RAND study of 52 civilian megaprojects (defined as projects ranging in cost from $500 million to over $10 billion in 1984 dollars) reported an average cost growth of 88 percent. The study also found that new technology posed significant challenges: “The incorporation of new technology in a megaproject almost ensures that the project will make more mistakes than money. The use of new technology is the only factor that is associated with bad results in all three dimensions: cost growth, schedule slippage, and performance shortfalls.”12 This finding would not surprise experienced project or system engineers. The introduction of new technology always represents a significant risk, particularly in spaceflight; there are very limited ways to fix the systems on a rocket or a satellite after launch.
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-

NASA commissioned retired Air Force general Samuel C. Phillips, who had managed the Apollo program at NASA’s headquarters in Washington, DC, to lead a study group and make recommendations to the NASA administrator. Among other things, his report called for the agency to “strengthen agency-wide leadership in developing and managing people.”13 This created an opportunity for NASA to find new ways of developing the talent of its project management workforce. One of the most powerful tools it ultimately adopted for sharing knowledge and lessons was storytelling.
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Stories are a natural form of communication that has always helped humankind convey and distribute information. Some scholars argue that humans are hard-wired to learn from each other in this manner. “Narrative arises from the advantages of communication in social species,” writes Brian Boyd, who suggests that…
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-

On a more practical level, psychologist Jerome Bruner describes story as one of our primary means of understanding the world: “There are two ways of cognitive functioning, two modes of thought, each providing distinctive ways of ordering experience, of constructing reality.… A…
- Location 1232
- stories,

Stories are legitimate means of explanation. They rely on a narrative arc to initiate and sustain interest in the body of the text, and if the arc is strong enough, the story will stick far more powerfully than a well-done PowerPoint presentation or paper. Bruner performed experiments that showed that stories were 22 times more memorable than flat information with the same content.16 Since stories are so sticky, they can serve as an efficient and effective method for…
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-

Skilled storytellers bring emotion and passion to their delivery. This has a powerful effect that makes a listener attend to it carefully, and in many cases identify with the teller or protagonist. As a result, stories can lower the defenses of listeners and push them beyond binary cost-benefit thinking to consider alternative perspectives. “Narratives are a performance-enhancing drug for…
- Location 1240
- stories, emotions, persuasion,

In a project environment, stories offer five major advantages. First, while databases, training, and other tools for sharing lessons require time and significant cost, storytelling is a low-cost method that needs no training. Few people will say, “I can’t tell a story, I don’t have that skill.” Nearly anyone…
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-

Another advantage of stories is that they require and build the muscles of reflective leadership. Although projects value speed, this often comes at the cost of learning. One of the persistent findings of project failure is a lack of commitment and time for learning and reflection. Storytelling is flexible in its time demands; stories of all lengths can be valuable. When storytelling is accepted as part of an organization’s culture, this allows reflective…
- Location 1250
- project failure, project learning, stories, reflective leadership,

A third attribute of stories is that they facilitate a communal sense of meaning. This concept is vital in an age of rapid change. When there is little change, a community—a family unit, team, or organization—can establish meaning over time. In a volatile and uncertain environment, a story…
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A culture of knowledge is built on the meaning ascribed to agreed-on stories. This is both the power and danger of story: regardless of its accuracy, it creates a shorthand for common understanding. Stories simplify reality, which can be useful for reaching broad audiences, but the process of…
- Location 1258
-
- [note::Stories are like heuristics for reality?]

A fourth advantage of stories is that they can provide a sense of clarity about what is important. All organizations and projects have an essential purpose. One of the prime challenges to that purpose is the ability to focus. Nonstop emails and meetings create constant pressure and distractions. Stories can serve as reminders to ignore nonessential activities in favor of vital priorities.18 A compelling story that…
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Finally, stories provide a sense of connection through a strong emotional link. They allow people to share their thoughts and feelings. Storytellers who express vulnerability by revealing their emotional stake in a story model the behaviors associated with psychological safety, which in turn…
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Many, if not most, project stories fall into one of three categories: successes, failures, or change initiatives that illuminate…
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Within an organization, a failure story can prompt reflection that ultimately leads to changes in strategy, governance,…
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The challenge of failure stories is that they are not often easy for organizations to accept. The people involved with the failure may feel persecuted, misunderstood, or otherwise unfairly treated. These dynamics certainly existed at NASA in the immediate aftermath of both the Challenger and 2003 Columbia accidents. The deaths of the crew members weighed heavily on everyone associated with the shuttle program,…
- Location 1274
- failure, failure acknowledgement,

Success stories can build organizational confidence and bolster morale. They can take a variety of archetypal forms: the upstart versus the established giant (David vs. Goliath), persistence in the face of terrible circumstances (Job), or the merger that leads…
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Stories about organizational wins are important, but as engineering historian Henry Petroski warns, “…
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Political stories can include elements of success or failure, but their underlying value is in helping practitioners understand the dynamics that shape the project-based organization. These can be stories of bureaucratic entrepreneurs who worked the system effectively, or of those who…
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Knowledge-sharing forums were not an overnight success at NASA. Branding mattered. For starters, there was a fairly strong prejudice against the word story itself. The speakers were often very senior engineers who felt that describing a serious talk on the space shuttle as a story would be degrading and insulting to all concerned. For this reason, these sessions were called Masters Forums at the beginning. There was little mention of “story” in the event announcements or descriptions. The term Masters Forum indicated that individuals with expertise in projects were coming together to discuss their experiences and lessons.
- Location 1316
- knowledge sharing, marketing, branding,

The proof of concept arrived in participant evaluations and increasing attendance. It helped that a few highly regarded engineers embraced the use of stories. Word spread about these early champions, creating a sense that it was okay to follow their lead. And as broadband internet became the norm, videos of compelling stories from forums could be shared with the world.
- Location 1326
- change_management, influencers, change champions, stories,
- [note::Reminds me of the commentary on "change champions"/"influencers" on the APQC podcast series on change Management.]

At the same time that Ed was convening the early Masters Forums, he developed a series of publications that culminated in an award-winning journal called ASK Magazine. ASK primarily featured first-person stories from NASA practitioners. From the beginning, it set a tone that was conversational rather than technical. Issue 1 featured a story by Michelle Collins that began: “I was a new engineer at one of NASA’s contractor sites, straight out of college and ready to conquer the agency. Of the 120 engineers there, I was the only female. To say I stuck out is putting it mildly.”22 ASK welcomed a wide range of practitioner perspectives, not just war stories from veterans of the good old days. Since many NASA experts were not professional writers, Ed enlisted a team, including Larry, Matt, and Don Cohen (who has written our case study of the International Space Station in chapter 6), to help capture and edit these stories. The magazine eventually expanded to bring in relevant stories from experts outside NASA as well. As word spread about ASK, researchers began to cite its stories in other publications. Ed also began a monthly newsletter that enabled more frequent communication than ASK, which was published on a quarterly basis.
- Location 1337
- psychological safety, culture building, stories,

1. Be clear about the goals for using stories. Ed’s efforts to promote the use of stories at NASA started with three goals. The first was to create a culture of reflective leadership and practitioners. Project teams often struggle with finding the time necessary for learning and conversation. This is understandable, but it creates a dangerous environment in which team members feel they cannot take time to learn and share ideas, concerns, and solutions. The second goal was to encourage the use, creation, and exchange of stories. At NASA we initially tracked the number of stories shared and their themes. (Eventually social media made it possible to track sharing in a much more granular way.) The third goal was to promote knowledge sharing through conversation.
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2. Start every project by telling your story. Every project starts with a story. Projects are always about delivering value through products or services. The journey to arrive at that value is the story. Like projects, stories start with a problem. When you begin a project, ask the question, “What is the story we are hoping to tell on completion?” Note where the discussion goes. Is there agreement on the goals? Are there subplots? What…
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3. Make room for presentations as stories. Many organizations train people to provide formal slide presentations that are organized by logical thinking. Create places and spaces for presentations that are structured as stories as well. During knowledge-sharing forums at NASA, we would often ask presenters to tell a brief story about a success or failure without any slides in fifteen minutes or less. The practitioners quickly understood how to spell out the problem, context, approach to problem-solving, and outcome. The attendees would then extrapolate lessons from the…
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4. Offer storytelling workshops. Although telling stories can be natural and easy for many people, it is also a great skill to develop. Today there are many professionals with expertise in storytelling. At NASA, we arranged a session with Annette Simmons, author of The Story Factor: Inspiration, Influence, and Persuasion through the Art of Storytelling.29 This created an appreciation among project professionals, scientists, and engineers of the value of this practice. Consider a team-learning session by inviting a specialist in stories to help build this capability among…
- Location 1418
- storytelling, stories,

5. Stories can be oral, written, or visual. We have focused our discussion mostly on oral stories, but some storytellers are more comfortable expressing their ideas in writing. And at some NASA knowledge forums we hired visual storytellers to illustrate the stories that were shared. The enduring popularity of graphic novels over the…
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6. Run experiments and iterate. There are many ways to bring story into an organization. If a first attempt doesn’t work, try a different approach. The key is to realize that stories are an essential tool to stimulate conversation, encourage reflection and learning, promote diverse voices, and inspire purpose. Some of the best…
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Edward W. Merrow, Understanding the Outcomes of Megaprojects: A Quantitative Analysis of Very Large Civilian Projects (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 1988), 62, www.rand.org/pubs/reports/2006/R3560.pdf.
- Location 1462
- project management, project success, 1resource,

NASA Academy of Program/Project & Engineering Leadership, “ASK OCE Interview: Five Questions for Dr. Henry Petroski,” ASK OCE 1, no. 10 (February 26, 2010), https://appel.nasa.gov/2010/02/26/ao_1-10_f_interview-html/.
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NASA Academy of Program/Project & Engineering Leadership, “Collaborative Problem Solving: The STS-119 Flow Control Valve Issue,” NASA, April 2013, https://appel.nasa.gov/case-studies/sts-119-html/.
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Stephen Denning, The Springboard: How Storytelling Ignites Action in Knowledge-Era Organizations (Boston: Butterworth-Heinemann, 2001). 29. A revised version of Simmons’s book is now available: Annette Simmons, The Story Factor: Inspiration, Influence, and Persuasion Through the Art of Storytelling (New York: Hachette Book Group, 2019).
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We are going to define culture for our purposes as the mostly unwritten yet enduring rules of behavior that convey “how things get done around here.” Organizational culture acts as a powerful addendum to rule books and other formal sources of behavioral control. Anyone who works at an organization for even a short time begins to pick up on the signals, stories, and artifacts that compose the culture.
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The only model for managing a much larger workforce that performed complex tasks over a range of geographies was the military, which was based on a command-and-control structure that was organized and led by a rigid hierarchy. All the knowledge in such organizations went in one direction—top-down—and with the exception of intelligence, there was little opportunity for knowledge acquired by a worker to ever reach the head office where knowledge was developed, sorted, and distributed on a need-to-know basis through the command structure. Since the military was highly regarded and very familiar in the United States and most of western Europe, the model wasn’t too difficult to replicate in organizations sprouting up in these countries. It quickly spread elsewhere as well. This operating philosophy could be summarized in a quote apocryphally attributed to Henry Ford: “What do I want with a worker’s brain? I only want his arm.” The idea of optimizing this insight for peak production was codified by Frederick Taylor and labeled “scientific management.”
- Location 1537
- scientific management, organizational structure, hierarchy, command-and-control organizational structure, 1todo evernote,
- [note::"Command-and-control" management was developed during the industrial revolution and was originally inspired by the military.]

But the great limitation of this model was (and is) its reliance on the physical strength of humans and machines as the key source of wealth production. This type of production factor and its associated activities can be far more easily measured, managed, traded, and priced than the major factor of production today, which is knowledge.
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-
- [note::Command-and-control was designed for markets of physical goods and services. Yet, the commodity of many modern markets is knowledge.]

A great benefit of a culture that prizes knowledge is that it serves as a competitive advantage against cultures that are slower to change. One of the most sweeping changes of the past two decades has been the agile movement, which empowers people at the local level to get things done. Whatever tools, processes, and systems an organization has in place, culture ultimately determines the extent to which it streamlines decision-making and facilitates productivity. Economist Joel Mokyr has coined the term culture of growth to identify culture as the defining factor that leads to the beliefs, values, and associated behaviors necessary for organizational success, and, ultimately, the creation of societal wealth.4
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But collaboration implies acts of working together that are voluntary and often directed or prompted by the organizational culture. For example, when a colleague asks for assistance with a difficult problem and you offer to help even if you don’t have a way to bill for your time, that’s collaboration. It often manifests as a proactive attitude that can be seen in actions such as reading an article and sending it to a colleague in another department who might find it useful.
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-
- [note::Collaboration is made up of both serendipitous collaboration (e.g. sharing an article with a colleague who might benefit) and deliberate collaboration (e.g. working directly with someone)]

Organizational cultures do not develop in a vacuum. Organizations are part of the larger cultures in which they operate, and as such they reflect the values of those places. The United States has both an individualistic and a collegial culture that can be tapped into by an employer to incorporate its own cultural preferences, but it’s not always easy to reconcile these two contrasting attitudes. This may help account for the noted difficulties of many change management projects. All three of us have worked with global firms and organizations and have experienced the ways in which, for instance, Japanese culture affects the work culture of Japanese firms, just as American culture influences the norms of American organizations.
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-
- [note::Culture is heritable - organizational culture has a tendency to inherit the culture of the geographic area (e.g. city, state, country, global region) it's employees work from.]

Most organizational cultures fall somewhere on a continuum between promoting competition or collaboration. In environments that heavily incentivize individual competition, there is usually little willingness to help colleagues voluntarily, while at the other end of the spectrum there are cultures that are successful at encouraging collaboration for a variety of reasons. Mission-oriented workplaces, for instance, often have collaborative cultures.
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One way organizations tip the scales in this direction is by following what Stanford’s Robert Sutton has dubbed “the no asshole rule.”7 Sutton clearly documented the negative effects brought about by hiring and retaining people who do not play well with others. There is no stronger signal that radiates through a firm than perceptions of the personal qualities of the people who get promoted or hired. Choosing people who collaborate well with others is a not-too-subtle way of recognizing the behaviors the company seeks to cultivate in its employees.
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One of the most effective ways to foster a culture that values knowledge is by creating and elevating knowledge communities within an organization. As we mentioned in chapter 2, the NASA Engineering & Safety Center, created in response to the space shuttle Columbia accident, established an elite community of engineers that quickly became a source of expertise for stakeholders and customers seeking knowledge for a variety of challenges. This is an example of promoting a knowledge culture by creating a community of readily available talent. The status of this organization helped to incentivize NASA’s technical workforce to adopt positive attitudes toward knowledge, collaboration, and a culture of technical excellence.
- Location 1638
- organizational_knowledge, knowledge communities, communities of practice,

As we mentioned in chapter 1, another way that organizations foster a culture that values knowledge is by funding individual knowledge exploration. Many organizations have budgets for employees to attend conferences or engage in exchanges with peers, professors, and other experts. Bringing in guest speakers or sponsoring visiting fellows also demonstrates a commitment to knowledge while making it available to a wider audience within the organization.
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One of the most fun ways we have seen a firm put knowledge front and center was at GLG, an expert network that has built its entire business model around connecting its clients directly with people who have the knowledge they need. In its New York headquarters, the lobby area doubles as a book nook featuring several shelves of eclectic titles. The meeting rooms throughout the space are named after great thinkers and writers from Socrates to Keynes. There is more to culture than trappings, as we said earlier, but these visual cues serve as a constant reminder that ideas are what matter.
- Location 1654
- interior design, culture,

a lack of trust can influence knowledge sharing. If colleagues in a large organization don’t trust one another, the process of eliciting knowledge from them comes with higher transaction costs. Nothing is harder in a culture with a trust deficit than moving knowledge when there is no mandate to do so.
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Some of the most common questions that arise when trust is lacking include: Will I get credit if the person I am helping uses my response in a paper or talk? Will this person reciprocate if I need assistance? Will I be besieged with more queries? Is it worthwhile to help this person because of her place in the hierarchy? In these and many other ways, trust plays a strong role in enabling, hampering, or even blocking knowledge transfer.
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One of the most effective tools for building a culture of trust is simply saying, “I trust you to do the right thing.” Backing those words with action shows people that you’re serious. Larry once had about 40 people reporting to him in a research unit of a major consulting firm. As a manager, he was expected to read and approve all travel and expense forms. Since many of these consultants traveled extensively, this would have meant spending a half-day or more on paperwork each week. This struck him as a tremendous waste of time and energy that did not add any value to his unit. At a group meeting, he told the team that he trusted them to stay at a Marriott rather than a Four Seasons hotel, and that he wasn’t going to dive into their expense reports. He realized that the cost of not trusting the group would be far greater than an infrequent upgrade from coach to business class. This not only gave Larry time to do more worthwhile work, but it added to the group’s social capital.11 They knew they were trusted and proved to be trustworthy over the years.
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- 1socialpost-queue, leadership, management, trust,

One of the fastest ways to establish trust is with face-to-face meetings. There is a body of research that finds that when people have met face to face, maybe even just a few times, they are able to establish swift trust. This alone is a solid argument for occasionally bringing together employees of geographically dispersed organizations.
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This story illustrates an important but not obvious point: strength without flexibility turns culture into a straitjacket that constricts growth and access to a wide range of knowledge and ideas. In an era when organizations increasingly recognize the value of diverse, agile teams exercising authority at the local level, the idea of culture as a monolithic thing shared by an entire organization may be on its way out.
- Location 1703
- organizational agility, organizational culture,
- [note::Having a strong, homogenous culture is a double-edged sword.]

Columbia University sociologist Diane Vaughan coined the term normalization of deviance to describe the role that NASA’s culture had played in the accident: “In the years preceding the Challenger launch, engineers and managers together developed a definition of the situation that allowed them to carry on as if nothing was wrong when they continually faced evidence that something was wrong.”17
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- [note::"Normalization of deviance" = Psychological safety?]

1. Signals and messages. Some of the strongest messages that managers and leaders send out are through hiring and promotion. These actions tell employees a story about the beliefs and behaviors that the organization values. This is particularly important when trying to build a collaborative culture: it is impossible to do so while promoting noncollaborative people.
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2. Social infrastructure. The way an organization uses and allocates physical space speaks to its attitudes about who matters and how work gets done. Spaces can be designed to encourage conversations and serendipitous encounters by providing simple signals for social interactions, such as coffee and snacks.
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3. Valuing learning and ideas. By subsidizing subscriptions to publications, encouraging conference attendance, and developing knowledge networks, an organization demonstrates its commitment to acquiring new knowledge and ideas. Much like hiring and promotion, the ways that an organization recognizes and shares new ideas also lets employees know what really matters.
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4. Shared mission and purpose. Through stories, examples, and cases, organizations can define their mission and create a sense of common purpose necessary for mission success. This is an important step in becoming a smart organization: a common understanding of the mission eliminates a great deal of noise, conflict, and transaction costs.
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- [note::Hmm, this seems kind of reductive. I wonder what proponents of having "non-coherent goals" would say about this.]

5. Eliminate mechanist metaphors for the organization. The image of the organization as a machine of ever-increasing efficiency needs to be eliminated to foster a culture that prizes learning and knowledge. A more human and organic metaphor should replace it, such as the organization as a living entity that feeds on ideas and a passion for the mission, and that reaches outside itself for sustenance as well as relying on internal sources of energy.
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“Netflix Culture,” Netflix, https://jobs.netflix.com/culture,
- Location 1762
- organizational structure, 1resource, organizational culture,

Robert I. Sutton, The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t (New York: Business Plus, 2007).
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- 1resource,

Bob Sutton, “Please Help Me Update! Places and People that Use the No Asshole Rule,” Bob Sutton Work Matters blog, February 8, 2012, https://bobsutton.typepad.com/my_weblog/2012/02/the_no_asshole_.html.
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- 1resource,

Don Cohen and Laurence Prusak, In Good Company: How Social Capital Makes Organizations Work (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2001).
- Location 1770
- 1resource,

For more about how this worked in practice, see Justin Bariso, “Netflix’s Unlimited Vacation Policy Took Years to Get Right. It’s a Lesson in Emotional Intelligence,” Inc., September 14, 2020, https://www.inc.com/justin-bariso/netflixs-unlimited-vacation-policy-took-years-to-get-right-its-a-lesson-in-emotional-intelligence.html.
- Location 1777
- 1resource,

See, for instance, Nitin Nohria and Robert G. Eccles, “Face-to-Face: Making Network Organizations Work,” in Networks and Organizations: Structure, Form, and Action, ed. Nitin Nohria and Robert G. Eccles (Boston, MA: Harvard Business School, 1992), 288–308.
- Location 1782
- 1resource,

One of the common mistakes of organizational life is the tendency to believe in the importance of individual development and organizational governance while assuming that smart individuals will figure out how to work effectively with each other once they’re thrown together on a project.
- Location 1808
-

Greg Oldham and Richard Hackman’s five-factor model of individual job satisfaction emphasizes the importance of task significance.1
- Location 1817
-

The dynamic capabilities framework first identified by David Teece, Gary Pisano, and Amy Shuen in the mid-1990s raises the importance of firms sustaining long-term performance through team-learning routines that support managerial strategy.5 From this vantage point, teams serve as the bridge between strategy and project outcomes.
- Location 1849
-

Another aspect of team performance that is simpatico with the dynamic capabilities framework is the development of sense-and-respond behaviors. As described by Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden, this is a vital capability that requires organizations and leaders to take in and interpret data from the environment in ways that allow for quick responses and experimentation.7 A core aspect of agile work and related methodologies is scanning the environment and using incoming insights to enable rapid adaptations to changing conditions. This can’t take place on the same time horizon as a strategic planning process; it must happen at the team level. It requires strong situational awareness and the ability to spot opportunities and mobilize teams to capitalize on them.8
- Location 1858
- agile, strategic planning, agile management, organizational agility,

Failures in complex projects can be categorized based on their degree of impact. At the earliest and simplest level are mistakes. These occur frequently and have small impacts on the project. Next are mishaps, which represent more significant losses to the project in terms of cost, time, or performance. A mishap is not an ultimate failure, but it is an inflection point for understanding and overcoming or recovering. Finally, there are failures at the project, program, product, or mission level. As the term suggests, a mission failure is catastrophic, leading to a total loss for the organization as well as the team. It calls for a thorough reexamination of the double-loop learning questions mentioned in our chapter 2 discussion of team learning—Were we doing the right things?—as well as the need for a new strategy or a different path. Mission failures often follow earlier mistakes or mishaps that were not adequately addressed.
- Location 1869
-
- [note::Types of project failures based on magnitude]

Project performance happens at the team level. Team members are closest to the work methods, domain expertise, and needs of their customers. Under the right circumstances, they can ignore organizational leadership, which is often too cautious, detached, or slow to respond. The popularity of the agile movement has been a repudiation of bureaucratic management that has helped to reset the balance of power in favor of teams. The strength of organizations like NASA typically resides in giving project units enough autonomy to self-organize and adapt to changing conditions without significant interference from senior leadership.
- Location 1884
-

STEREO was one of the early NASA teams to go through what is called four-dimensional (4-D) leadership, a comprehensive process developed by Charlie Pellerin, a highly regarded astrophysicist who has spent the second half of his career understanding the dynamics of leadership and team performance. The 4-D method supports projects by employing a short survey to collect data about perceptions of the team.
- Location 1900
-
- [note::Similar to my project pulse survey?]

So how did STEREO go from problem child to model project? The first step was taking the time to collect data. Many troubled teams put their heads down and plod through, maintaining the behaviors that created trouble in the first place. Next, the STEREO team leaders and members set aside three days to reflect, understand, communicate, and find a new way to work together. Then they accepted the truth of the survey data. This was a brave step. Confronted with poor performance, many teams either fail to admit reality or become defensive. STEREO’s leadership subsequently participated in multiple team workshops, individual coaching sessions, and periodic team reassessments. They developed the ability to practice appreciation, commit to shared goals, and create and adopt positive storylines about the project. Rather than perpetuating narratives that blamed their partners, team members consciously made an effort to tell themselves different stories based on a new shared understanding of the project. They designed an operating agreement that established a “badge-less culture” between the two organizations that would diminish differences between GSFC and APL employees and focus on accountability and commitment to sustained trust. In short, they decided to become a team that valued respect, inclusion, learning, and the open exchange of knowledge.
- Location 1912
-
- [note::Methods for turning around a "dumpster fire" project]

The challenge it raises is how to create a team culture that both respects and transcends organizational and cultural differences. A powerful starting point is to encourage behaviors and conversations of appreciation and gratitude for the project. A simple question like “What are you most grateful for as we start working together on this project?” can help build a sense of team unity.
- Location 1926
-

there is often confusion and disagreement about the specifics of work goals. It is important to allocate time to discuss the mission, purpose, and goals of a project. A team of smart, highly diverse individuals will arrive at different conclusions that can corrode their ability to collaborate if time is not taken to arrive at an understanding of shared goals. Some project leaders use reviews and meetings to ask, “What are the three most important outcomes of the project?” This…
- Location 1930
-

High-performing teams also expertly use stories and create storylines that promote team commitment, communication, and confidence. As a quick tool for predicting and understanding team performance, listen to the stories that project team members share. Simply ask how a project is going. Projects in distress will often produce stories of frustration, anger, blame, problems, and even illness: “I need to get out of here before this job kills me.” Projects in challenging but healthy situations will tell very different stories. They will…
- Location 1934
-
- [note::The sentiment of project team members' stories about the project is correlated with team cohesion and performance.]

In our experience, great teams are heard more easily than they’re seen. They have a sound. They are often noisy. Team members talk, laugh, argue, move, disagree, fight, and celebrate. They create space for each member of the team to speak freely. There is no fear of being too honest. They don’t confuse emotional intelligence with politeness; they are not afraid to speak truth to each other even if it might mean hurt feelings as part of the growth process. The best teams also have an emotional connection to their work. There is a shared sense of appreciation and…
- Location 1943
-
- [note::"Great teams are noisy"]

We have watched teams that are hard-working and cautious. They participate and engage, but they overly script conversations with senior leaders and key stakeholders to avoid being called out for mistakes. The quiet and polite appearance of collaboration masks an underlying fear of being wrong. Team members strain their necks to see the reactions of senior leaders. As a result, the team learns little to nothing from these conversations…
- Location 1949
-
- [note::Such a great point - quite and polite collaboration often indicates a lack of psychological safety. Also, love the phrase "impression management" - it nicely captures the idea of "walking on eggshells."]

The sound of success is noisier, energized, combative, and honest. An effective project review is probing, zeroing in on problems and gaps rather than strengths. (A NASA project manager whose father was a baker referred to this as focusing on the hole rather than the donut.) This is uncomfortable, but the best teams set high standards for their performance. They…
- Location 1953
-

The need for focused attention speaks to the challenge of making sense of work in organizations. Karl Weick coined the concept of sensemaking to describe the importance people place on making sense of the actions, goals, and behaviors desired in an organization.12 People waste time on the wrong things and become frustrated when they are unclear about desired outcomes. That frustration breeds skepticism, which contributes to a loss of productivity. Strategies to enhance sensemaking increase understanding and transparency and promote faster and more effective action.
- Location 1972
-

The best teams are clear about their outcome. They know what to prioritize and how to spend their time. “A successful team picks out the 10 to 20 important things of the hundreds they could be doing,” says Ray Ryan of Square. “They know what’s crucial to fix and what’s nice to fix. They understand the difference between a flaw that’s embarrassing and one that’s fatal when working to make something shippable asap.”13
- Location 1977
-

A simple, powerful technique is to periodically ask the team to define and describe the outcome it is working to achieve. This is a natural reflection point that facilitates alignment, and it provides an opportunity for a team to stop and assess whether they are proceeding in the right direction or if there is a need to make changes. Researcher Connie Gersick has found that teams go through extended periods of stasis that are then interrupted by sudden change. Her punctuated equilibrium model indicates that teams start in one direction toward an intended outcome, and then the need for change becomes desirable and welcome at a certain point. The key is to remain clear about the destination.14
- Location 1987
-

While many organizations have traditionally tried to ignore or avoid emotions associated with problems, feelings, and interpersonal dynamics, successful teams have behavioral signatures that encourage and support empathy and open expression of emotion. This may partly explain the finding that the presence of more women on a team promotes higher performance. Women score higher than men on tests of social sensitivity, and this may help make diverse teams more effective at managing emotions.18
- Location 2008
-

Scott Page of the University of Michigan coined the term diversity bonus to describe the value that a member with new cognitive tools can bring to a team: “If the field or the challenge is complex, then diversity bonuses can exist because different people master different relevant tools.”21
- Location 2037
-

“People from different identity groups will bring different knowledge, experiences, and mental models to the table for consideration, allowing for increased cognitive diversity and therefore better outcomes (predictions, creativity, decision making, problem solving, and so on),” writes Katherine Phillips of Columbia University. “Just like one’s functional training in engineering, psychology, or cultural anthropology shapes one’s cognitive identity, so too does one’s gender, race, cultural background, (dis)ability, and so forth.”24
- Location 2054
-

Purpose provides fuel that can sustain a team through the inevitable setbacks and conflicts it will encounter. A simple act like reading a purpose statement at the beginning of each team meeting reminds the team why its work matters.
- Location 2081
-

The distinction between purpose and meaning may seem like a matter of semantics, but it is worth defining. The shared purpose of a team gives it something to keep striving to achieve. The shared meaning illuminates the significance of the team’s experience to its members. A team can often only identify the shared meaning of a project through after-the-fact reflection and dialogue, particularly on fast-paced projects like VITAL.
- Location 2086
- purpose, meaning, 1evernote, team synergy,

Purpose statements and project charters may sound like feel-good exercises, but they are commitments that bind teams together and frame the way they approach their work.
- Location 2089
-
- [note::Project charters are not just documentation, they are tools to ensure alignment among members of a project team.]

Again, when long-running projects create a culture that transcends an organization, the message to outsiders is often “Nothing to see here. We got this.” This is a reality for high-performing teams of smart people. They like to be left alone to work and produce exceptional outcomes. Anything that gets in the way of their purpose is seen as a distraction and waste of valuable time. They trust in their own abilities to solve problems, which can lead them to resist anything that makes them stop work and spend time learning and sharing.
- Location 2101
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A strong sense of purpose can be a double-edged sword. Some teams like to brag about their speed and agility. A team unbound by rules can make decisions faster and outperform teams constrained by too much oversight. But every situation is different. There are decisions that involve low to minimal risk. A failed decision in such instances can be painlessly repaired, but there are other situations where a faulty decision can cause severe damage and even loss of life. Decisions require an understanding of context, and mission purpose requires striking a balance between getting the job done and building in time for dialogue and learning. The best teams consider the variables and commit to a purpose that accounts for outcomes, people, and reflection.
- Location 2109
-

Focus on creating a sense of appreciation and inclusion for team members. Let them know they have an opportunity to do and be part of something special. At the start of a project, take time to acknowledge and introduce all of the team members. Ask them to discuss what they most appreciate about the opportunity to work on the assignment. A short gratitude activity like that can have a powerful impact by reminding team members about the benefits of the journey they are beginning. These conversations also allow team members to identify shared experiences and build rapport quickly.
- Location 2168
- project kickoff, team synergy, project management, favorite, fostering collaboration, gratitude,

One way to ensure this does not happen is to establish a team charter that explicitly identifies growth learning as part of the team’s purpose. Team members should be encouraged to plan for their own development and to think about how each project can improve their ability to work effectively in a team setting.
- Location 2175
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Teams get frustrated by two things. First, people don’t like to be considered “resources,” “assets,” or “capital.” (See “People first” above.) Second, teams get frustrated when they don’t know where to focus. A very common plea is for leadership to simply commit to clearly defined priorities. If everything is important, nothing is important.
- Location 2178
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Successful teams have conversations around acceptable risk, and create conditions for sharing insights from mistakes, mishaps, and failures. Resilience often comes from developing capabilities in response to past failures. Smart and safe failure means embracing risk-based thinking. A mindset that views risk as a resource will help to counter magical thinking and promote openness to learning from setbacks.
- Location 2185
-

A team’s sense of purpose needs to be refreshed over time. People become complacent. Remind them about the project’s purpose in meetings. Find opportunities for team members to present their work and accomplishments so they can explain to others how their work fits into the greater whole.
- Location 2193
-

Alex “Sandy” Pentland, “The New Science of Building Great Teams,” Harvard Business Review 90 (April 2012): 60.
- Location 2201
-

Denise A. Bonebright, “40 Years of Storming: A Historical Review of Tuckman’s Model of Small Group Development,” Human Resource Development International 13, no. 1 (2010): 111–120.
- Location 2203
-

David J. Teece, Gary Pisano, and Amy Shuen, “Dynamic Capabilities and Strategic Management,” Strategic Management Journal 18, no. 7 (August 1997): 509–533.
- Location 2208
-

Jean-François Harvey, Henrik Bresman, Amy C. Edmondson, and Gary P. Pisano, “Team Learning and Superior Firm Performance: A Meso-Level Perspective on Dynamic Capabilities,” Working Paper No. 19-059, Harvard Business School, Boston, December 2018, revised January 2020.
- Location 2211
-

Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden, Sense and Respond: How Successful Organizations Listen to Customers and Create New Products Continuously (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2017).
- Location 2213
-

Teece, Pisano, and Shuen, “Dynamic Capabilities and Strategic Management.”
- Location 2216
-

NASA Safety Center & Office of the Chief Knowledge Officer, Goddard Space Flight Center, “STEREO: Organizational Cultures in Conflict,” Selected NASA Case Studies (February 2009): 14–23, https://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/pdf/452484main_Case_Study_Magazine.pdf.
- Location 2217
-

Charles J. Pellerin, How NASA Builds Teams: Mission Critical Soft Skills for Scientists, Engineers, and Project Teams (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2009), 54. This book offers an in-depth explanation of how leaders have used 4-D to conduct team interventions for NASA.
- Location 2221
- 1resource, 1action, collaboration,

Terry Little, “The Goal,” in Project Management Success Stories: Lessons of Project Leaders, ed. Alexander Laufer and Edward J. Hoffman (New York: Wiley, 2000), 120–121.
- Location 2223
-

Karl E. Weick, Sensemaking in Organizations (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, 1995).
- Location 2226
-

Connie Gersick, “Time and Transition in Work Teams: Toward a New Model of Group Development,” Academy of Management Journal 31 (October 1988): 9–41.
- Location 2229
-

Charles Duhigg, “What Google Learned from Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team,” New York Times Magazine, February 25, 2016, MM20.
- Location 2234
- teamwork, collaboration, 1resource/article, group performance,

Anita Woolley, Thomas W. Malone, and Christopher F. Chabris, “Why Some Teams Are Smarter than Others,” New York Times, January 16, 2015, SR5, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/18/opinion/sunday/why-some-teams-are-smarter-than-others.html?.
- Location 2236
-

Anita Woolley and Thomas W. Malone, “Defend Your Research: What Makes a Team Smarter? More Women,” Harvard Business Review 89, no. 6 (June 2011): 32–33, http://hbr.org/2011/06/defend-your-research-what-makes-a-team-smarter-more-women/ar/1.
- Location 2239
-

Scott E. Page, The Diversity Bonus: How Great Teams Pay Off in the Knowledge Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), 27.
- Location 2246
- diversity, knowledge economics, group performance,

Katherine W. Phillips, “What Is the Real Value of Diversity in Organizations? Questions Our Assumptions,” in The Diversity Bonus, by Scott E. Page (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), 229.
- Location 2250
-

Kathryn B. McEwen and Carolyn M. Boyd, “A Measure of Team Resilience: Developing the Resilience at Work Team Scale,” Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine 60, no. 3 (2018): 258–272, https://doi.org/10.1097/JOM.0000000000001223.
- Location 2264
-

Sherin Shibu and Shana Lebowitz, “Microsoft Is Rolling Out a New Management Framework to Its Leaders. It Centers around a Psychological Insight Called Growth Mindset,” Business Insider, November 11, 2019, https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-is-using-growth-mindset-to-power-management-strategy-2019-11. See also Robert Martin, “Resilience Message: Change Your Mindset, Change Your World,” US Army War College Archives, August 23, 2016, https://www.armywarcollege.edu/news/Archives/12534.pdf.
- Location 2269
-

Where might that basis for collaboration come from? A long process of working together on official negotiations can gradually build the necessary confidence. Shared professional competence is also an important source of trust and respect. Engineers and others in related technical fields earn one another’s respect by displaying knowledge of their craft; they are, in effect, members of an informal community of practice, even when they live and work in different countries and have not previously been acquainted. They stand together on the common ground of a particular technical discipline. Another source of cooperative effort is demonstrated commitment to a clearly defined shared goal, proof that your partners are working toward the same important end that you are. Some confidence that your future partners want what you want is essential from the beginning. This sense of mutuality must be demonstrated and strengthened again and again during the course of the project.
- Location 2327
-
- [note::Collaboration = Trust + Shared Goal
Trust = Working Proximity + Respect + Shared Competence]

As the early history of preliminary ISS work suggests, a critical lesson for other large, culturally and geographically dispersed projects is that the necessary planning and negotiation take a lot of time and thoughtful diplomatic effort. Rushing to get to the “real work” is a potentially fatal error. Those early stages provide an essential foundation that will support the final structure.
- Location 2381
-

This is another key lesson for global projects: success depends on hiring people who have the cultural and relationship skills needed to foster agreement and cooperation, not just people with the necessary technical expertise.
- Location 2413
-

Workable flexibility in operations and management depends on clearly distinguishing between bedrock principles that must be followed to avoid chaos and the areas where rigid adherence to detailed rules is unnecessarily restrictive and counterproductive.
- Location 2433
-
- [note::I think The Leader Lab talks about this - achieving alignment by explicitly communicating priority in terms of must/should/could do and the level of quality desired]

Unless the teams are working toward a common result clearly understood and valued by all, no amount of mutual trust and respect will create the necessary coordination.
- Location 2451
-

Tim Howell, a former ISS engineer, worked on Design Knowledge Capture (DKC), an initiative started in late 1997 to create a repository of real-world knowledge about elements of station design. The initiative was a response to the certainty that some or much of that mainly tacit knowledge would be lost over the possible thirty-year life of the station if nothing were done to preserve it.
- Location 2461
-

“Capture, Index, Share” was the initiative’s slogan. Contacts at organizations involved in ISS design directed the DKC team to subject matter experts, especially the ones about to retire or join other programs. Discussions that focused on the essentials of how things actually work were video-recorded and the content indexed by topic on the DKC website so engineers could easily find what they needed.
- Location 2470
-

The DKC team spent eight hours with a designer of an EVA airlock system, interviewing him and videotaping his tour of the airlock being assembled at his facility. A few months later, the engineer left the company. In many organizations, his departure would have meant a damaging loss of knowledge about the how and why of the system. The DKC initiative work avoided that common problem.
- Location 2477
- knowledge codification,

Managing the Unforeseen
- Location 2517
-

Because it is impossible to plan for every possible contingency, having the freedom to respond to novel situations in novel ways is essential. As suggested, that flexibility has two sources: avoiding rigidity in procedures and regulations that would inhibit new approaches, and building strong working relationships that encourage mutual aid and entrust partners to act responsibly.
- Location 2519
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Invest time and effort in establishing mutual trust and understanding among participants. Organizations driven to get things done as quickly as possible are in danger of shortchanging this critical step. Without essential planning, negotiation, and relationship building, efforts to hit the ground running will lead to painful stumbles.
- Location 2551
-

Hire people with relationship skills. The process of relationship-building recognizes that a lot of good work gets done through informal networks of relationships known as social capital. The ISS story is full of examples of problems solved and agreements reached thanks to personal connections developed between participants during the process of working together toward a shared goal.
- Location 2554
-

Face-to-face communication matters. Much of the coordination of dispersed work happens remotely, using the increasingly sophisticated and reliable collaboration tools now available. But critical aspects of complex projects demand rich dialogue, subtle understanding, and trust that are only possible when people are physically together at work and in social settings. Difficult negotiations, key decision-making, responses to crises, and analysis of ambiguous information all call for in-person collaboration.
- Location 2559
-

Involve everyone early. Part of achieving agreement and commitment is bringing all players to the table from the beginning and giving them a voice in planning and development. That early participation creates a sense of ownership and commitment that would be much harder to come by if plans were presented to teams as a fait accompli, a set of orders to be carried out.
- Location 2566
-

Build in flexibility. The history of the station also makes clear the importance of flexibility in negotiation, planning, and operation. Any project that has a long life is going to run into challenges and opportunities that cannot be addressed by a rigid set of rules. People need sufficient autonomy to deal with the unexpected. Flexibility also leaves room for the various teams to make unique contributions to the project.
- Location 2569
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Focus on the purpose. Spend time ensuring that all participants understand the aim of the work and share a commitment to achieving the goal. Keeping the shared goal visible throughout the project helps overcome conflicts and problems that are likely to arise.
- Location 2575
-

ASK Magazine staff, “The Challenge of Collaboration,” ASK Magazine 47, August 1, 2012, https://appel.nasa.gov/2012/08/01/the-challenge-of-collaboration/.
- Location 2583
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One result of radical uncertainty is epistemic uncertainty. All knowledge is temporal. A physicist working at the turn of the twentieth century could scarcely have imagined that the laws of classical mechanics would not hold at the quantum level. What works for today may not work for tomorrow, and this is particularly true as the velocity of change increases.
- Location 2659
-

Stopping the clock is not always possible, but our experience is that too often the perceived need for speed shapes the decision-making reality.
- Location 2670
-
- [note::This indicates the importance of continually communication the actual priority of tasks in days/weeks and the impact if those deadlines are not met. Otherwise, your direct reports will assume urgency when there is little/none.]

As we write this, Google has established a low-cost certification for information technology professionals that provides highly transferable skills in some of the most common computer languages in use today.9 At first blush, this sounds like a wonderful gift that can help to level the playing field in a deeply unequal society. But it quickly raises questions about the educational priorities of a tech firm with a market capitalization of $1 trillion. What aspects of ethics and social responsibility will be taught? Where will judgment and contextual thinking fit into the curriculum? How will a workforce trained by and for a private sector firm that owns some of the most powerful algorithms in the world learn to make decisions that have consequences for billions of people?
- Location 2707
-
- [note::Great points - what kinds of important educational objectives are being left out of curriculums developed by tech firms?]

Access to critical real-time data is essential, but it is a category error to mistake curated data for reality. Leading organizations through radical uncertainty is not the same as piloting an aircraft through foul weather. It’s not possible to rely on instruments to hit the middle of the runway 99.9 percent of the time.
- Location 2719
- leadership, metrics, reality, project management, program management,
- [note::Don't confuse metrics with reality]

AI and machine learning will continue to tackle tasks that were once thought to be the exclusive province of technical experts (just ask any radiologist), but the social problems inherent in teamwork, collaboration, and organizational culture will always come down to people.
- Location 2736
-

If we have emphasized one theme throughout this book, it is that focusing on the human dimension of project work offers the greatest potential for return on investment to an organization, its stakeholders, and society. As we said in the introduction, projects run on knowledge that can be technical, organizational, or political. Teams function within organizations that empower or constrain them through a combination of bureaucratic means such as governance and intangibles such as culture and a shared sense of mission and purpose. They explore, fail, improvise, and maneuver in response to challenges they didn’t or couldn’t anticipate, and as a result they learn the only way they can: together. The starting point for knowledge is not information. It is people.
- Location 2739
- favorite, project management, management, group governance, teamwork, collaboration, group performance,

A project of any complexity is an effort to harness multidisciplinary expertise to solve challenges for the benefit of people.
- Location 47
-

Projects run on knowledge—a combination of learning and experience that enables people to perform tasks. A project can have all the resources in the world, but without the necessary knowledge it is doomed. There are plenty of other reasons that projects fail, but lack of know-how almost guarantees a bad outcome.
- Location 50
-

Three leitmotifs recur throughout this book. The first is that projects are fundamentally about how teams work and learn together to get things done. Project teams are not like professional sports teams that play games with clearly defined rules. Project teams may rely on repeatable processes to design, build, test, and deliver products or services, but innovation, whether incremental or radical, depends on team learning. As Arie de Geus of Royal Dutch Shell Group writes, “The ability to learn faster than your competitors may be the only sustainable competitive advantage.”1
- Location 57
-

Second, the local level is where the action happens. Innovations and breakthroughs that lead to project success rarely come from the top of large, centralized organizations. If anything, a burdensome bureaucracy will spur a project team to expend considerable time and energy finding ways to work around it. This is nothing new—the agile movement that began two decades ago has brought widespread recognition to the benefits of decentralized decision-making—but the implications for knowledge often go unnoticed.
- Location 62
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The governance of knowledge and projects in large organizations is typically most effective when it empowers people working at the local level to…
- Location 65
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Finally, projects don’t operate in a vacuum. They exist within organizations that are responsible to stakeholders, whether they are corporations accountable to shareholders or government agencies accountable to political leaders and the public. A project’s…
- Location 67
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The traditional project management “iron triangle” of cost, schedule, and scope does little to articulate the differences between a project that delivers a sidewalk versus another that delivers a supercollider, let alone accounting for elements like knowledge,…
- Location 71
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There is a symbiotic relationship between an organization that pursues its mission through projects and the teams and individual members that execute them. The organization supports its teams and individuals by providing resources and infrastructure for knowledge and learning as well as a culture that shapes the work environment. This enables teams and individuals to learn and acquire the knowledge…
- Location 74
-
- [note::Organization -> Knowledge/project infastructure + culture
Team/Individual -> Knowledge acquisition + project execution]

We approach project complexity through the lens of knowledge and learning needs, identifying three project models—micro, macro, and global—that each…
- Location 78
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A micro project seeks to solve a problem that is finite and primarily technical in nature. The challenge can be simple or difficult, but the solution comes as a result of having the… ... A micro project can be a straightforward software project such as delivering a feature for a website, or it can require a great deal of innovation (think of an ambitious R&D initiative), but in either case the project team has the…
- Location 80
-

A macro project focuses on a problem that can only be solved by involving a significant part of an organization, ranging from a division or large business unit to the entire enterprise. The need for technical knowledge cannot be divorced from the organizational knowledge required to gain support for changes in resources, authority, or norms and behaviors. Mastery of organizational politics is necessary to secure buy-in from key decision makers and neutralize pockets of resistance.
- Location 96
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A global project addresses a vast societal challenge. This can be a public health problem like eradicating smallpox, or a knowledge quest such as unraveling scientific mysteries of the universe through a shared laboratory or observatory.
- Location 109
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These projects are inherently political, and they call for practical wisdom about the way the world works (the Greeks called this worldliness phronesis—wisdom and prudence acting in the world) in combination with metis and episteme. They are akin to a three-dimensional chess game: critical knowledge can be identified at global, organizational, and local levels. Global knowledge—an understanding of a project’s political dimension—is necessary to manage relationships among governments, corporations, universities, and other key stakeholders. Organizational knowledge is unique since the organization itself has to be created to execute the project. And local knowledge within the project is still just as essential as it is for a project with a narrower scope.
- Location 112
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As these models suggest, technical knowledge is critical but insufficient unless the problem is essentially technical and the project team is empowered with the authority to solve it without interference. In our experience, complex projects rarely, if ever, have a purely technical focus. Yet few organizations acknowledge their need for organizational or political knowledge.
- Location 126
- technical knowledge, organizational_knowledge, 1todo evernote, political knowledge, knowledge,

We offer three archetypes for organizations that accomplish their work through projects while acknowledging that most large organizations are hybrids that combine elements of more than one of these models.
- Location 133
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A complex project-based organization is in the one-and-only business. These are organizations like NASA or CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, that solve fundamentally novel problems. Cost and schedule are measured in terms of the project life cycle rather than a unit of production (e.g., the time and dollars required to manufacture a single automobile in a mass-production operation). The customer, which in the case of NASA or CERN is often a team of scientists seeking to run highly sophisticated experiments and collect data, is typically involved throughout the life cycle because of the complexity of the problem. Success is impossible without significant technology development and innovation.
- Location 135
-

A mass-production organization is a manufacturer working at scale, whether it makes cars or candy bars. Problems in production are measured, scored for criticality, and tracked until resolved. These organizations use lean or agile methodologies to improve quality and efficiency and have a separate research and development (R&D) function focused on breakthrough innovations. Customer feedback informs the design and production process, but the point of sale is where most customers enter the picture.
- Location 140
-

An entrepreneurial organization in this framework is something like a pure software-as-a-service (SaaS) organization, for example. The minimum viable product provides the initial basis for continuous testing and improvement, which is informed by ongoing customer feedback. Since there are no per-unit physical capital costs as there are with cars or candy bars, the unit cost goes down with every subsequent sale.
- Location 144
-

Since knowledge is inherently social, the structure of an organization plays a huge role in its approach to knowledge development, retention, and transfer.
- Location 148
-

Three Models for Project-Based Organizations
- Location 151
-

Knowledge is a social phenomenon. Team dynamics and organizational considerations including governance, incentives, and culture can either promote or inhibit the learning and collaboration necessary for project success. There isn’t a neat algorithm for optimal performance in project-based organizations; the intangibles make all the difference.
- Location 173
-

A smart mission recognizes that few things go as planned, and that both learning and unlearning are essential. It understands that knowledge creation happens at the team level, and therefore works to design and sustain a strong, inclusive team that collaborates effectively. It is conscious of the culture it develops and maintains. Above all, it values people, and offers them the opportunity to be part of something that has meaning and purpose.
- Location 185
-

Larry is one of the world’s leading authorities on the subject of knowledge in organizations, having written nine books and more than 50 articles and consulted with more than 300 organizations around the globe on the topic. Matthew has run a consultancy focused on learning and development for over a decade and has written widely about leadership, communication, and influence.
- Location 192
-

Ed and Larry teach in Columbia University’s Information and Knowledge Strategy program, and all three authors currently serve as senior advisers to the Project Management Institute.
- Location 196
- information strategy, knowledge, knowledge strategy, project management, information, 1action, 1resource/graduate-program,

Learning is the other side of the coin from knowledge: it is an activity whereby knowledge is specifically taught and transferred to others. Most organizations emphasize learning at an individual level, which is insufficient in a context that demands team learning and organizational infrastructure and support.
- Location 215
- learning infrastructure, knowledge, learning,

Efforts to improve knowledge sharing and learning cannot be successful unless the organization values and recognizes the importance of these activities. This understanding comes from the culture of the organization.
- Location 223
-
- [note::Sad but true :(]

1. Arie de Geus, “Planning as Learning,” Harvard Business Review 66, no. 2 (March–April 1988): 70–74, https://hbr.org/1988/03/planning-as-learning.
- Location 240
-

2. Rick Waghorn, “Distance Learning,” Project (February 2009), 12–14, https://www.nasa.gov/pdf/321075main_Project_Magazine_excerpt.pdf.
- Location 242
- learning, asychronous_communication,

Knowledge is the source of wealth. Applied to tasks we already know, it becomes productivity. Applied to tasks that are new, it becomes innovation. —Peter F. Drucker, Peter F. Drucker on Practical Leadership
- Location 248
- productivity, knowledge, innovation,
- [note::Relationship between knowledge and innovation]

Ed shared his concerns openly and explained that his focus would be on the people side of the equation, saying, “There are many in the knowledge management community who see knowledge management from a technology, process, and tools perspective. That is important, but it will not be my starting point.”
- Location 275
-

Knowledge is not information, although information can be seen as a piece of knowledge when it is added to an individual’s store of know-what. Knowledge isn’t data or wisdom either. A few years ago, Larry was asked by a reporter for a quick definition that would help people understand the differences between these terms. He came up with this: Let’s say you plan to make a fine dinner for someone you care for. The letters in a printed recipe are data, the recipe is information, knowledge is the ability to cook, and wisdom is marrying a good cook.
- Location 296
-

Working knowledge is a mix of explicit and tacit knowledge, or know-what and know-how, with a stronger dose of the latter.
- Location 303
-

Knowledge is a slippery word because it describes something that is basically intangible, though the outcomes of it are often plain to see, and those outcomes enable us to determine its value and best uses. Whether we are discussing a car, medicine, legal advice, or the space shuttle, we can value its performance and outcome without trying to meticulously identify the knowledge that went into creating it. But it is useful and important to understand the sources of an organization’s knowledge to get a better grip on what it does and doesn’t know, and how to use that knowledge in a more effective way.
- Location 310
-

Knowledge is profoundly social. Individual knowledge is important, but it pales in comparison to the knowledge of a group. This can be true of a team, network, community of practice, or any other aggregate unit where there is a generalized common goal, vocabulary, understanding, and purpose.
- Location 315
- knowledge, 1todo evernote,

Ideas about the nature of knowledge are deeply influenced by the culture of the person using it. “We find knowledge inseparable from the knower,” says Naoki Ogiwara, managing director of a Tokyo-based global consulting firm that specializes in knowledge.2 He notes that in East Asian cultures, knowledge is viewed “not as a thing to be measured, but an attribute or force within us.” In Western cultures and those regions most influenced by the West, knowledge is often thought of as something that can be expressed in a rule or an algorithm, or embedded in a form external to the knower. These two very different understandings of how knowledge is manifested have created some difficulties in communications about how to successfully manage knowledge.
- Location 319
-

Working knowledge can be embodied in people and embedded in processes and routines. When a new idea enters an organization it is evaluated, and if deemed valuable, it takes root as a part of the way work is organized and performed until a better idea supersedes it. It becomes part of the set of routines and processes that allows an organization to operate.
- Location 344
-

When organizations decide to actively engage with knowledge, they generally focus on three activities: knowledge development, knowledge retention, and knowledge transfer and diffusion. All of these activities are critical to any organization, but their value and the time spent on any of them largely depend on the organization’s products or services. Most organizations in our experience choose one or maybe two of these activities to focus on.
- Location 350
-

Knowledge development focuses on how knowledge comes into an organization, is evaluated, and becomes part of an organization’s stock of working knowledge. This can be done by forming an alliance with a firm that has needed knowledge, buying that firm outright, hiring consultants or other advisors, or creating a team or task force to identify new sources of knowledge.
- Location 354
- knowledge, knowledge development,

Knowledge retention is usually associated with training and internal learning processes in order to embody knowledge in chosen employees. The effectiveness of these processes is mixed. As we explain in chapter 2, a great deal of knowledge retention happens directly and informally among employees as circumstances allow. But a growing trend in knowledge retention is the development of academies and corporate universities.
- Location 369
-

Knowledge transfer or diffusion describes how knowledge gets intentionally shared among people or groups. This can happen at any level and degree of cardinality within an organization, whether it’s one-to-one, one-to-many, or team-to-team. Many managers, organization theorists, and economists assume that if part of an organization (e.g., a division or team) has some knowledge, it is known by the whole organization. Needless to say, this isn’t true. For varied reasons, knowledge is sticky—it tends to remain where it has been developed.6
- Location 379
- knowledge, knowledge_transfer, knowledge diffusion, knowledge stickiness,

Many knowledge-sharing efforts overlook the impediments to transferring knowledge, such as the reliability of the knowledge being transferred, logistical factors, the sheer difficulties of communicating and appropriating what is often complex and tacit, and the transaction costs that transferring knowledge can entail. We have learned that a great deal of knowledge transfer happens informally through casual or spontaneous conversations that spark new connections. A critical lesson shared in an email (or worse, a lessons-learned database) is less likely to find its audience than if it is shared in a discussion that allows listeners to prod, question, and evaluate the knowledge before deciding to act on it.
- Location 384
-
- [note::Very curious to hear more about the last sentence. Why is a lessons learned database ill-advised?]

This should not be misinterpreted as a dismissal of the importance of documentation. Ray Ryan, a senior software engineer at Square, emphasizes the importance of capturing ideas in writing to facilitate knowledge transfer through dialogue. “The main thing is to write things down, teach others to write things down, and be willing to read what others have written down,” he says. “The conversations we have are about the documents.”7 The critical distinction is that knowledge captured in writing is most likely to prove its value when it spurs conversation.
- Location 389
-

One way to encourage knowledge transfer is to build social infrastructures that allow employees to share what they know. Organizations that provide spaces to learn demonstrate a different level of understanding about the inherently social nature of knowledge. This concept is well known in Japan, and there is a Japanese word, ba, that is used to describe a space where common meaning is created.
- Location 394
-

Beyond physical spaces, events can offer a different kind of space for knowledge transfer. NASA has used this approach extensively, combining internal and external speakers to stir the pot of knowledge circulation while leaving ample time for talking, informal meetings, and conversation. Convening a workshop to reflect on and capture lessons learned from a project is a common example.
- Location 409
-

Another way to transfer and diffuse knowledge is to relocate employees who have specific knowledge to places where this knowledge is needed. While this sounds simple, it has proven to be problematic since global firms often meet resistance when shuffling workers across the globe. Another impediment to this is that knowledge is not only sticky, as noted previously, but it is often context dependent: an idea may work well in one occupational or geographical context but not in another.
- Location 415
- knowledge_transfer, knowledge diffusion, context dependence,

Though it would seem self-evident that “capturing” or even roughly identifying all the knowledge in any organization of size would be absurd, if not impossible, it has been attempted by several organizations. Much of this absurdity stems from three fallacies. The most common is the myth that enterprise-wide software promoted by vendors and consultants can either catalog the knowledge of the organization or serve as a portal for individual employees to share their knowledge. The latter, while having some value, is based on the false premise that individual knowledge is the most important unit of analysis in an organization. The second fallacy is the belief (again promoted by technology vendors and consultants) that organizational knowledge is an objective, tangible “thing” that can be identified, manipulated, and harnessed in encyclopedic form. ... Trying to document individual knowledge in a large industrial enterprise is futile. ... The third misguided notion is that knowledge can be captured. This idea, which still has some currency, conflates knowledge with information. In the 1990s, there was a popular belief that if an organization could deliver the right information to the right person at the right time, the firm would prosper forever. This is a category error based on a misunderstanding of the nature of knowledge. Library-like information management systems can be incredibly useful, but they don’t have much to do with knowledge.
- Location 424
-

Not all knowledge is critical for effective performance capability. Much depends on an organization’s products or services, the complexity involved with product or service delivery, and the competitiveness of the market. NASA used the term “mission-critical knowledge” to describe this distinction. The process of identifying what’s truly critical doesn’t need to be difficult. The best way we know to explore this is through a series of questions, such as “What do we know that enables us to do well?” and “What do we need to know that we don’t know right now?” See the “Putting Knowledge to Work” section at the end of this chapter for a list of questions that can serve as a starting point.
- Location 456
-

The level of granularity is also important to consider. What is the unit of analysis when evaluating critical knowledge? It is almost never an individual, since knowledge is a social activity. ... The unit of analysis is often driven by organizational incentives. In organizations that reward employees for publishing reports, for instance, the report becomes the unit of analysis rather than the team that produces the report.
- Location 462
-
- [note::Having trouble understanding this]

Since knowledge is social, the transaction cost is primarily a function of the total time it takes to identify, locate, evaluate, and adapt knowledge. The time it takes to search for a source of knowledge represents a relatively small part of the total cost. Larry and his colleague Al Jacobson found that 80 percent of the time spent acquiring new knowledge is consumed by the process of eliciting it from people and then adapting it for a specific context.17 The real drivers of the cost are social.
- Location 492
- context, knowledge, knowledge economics, knowledge transfer, cost drivers, knowlege acquisition,
- [note::Does this imply that the highest leverage way of reducing knowledge-related costs are not in actually identifying where one can get the knowledge but actually eliciting it from the source and applying it to their context? I'm not quite clear if that's what this is saying.]

As he planned to convene the first in-person meeting of the NASA knowledge communities—employees who already had some responsibility for knowledge in specific parts of the organization—Ed aimed to secure agreement on a set of guiding principles that were broad enough to feel inclusive and specific enough to result in positive change. By the end of that meeting, the community had reached consensus on five points that would ultimately serve as the kernel for an agency-wide governance model for knowledge: We recognize that knowledge is embedded in the flow of all the work we do in order to get real results. We foster community-wide knowledge acquisition, access, sharing, and reuse. We respect local customs while enhancing organizational norms. We strive to operationalize and brand knowledge so that it resonates with all stakeholders—what it is, what it isn’t, and how to use it effectively. We collaborate across organizational boundaries, remove stovepipes, and continuously measure our effectiveness (people, process, systems).
- Location 506
-

It is useful to stress here that the governance structure for managing organizational knowledge needs to fit the culture and the strategy of the organization as well as the national or regional culture in which it is located. Some organizations such as intelligence agencies have a strong need for monarchy, and organizations that have a number of disparate major products or decentralized sites may be best suited for feudalism.
- Location 523
-

Knowledge is a profoundly social and human activity. It may be represented in a process, rule, or system, but it is basically a human activity. It includes judgment, discernment, and a rich understanding that isn’t yet accessible to machines, except as instructed by humans.
- Location 536
- 1social/post-queue, knowledge,

Knowledge is its own thing. It is not anything else. Knowledge isn’t information or data or wisdom. It’s a way of understanding a bounded subject that allows practitioners to act on that understanding.
- Location 538
- action, information, wisdom, data, knowledge, understanding, 1todo evernote,

Knowledge is temporal. It changes as new knowledge is developed and displaces old knowledge. This has always been true since the dawn of human achievements. Even with the most established knowledge, such as Newton’s laws, questions have been raised about their “truth” value, and several of them have been modified in the last century.
- Location 541
-

Knowledge can be observed and understood but not captured. It is always largely tacit, and this type of tacit know-how can’t be readily documented or captured by observation.
- Location 544
-

Knowledge is expensive. It takes time, energy, and focus to become knowledgeable in a subject. There are no shortcuts to knowledge. One may have flash intuitions, but even those are dependent on prior knowledge for their efficacy.
- Location 546
-

People, ideas, and things are all that we have. (This is a simple way of summarizing a powerful concept identified by economist Paul Romer.) A century ago, the world ran primarily on things—tangible objects ranging from pairs of shoes to barrels of oil. Things are still important, but our global economy is increasingly based on ideas that can be captured in algorithms, apps, drug developments, and financial tools, to name just a few examples.
- Location 549
-

There is no individual knowledge—only individual memories. No one has useful knowledge that isn’t known by others. Knowledge is a social…
- Location 552
-

Knowledge can be best understood and characterized as “know-what and know-how.” Most people know that Paris is the capital of France—that is know-what. But an understanding of French culture or even the…
- Location 554
-

Experience doesn’t automatically turn into knowledge. It needs to be framed and…
- Location 557
- experience, knowledge,

Knowledge is an interdisciplinary subject. It can be approached and analyzed from almost all the social sciences and many of the humanities. The challenge is that the vocabularies and research agendas of the various disciplines within the social sciences and humanities make it…
- Location 558
-

Pick a unit of analysis that corresponds to places or structures that can be identified as knowledge hubs or hot spots that have an impact on business outcomes or strategy. There is usually some focused aggregate, such as a team, network, community, branch, division, or department. It is helpful to limit the unit to no more than…
- Location 565
- unit of analysis, knowledge hubs, knowledge management,

Identify critical knowledge, keeping in mind that knowledge is social and intangible rather than a “thing” that can be captured. These questions can serve as a starting point for discussion: Strengths: What gives us a competitive advantage? What do we know that enables us to do well? What do we know that sets us apart from others? Gaps: What opportunities and vulnerabilities can we see? What do we need to know that we don’t know right now? What do we need to learn to do differently? What do we know now that we could lose in the future? Development: How do we develop new knowledge? Innovation: Where do new ideas come from? How well does the organization innovate? How well does the team innovate? Learning How well does the organization support learning? How well does the team support learning? Problem-solving How well does the organization solve unexpected problems? How well does the project team solve unexpected problems? Retention: How do we embed what we know in order to keep it? Transfer: How do we share what we know across…
- Location 568
-

Identify a governance model for knowledge that reflects the structure of your organization. Federated models are increasingly the norm in large, decentralized organizations. Centralized models (e.g., “monarchies”) can work in settings where it’s impossible to reach the consensus needed in a federated model as long as the culture and incentives foster open…
- Location 595
-

Remember that ideas don’t speak for themselves. Organizations are not meritocracies when it comes to adopting ideas. The decision makers in a hierarchy make the decisions, and their motives are almost always more complex than the pure potential value of the idea. Even before an idea reaches the C-suite, it…
- Location 599
-

Robert Gibbons and Laurence Prusak, “Knowledge, Stories, and Culture in Organizations,” AEA Papers and Proceedings 110 (2020):187–192, https://doi.org/10.1257/pandp.20201091.
- Location 610
- 1resource/paper, organizational culture, organizational stories,

NASA Academy of Program/Project & Engineering Leadership, “Collaborative Problem-Solving: The STS-119 Flow Control Valve Issue,” NASA, April 2013, https://appel.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/468375main_STS-119_flow_control_valve.pdf.
- Location 614
-

Gabriel Szulanski, Sticky Knowledge: Barriers to Knowing in the Firm (London: SAGE Publications, 2003), 2.
- Location 618
-

Ikujiro Nonaka and Noboru Konno, “The Concept of ‘Ba’: Building a Foundation for Knowledge Creation,” California Management Review 40, no. 3 (Spring 1988): 40–54, https://home.business.utah.edu/actme/7410/Nonaka+1998.pdf.
- Location 621
-

Thomas H. Davenport and Laurence Prusak, Working Knowledge: How Organizations Manage What They Know (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1998), 7. See also Richard F. Meyer, Michael G. Rukstad, Peter J. Coughlan, and Stephan A. Jansen, “DaimlerChrysler Post-Merger Integration,” Case, Harvard Business Publishing, last revised December 1, 2005, https://hbsp.harvard.edu/product/703417-PDF-ENG.
- Location 639
-

Al Jacobson and Laurence Prusak, “The Cost of Knowledge,” Harvard Business Review 84, no. 11 (November 2006), https://hbr.org/2006/11/the-cost-of-knowledge
- Location 649
-

Thomas H. Davenport, R. G. Eccles, and Laurence Prusak, “Information Politics,” Sloan Management Review 34, no. 1 (1992): 53–65.
- Location 651
-

In times of drastic change, it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves beautifully equipped to live in a world that no longer exists. —Eric Hoffer, Reflections on the Human Condition
- Location 660
-

The starting point for learning is an experience or problem. This experience leads to reflection on what is happening, followed by the development of an abstract hypothesis to address the experience or problem. The final step is action through experimentation, which leads to new experiences, creating a cycle. Without experience, learning becomes a series of disconnected abstract concepts.2
- Location 699
- action, learning, experimentation, experience,
- [note::This points to the necessity of applying the knowledge I've gained through my readings. Without actually utilizing the information I've read about project management and systems, it's going to be difficult to develop a deep conceptual understanding of these topics.]

Learning often meets resistance because it demands changes in mindset, skill, and performance. These changes can be difficult and even painful, and as a result they elicit strong emotions. The emotional dimension of learning generally receives little attention unless it falls under the banner of “change management,” but learning is always more than a purely cognitive experience.
- Location 703
-

Training traditionally implies a classroom exercise where a fellow employee or a consultant teaches the processes, routines, technologies, or expected behaviors of the organization. In recent years much of this work has migrated to online courses, but the substance hasn’t changed significantly. The main faults with this model in a project context are threefold: these activities rarely reflect the way employees actually learn, there is little room for substantive discussion and feedback, and there is almost no integration with the learning done at other levels in the organization.
- Location 708
- applied learning, knowledge sharing, interactive learning, training, learning,

Fortunately, training represents just one of many ways to learn in a professional setting. Rotational assignments, hands-on opportunities, problem challenges and contests (e.g., hackathons), storytelling forums, and partnership programs with universities can all provide valuable learning experiences for individuals.
- Location 715
-

Katie Smith Milway and Amy Saxton identify three challenges to organizational learning: lack of clarity around measures of organizational knowledge and related outcomes, poor incentives for learning, and uncertainty about the best ways to create and transfer knowledge across an organization.
- Location 727
-

While individual learning gets the lion’s share of attention, savvy organizations have recognized the value in approaching learning as an integrated effort that happens at all three levels: Organizational—promoting sustainable performance and innovation Team—enabling project success Individual—building competence, capability, and confidence
- Location 738
-

This experience points to a central requirement for successful learning and knowledge systems: they have to be closely aligned with and managed by senior leadership. They cannot operate as an HR function that’s disconnected from corporate strategy. Leadership sponsorship and engagement are essential. At NASA’s academy, leaders from engineering, project management, safety, business, and science were responsible for identifying critical capabilities, designing learning events, and serving as faculty. At such educational events, senior executives would be exposed to conversations about the practitioners’ reality—both the good and the bad.
- Location 773
-

An organization uses a combination of signals and incentives to send a message about the value of learning. At a high level, organizational efforts generally boil down to 1) investments in learning infrastructure, and 2) reinforcement through culture.
- Location 780
- signals, organizational learning, organizational culture, incentives, learning infrastructure, organizational infrastructure,

The primary dimensions of learning infrastructure include integration, resources, time and space, and networks.
- Location 785
-

Larry’s research into knowledge networks with Katrina Pugh identified four distinct goals that these networks can have: coordination, learning/innovation, translation/local adaptation, and support of individual members.9 Given the range of these goals, there’s no single best way for an organization to develop and leverage networks. Successful networks reflect culture and a shared sense of mission. McKinsey’s thousands of consultants around the globe are expected to return a call from any other consultant in the company within 24 hours.10 Experience with this kind of responsiveness in a network fosters a strong sense of reciprocity.
- Location 814
-

Software developers of all ages around the globe rely on Stack Overflow, a network of 10 million registered users who troubleshoot problems and share solutions with each other. Learning is increasingly an outside-in opportunity.
- Location 830
-

Infrastructure can only take an organization so far. The presence of a learning culture is the real indication that learning matters. It’s one thing to own exercise equipment, but it’s another to use it every day as a matter of habit. Some of the hallmarks of a learning culture include recognition, leadership support and participation, iterative experimentation, unlearning behaviors that have impeded learning, and connection.
- Location 836
-

Organizations can also recognize learning through events that explicitly acknowledge and even celebrate the importance of getting things wrong. ... The World Bank has hosted FAILfaires (failure fairs) to share lessons about approaches that haven’t worked.11 ... The World Bank is not alone among large organizations in adopting this approach; other organizations, including the Gates Foundation, have held failure festivals.
- Location 846
-

Psychological safety is oxygen for a learning organization; it’s impossible to imagine one without it. At firms like Bridgewater Associates, which practices a kind of radical transparency that’s uncommon in most corporate settings, the focus is on building a culture where mistakes are aired rather than airbrushed.
- Location 868
-

Before rolling out top-down company-wide initiatives, experienced leaders in learning organizations run experiments to figure out what works best in a given context. In short, they think big and start small. At NASA, Ed ran initial knowledge-sharing events and publications as pilot programs, and only established knowledge sharing as a formal business line of the project academy once the offerings were relatively mature. ... Particularly in situations involving technology, limited test runs with small groups of practitioners can save countless time, money, and frustration.
- Location 871
-

In order for an organization to shift direction and adopt a learning posture, the people within the organization have to unlearn behaviors and habits that have held the organization back in the past. For example, if people have guarded knowledge rather than shared it or elevated team loyalty over transparency with the broader organization, these norms have to change to create space for learning to happen.
- Location 885
-

As Edgar Schein has noted, learning anxiety—the fear of trying something new—can only be overcome by either a greater survival anxiety (e.g., the prospect of job loss for failing to adapt) or an increase in psychological safety that reduces the resistance to change.
- Location 887
-

A novel approach to unlearning is the Friction Project, an initiative by Stanford professors Bob Sutton and Huggy Rao that seeks to “understand the causes and cures for destructive organizational friction.”15 It has studied firms such as AstraZeneca, which made an organization-wide commitment to simplification in order to free up hundreds of thousands of wasted hours that could be put to more constructive uses.
- Location 891
-

Where learning is concerned, connection must come before content. A key aspect of our colleague Nancy Dixon’s life-long work is research that underscores the need for relationships, trust, and connection.17 Once the question “Who is this?” has been answered, then people can focus on “What are they saying?”
- Location 898
-

Efforts to promote team learning should consider big-picture issues like project relevance, cultural factors that promote safety to challenge the status quo, and resources such as space and time and targeted support.
- Location 943
- group learning,

At the other extreme, an ad hoc team assembled to promote a hastily approved change initiative that’s not supported by senior leadership stands little chance of learning to enhance its performance. This may sound obvious, but anyone who has worked in a large, bureaucratic organization has probably witnessed a team that was doomed to fail before its kickoff meeting. There can be any number of reasons for this, from ill-conceived ideas to political naivete, but the end result is always the same if a team’s mission is not respected by the organization’s leaders.
- Location 947
-

Chris Argyris, one of the most influential theorists of organizational development, argued for a different characteristic of learning teams and organizations, which he dubbed “double-loop” learning.22 This is what happens when teams go beyond learning that simply addresses a problem with a linear solution (single-loop learning) and respond instead by delving deeply into context and questioning the underlying values, beliefs, and norms that frame the problem. Seen from this vantage point, project reviews are places for argument, exchange, and exploration, and risk management is a tool for learning to understand the likelihood of failure.
- Location 959
- post-mortem, double-loop learning, organizational theory, organizational development, problem solving, 1action,
- [note::Follow Chris Argyris's work]

What ultimately makes individuals effective in a project organization? At a series of NASA knowledge-sharing events from 2007 to 2009, Ed asked 275 senior practitioners a simple question: “How do you learn to do your job?”
- Location 1009
- c1,

Ed and Matt collated these responses and ultimately identified four key dimensions of effectiveness: Ability—a combination of natural aptitude and the capability to incorporate new knowledge and learn from experience. Attitude—motivation, curiosity, a growth mindset, and the willingness to work as a member of a team. Assignments—core on-the-job learning experiences that lead to personal development. Alliances—relationships that enable an individual to succeed within the organization. These “4 A’s” provide a lens for thinking about individual development as a process that is both personal and social. Ability and attitude are personal qualities, while alliances and assignments are both rooted in relationships with others.
- Location 1012
-
- [note::Similar to CAMPS model of job satisfaction?]

Promote leaders as teachers, which contributes in many ways to the value of learning. Under Ed’s leadership, the NASA project academy always invited executives, engineers, and scientists to present at events ranging from training courses and knowledge forums to conferences.
- Location 1037
- organizational learning, organizational values,

Establish reflective leadership as a clear goal.
- Location 1041
-

Approach training as a conversation that makes productive use of argument and dissent. Training often turns off smart people. Asking people to share their own experiences and perspective gives them a voice and helps to foster inclusion and appreciation.
- Location 1045
-

Create spaces and places where learning takes place. NASA provided many places where people would come together for the purpose of learning, sharing, and growing. In recent years, young professionals at NASA have solicited leadership support to establish workspaces that enable co-creation, collaboration, sharing, and networking.30
- Location 1047
-

Learn in small gatherings and communities. When people learn together, they get better at working together. This goes beyond intelligence to social capital. Spending significant time together in a learning environment will lead to profound work relationships for life if the event has been designed correctly. This includes providing opportunities for eating, drinking, and socializing together.
- Location 1051
-

Learning is not overhead. It is the ultimate competitive advantage for every leader, team, and organization. The best teams and organizations clearly articulate the requirement for learning, reflection, and knowledge sharing as part of mission strategy and success. What NASA has done well is to create expectations, requirements, policies, executive sponsorship, and resources for exceptional learning opportunities. Learning is not a “nice-to-have” perk that can be cut when funding becomes tight.
- Location 1054
-

A diversity of voices is vital. One of the first principles for the NASA project academy was to offer a way, not the way, to enable project success. When learning is shared from a variety of perspectives, people understand that they are free to accept, question, improve on, or tailor for their own context. Psychological safety reassures them that all voices are welcome.
- Location 1058
-

4. Katie Smith Milway and Amy Saxton, “The Challenge of Organizational Learning,” Stanford Social Innovation Review 9, no. 3 (Summer 2011): 44–49.
- Location 1070
- 1resource/article, organizational learning,

7. Matthew Parsons, Effective Knowledge Management of Law Firms (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 16.
- Location 1084
-

9. Katrina Pugh and Laurence Prusak, “Designing Effective Knowledge Networks,” Sloan Management Review 55, no. 1 (Fall 2013): 79–88.
- Location 1087
-

10. Tom Peters, The Tom Peters Seminar: Crazy Times Call for Crazy Organizations (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 171.
- Location 1089
- 1resource,

11. Michael Trucano, “Running Your Own FAILfaire,” World Bank, EduTech blog, November 17, 2011, https://blogs.worldbank.org/edutech/failfaire-internal.
- Location 1091
-

12. Ronald Bledlow, Bernd Carette, Jana Kuehnel, and Daniela Pittig, “Learning from Others’ Failures: The Effectiveness of Failure Stories for Managerial Learning,” Academy of Management Learning and Education 16, no. 1 (2017): 40, Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School of Business, https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/lkcsb_research_all/16.
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14. This interview with Edgar Schein captures the point succinctly: Diane L. Coutu, “Edgar Schein: The Anxiety of Learning—the Darker Side of Organizational Learning,” Harvard Business School Working Knowledge, April 15, 2002, https://hbswk.hbs.edu/archive/edgar-schein-the-anxiety-of-learning-the-darker-side-of-organizational-learning.
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15. See this description of the Friction Project: https://www.bobsutton.net/friction-project/, accessed October 7, 2021.
- Location 1103
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Nancy Dixon, Common Knowledge: How Companies Thrive by Sharing What They Know (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2000).
- Location 1108
- organizational_knowledge, knowledge sharing, 1resource/book,

20. Amy C. Edmondson, Richard M. J. Bohmer, and Gary P. Pisano, “Speeding Up Team Learning,” Harvard Business Review 79, no. 9 (October 2001): 125–134, https://hbr.org/2001/10/speeding-up-team-learning.
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21. Charles Duhigg, “What Google Learned from Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team,” New York Times Magazine, February 25, 2016, MM20.
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22. Chris Argyris, “Teaching Smart People How to Learn,” Harvard Business Review (May–June 1991): 99–109.
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24. James G. March, The Ambiguities of Experience (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010), 115.
- Location 1124
- 1resource/book, organizational learning,

28. Reid Hoffman, Ben Casnocha, and Chris Yeh, The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2014), chap. 2, Kindle.
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-

29. Lynn Crawford, “Beyond Competence: Developing Managers of Complex Projects,” in Proceedings of AIPM National Conference (Sydney: Australian Institute of Project Management, October 2010), 6.
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30. See, for instance, NASA Academy of Program/Project & Engineering Leadership, “The Space to Collaborate, the Space to Share,” ASK the Academy 5, no. 3 (March 6, 2012), https://appel.nasa.gov/2012/03/26/5-3_space_collaborate-html/.
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-

The failure of a seal on Challenger’s solid rocket boosters, which initiated a sudden series of events resulting in the loss of the shuttle and its crew, did not surprise engineers who had cautioned NASA officials just a day earlier against launching at such cold temperatures. Several previous shuttle flights had experienced problems with the solid rocket booster’s O-rings failing to seal properly. The night before the launch, Roger Boisjoly, an engineer at Morton Thiokol, the manufacturer of the solid rocket boosters, had argued forcefully in telephone meetings with leaders from NASA and his own company against launching at temperatures below 53 degrees. Boisjoly had written a memo six months earlier warning of the consequences of an O-ring failure: “The result would be a catastrophe of the highest order—loss of human life.”1
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-
- [note::Wow - what an awful disregard for safety]

Allan McDonald, a Morton Thiokol official who had refused to go along with his management’s decision to confirm in writing for NASA that it would be safe to launch Challenger into freezing temperatures, recounted intimidating remarks made in the teleconferences the night before the launch.4 McDonald had stood his ground in the face of tremendous pressure, but his account spoke to a lack of psychological safety that needed to be addressed. An organization that disregarded the advice of its technical experts had to change more than its management structure. It had to come to grips with the human dimension of this difficult story and learn from it.
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A 1988 RAND study of 52 civilian megaprojects (defined as projects ranging in cost from $500 million to over $10 billion in 1984 dollars) reported an average cost growth of 88 percent. The study also found that new technology posed significant challenges: “The incorporation of new technology in a megaproject almost ensures that the project will make more mistakes than money. The use of new technology is the only factor that is associated with bad results in all three dimensions: cost growth, schedule slippage, and performance shortfalls.”12 This finding would not surprise experienced project or system engineers. The introduction of new technology always represents a significant risk, particularly in spaceflight; there are very limited ways to fix the systems on a rocket or a satellite after launch.
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NASA commissioned retired Air Force general Samuel C. Phillips, who had managed the Apollo program at NASA’s headquarters in Washington, DC, to lead a study group and make recommendations to the NASA administrator. Among other things, his report called for the agency to “strengthen agency-wide leadership in developing and managing people.”13 This created an opportunity for NASA to find new ways of developing the talent of its project management workforce. One of the most powerful tools it ultimately adopted for sharing knowledge and lessons was storytelling.
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Stories are a natural form of communication that has always helped humankind convey and distribute information. Some scholars argue that humans are hard-wired to learn from each other in this manner. “Narrative arises from the advantages of communication in social species,” writes Brian Boyd, who suggests that…
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On a more practical level, psychologist Jerome Bruner describes story as one of our primary means of understanding the world: “There are two ways of cognitive functioning, two modes of thought, each providing distinctive ways of ordering experience, of constructing reality.… A…
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- stories,

Stories are legitimate means of explanation. They rely on a narrative arc to initiate and sustain interest in the body of the text, and if the arc is strong enough, the story will stick far more powerfully than a well-done PowerPoint presentation or paper. Bruner performed experiments that showed that stories were 22 times more memorable than flat information with the same content.16 Since stories are so sticky, they can serve as an efficient and effective method for…
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-

Skilled storytellers bring emotion and passion to their delivery. This has a powerful effect that makes a listener attend to it carefully, and in many cases identify with the teller or protagonist. As a result, stories can lower the defenses of listeners and push them beyond binary cost-benefit thinking to consider alternative perspectives. “Narratives are a performance-enhancing drug for…
- Location 1240
- stories, emotions, persuasion,

In a project environment, stories offer five major advantages. First, while databases, training, and other tools for sharing lessons require time and significant cost, storytelling is a low-cost method that needs no training. Few people will say, “I can’t tell a story, I don’t have that skill.” Nearly anyone…
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Another advantage of stories is that they require and build the muscles of reflective leadership. Although projects value speed, this often comes at the cost of learning. One of the persistent findings of project failure is a lack of commitment and time for learning and reflection. Storytelling is flexible in its time demands; stories of all lengths can be valuable. When storytelling is accepted as part of an organization’s culture, this allows reflective…
- Location 1250
- project failure, project learning, stories, reflective leadership,

A third attribute of stories is that they facilitate a communal sense of meaning. This concept is vital in an age of rapid change. When there is little change, a community—a family unit, team, or organization—can establish meaning over time. In a volatile and uncertain environment, a story…
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A culture of knowledge is built on the meaning ascribed to agreed-on stories. This is both the power and danger of story: regardless of its accuracy, it creates a shorthand for common understanding. Stories simplify reality, which can be useful for reaching broad audiences, but the process of…
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-
- [note::Stories are like heuristics for reality?]

A fourth advantage of stories is that they can provide a sense of clarity about what is important. All organizations and projects have an essential purpose. One of the prime challenges to that purpose is the ability to focus. Nonstop emails and meetings create constant pressure and distractions. Stories can serve as reminders to ignore nonessential activities in favor of vital priorities.18 A compelling story that…
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Finally, stories provide a sense of connection through a strong emotional link. They allow people to share their thoughts and feelings. Storytellers who express vulnerability by revealing their emotional stake in a story model the behaviors associated with psychological safety, which in turn…
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Many, if not most, project stories fall into one of three categories: successes, failures, or change initiatives that illuminate…
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Within an organization, a failure story can prompt reflection that ultimately leads to changes in strategy, governance,…
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The challenge of failure stories is that they are not often easy for organizations to accept. The people involved with the failure may feel persecuted, misunderstood, or otherwise unfairly treated. These dynamics certainly existed at NASA in the immediate aftermath of both the Challenger and 2003 Columbia accidents. The deaths of the crew members weighed heavily on everyone associated with the shuttle program,…
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- failure, failure acknowledgement,

Success stories can build organizational confidence and bolster morale. They can take a variety of archetypal forms: the upstart versus the established giant (David vs. Goliath), persistence in the face of terrible circumstances (Job), or the merger that leads…
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Stories about organizational wins are important, but as engineering historian Henry Petroski warns, “…
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Political stories can include elements of success or failure, but their underlying value is in helping practitioners understand the dynamics that shape the project-based organization. These can be stories of bureaucratic entrepreneurs who worked the system effectively, or of those who…
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Knowledge-sharing forums were not an overnight success at NASA. Branding mattered. For starters, there was a fairly strong prejudice against the word story itself. The speakers were often very senior engineers who felt that describing a serious talk on the space shuttle as a story would be degrading and insulting to all concerned. For this reason, these sessions were called Masters Forums at the beginning. There was little mention of “story” in the event announcements or descriptions. The term Masters Forum indicated that individuals with expertise in projects were coming together to discuss their experiences and lessons.
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- knowledge sharing, marketing, branding,

The proof of concept arrived in participant evaluations and increasing attendance. It helped that a few highly regarded engineers embraced the use of stories. Word spread about these early champions, creating a sense that it was okay to follow their lead. And as broadband internet became the norm, videos of compelling stories from forums could be shared with the world.
- Location 1326
- change_management, influencers, change champions, stories,
- [note::Reminds me of the commentary on "change champions"/"influencers" on the APQC podcast series on change Management.]

At the same time that Ed was convening the early Masters Forums, he developed a series of publications that culminated in an award-winning journal called ASK Magazine. ASK primarily featured first-person stories from NASA practitioners. From the beginning, it set a tone that was conversational rather than technical. Issue 1 featured a story by Michelle Collins that began: “I was a new engineer at one of NASA’s contractor sites, straight out of college and ready to conquer the agency. Of the 120 engineers there, I was the only female. To say I stuck out is putting it mildly.”22 ASK welcomed a wide range of practitioner perspectives, not just war stories from veterans of the good old days. Since many NASA experts were not professional writers, Ed enlisted a team, including Larry, Matt, and Don Cohen (who has written our case study of the International Space Station in chapter 6), to help capture and edit these stories. The magazine eventually expanded to bring in relevant stories from experts outside NASA as well. As word spread about ASK, researchers began to cite its stories in other publications. Ed also began a monthly newsletter that enabled more frequent communication than ASK, which was published on a quarterly basis.
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- psychological safety, culture building, stories,

1. Be clear about the goals for using stories. Ed’s efforts to promote the use of stories at NASA started with three goals. The first was to create a culture of reflective leadership and practitioners. Project teams often struggle with finding the time necessary for learning and conversation. This is understandable, but it creates a dangerous environment in which team members feel they cannot take time to learn and share ideas, concerns, and solutions. The second goal was to encourage the use, creation, and exchange of stories. At NASA we initially tracked the number of stories shared and their themes. (Eventually social media made it possible to track sharing in a much more granular way.) The third goal was to promote knowledge sharing through conversation.
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2. Start every project by telling your story. Every project starts with a story. Projects are always about delivering value through products or services. The journey to arrive at that value is the story. Like projects, stories start with a problem. When you begin a project, ask the question, “What is the story we are hoping to tell on completion?” Note where the discussion goes. Is there agreement on the goals? Are there subplots? What…
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3. Make room for presentations as stories. Many organizations train people to provide formal slide presentations that are organized by logical thinking. Create places and spaces for presentations that are structured as stories as well. During knowledge-sharing forums at NASA, we would often ask presenters to tell a brief story about a success or failure without any slides in fifteen minutes or less. The practitioners quickly understood how to spell out the problem, context, approach to problem-solving, and outcome. The attendees would then extrapolate lessons from the…
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4. Offer storytelling workshops. Although telling stories can be natural and easy for many people, it is also a great skill to develop. Today there are many professionals with expertise in storytelling. At NASA, we arranged a session with Annette Simmons, author of The Story Factor: Inspiration, Influence, and Persuasion through the Art of Storytelling.29 This created an appreciation among project professionals, scientists, and engineers of the value of this practice. Consider a team-learning session by inviting a specialist in stories to help build this capability among…
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- storytelling, stories,

5. Stories can be oral, written, or visual. We have focused our discussion mostly on oral stories, but some storytellers are more comfortable expressing their ideas in writing. And at some NASA knowledge forums we hired visual storytellers to illustrate the stories that were shared. The enduring popularity of graphic novels over the…
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6. Run experiments and iterate. There are many ways to bring story into an organization. If a first attempt doesn’t work, try a different approach. The key is to realize that stories are an essential tool to stimulate conversation, encourage reflection and learning, promote diverse voices, and inspire purpose. Some of the best…
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Edward W. Merrow, Understanding the Outcomes of Megaprojects: A Quantitative Analysis of Very Large Civilian Projects (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 1988), 62, www.rand.org/pubs/reports/2006/R3560.pdf.
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- project management, project success, 1resource,

NASA Academy of Program/Project & Engineering Leadership, “ASK OCE Interview: Five Questions for Dr. Henry Petroski,” ASK OCE 1, no. 10 (February 26, 2010), https://appel.nasa.gov/2010/02/26/ao_1-10_f_interview-html/.
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NASA Academy of Program/Project & Engineering Leadership, “Collaborative Problem Solving: The STS-119 Flow Control Valve Issue,” NASA, April 2013, https://appel.nasa.gov/case-studies/sts-119-html/.
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Stephen Denning, The Springboard: How Storytelling Ignites Action in Knowledge-Era Organizations (Boston: Butterworth-Heinemann, 2001). 29. A revised version of Simmons’s book is now available: Annette Simmons, The Story Factor: Inspiration, Influence, and Persuasion Through the Art of Storytelling (New York: Hachette Book Group, 2019).
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We are going to define culture for our purposes as the mostly unwritten yet enduring rules of behavior that convey “how things get done around here.” Organizational culture acts as a powerful addendum to rule books and other formal sources of behavioral control. Anyone who works at an organization for even a short time begins to pick up on the signals, stories, and artifacts that compose the culture.
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The only model for managing a much larger workforce that performed complex tasks over a range of geographies was the military, which was based on a command-and-control structure that was organized and led by a rigid hierarchy. All the knowledge in such organizations went in one direction—top-down—and with the exception of intelligence, there was little opportunity for knowledge acquired by a worker to ever reach the head office where knowledge was developed, sorted, and distributed on a need-to-know basis through the command structure. Since the military was highly regarded and very familiar in the United States and most of western Europe, the model wasn’t too difficult to replicate in organizations sprouting up in these countries. It quickly spread elsewhere as well. This operating philosophy could be summarized in a quote apocryphally attributed to Henry Ford: “What do I want with a worker’s brain? I only want his arm.” The idea of optimizing this insight for peak production was codified by Frederick Taylor and labeled “scientific management.”
- Location 1537
- scientific management, organizational structure, hierarchy, command-and-control organizational structure, 1todo evernote,
- [note::"Command-and-control" management was developed during the industrial revolution and was originally inspired by the military.]

But the great limitation of this model was (and is) its reliance on the physical strength of humans and machines as the key source of wealth production. This type of production factor and its associated activities can be far more easily measured, managed, traded, and priced than the major factor of production today, which is knowledge.
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-
- [note::Command-and-control was designed for markets of physical goods and services. Yet, the commodity of many modern markets is knowledge.]

A great benefit of a culture that prizes knowledge is that it serves as a competitive advantage against cultures that are slower to change. One of the most sweeping changes of the past two decades has been the agile movement, which empowers people at the local level to get things done. Whatever tools, processes, and systems an organization has in place, culture ultimately determines the extent to which it streamlines decision-making and facilitates productivity. Economist Joel Mokyr has coined the term culture of growth to identify culture as the defining factor that leads to the beliefs, values, and associated behaviors necessary for organizational success, and, ultimately, the creation of societal wealth.4
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But collaboration implies acts of working together that are voluntary and often directed or prompted by the organizational culture. For example, when a colleague asks for assistance with a difficult problem and you offer to help even if you don’t have a way to bill for your time, that’s collaboration. It often manifests as a proactive attitude that can be seen in actions such as reading an article and sending it to a colleague in another department who might find it useful.
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-
- [note::Collaboration is made up of both serendipitous collaboration (e.g. sharing an article with a colleague who might benefit) and deliberate collaboration (e.g. working directly with someone)]

Organizational cultures do not develop in a vacuum. Organizations are part of the larger cultures in which they operate, and as such they reflect the values of those places. The United States has both an individualistic and a collegial culture that can be tapped into by an employer to incorporate its own cultural preferences, but it’s not always easy to reconcile these two contrasting attitudes. This may help account for the noted difficulties of many change management projects. All three of us have worked with global firms and organizations and have experienced the ways in which, for instance, Japanese culture affects the work culture of Japanese firms, just as American culture influences the norms of American organizations.
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-
- [note::Culture is heritable - organizational culture has a tendency to inherit the culture of the geographic area (e.g. city, state, country, global region) it's employees work from.]

Most organizational cultures fall somewhere on a continuum between promoting competition or collaboration. In environments that heavily incentivize individual competition, there is usually little willingness to help colleagues voluntarily, while at the other end of the spectrum there are cultures that are successful at encouraging collaboration for a variety of reasons. Mission-oriented workplaces, for instance, often have collaborative cultures.
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One way organizations tip the scales in this direction is by following what Stanford’s Robert Sutton has dubbed “the no asshole rule.”7 Sutton clearly documented the negative effects brought about by hiring and retaining people who do not play well with others. There is no stronger signal that radiates through a firm than perceptions of the personal qualities of the people who get promoted or hired. Choosing people who collaborate well with others is a not-too-subtle way of recognizing the behaviors the company seeks to cultivate in its employees.
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One of the most effective ways to foster a culture that values knowledge is by creating and elevating knowledge communities within an organization. As we mentioned in chapter 2, the NASA Engineering & Safety Center, created in response to the space shuttle Columbia accident, established an elite community of engineers that quickly became a source of expertise for stakeholders and customers seeking knowledge for a variety of challenges. This is an example of promoting a knowledge culture by creating a community of readily available talent. The status of this organization helped to incentivize NASA’s technical workforce to adopt positive attitudes toward knowledge, collaboration, and a culture of technical excellence.
- Location 1638
- organizational_knowledge, knowledge communities, communities of practice,

As we mentioned in chapter 1, another way that organizations foster a culture that values knowledge is by funding individual knowledge exploration. Many organizations have budgets for employees to attend conferences or engage in exchanges with peers, professors, and other experts. Bringing in guest speakers or sponsoring visiting fellows also demonstrates a commitment to knowledge while making it available to a wider audience within the organization.
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One of the most fun ways we have seen a firm put knowledge front and center was at GLG, an expert network that has built its entire business model around connecting its clients directly with people who have the knowledge they need. In its New York headquarters, the lobby area doubles as a book nook featuring several shelves of eclectic titles. The meeting rooms throughout the space are named after great thinkers and writers from Socrates to Keynes. There is more to culture than trappings, as we said earlier, but these visual cues serve as a constant reminder that ideas are what matter.
- Location 1654
- interior design, culture,

a lack of trust can influence knowledge sharing. If colleagues in a large organization don’t trust one another, the process of eliciting knowledge from them comes with higher transaction costs. Nothing is harder in a culture with a trust deficit than moving knowledge when there is no mandate to do so.
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Some of the most common questions that arise when trust is lacking include: Will I get credit if the person I am helping uses my response in a paper or talk? Will this person reciprocate if I need assistance? Will I be besieged with more queries? Is it worthwhile to help this person because of her place in the hierarchy? In these and many other ways, trust plays a strong role in enabling, hampering, or even blocking knowledge transfer.
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One of the most effective tools for building a culture of trust is simply saying, “I trust you to do the right thing.” Backing those words with action shows people that you’re serious. Larry once had about 40 people reporting to him in a research unit of a major consulting firm. As a manager, he was expected to read and approve all travel and expense forms. Since many of these consultants traveled extensively, this would have meant spending a half-day or more on paperwork each week. This struck him as a tremendous waste of time and energy that did not add any value to his unit. At a group meeting, he told the team that he trusted them to stay at a Marriott rather than a Four Seasons hotel, and that he wasn’t going to dive into their expense reports. He realized that the cost of not trusting the group would be far greater than an infrequent upgrade from coach to business class. This not only gave Larry time to do more worthwhile work, but it added to the group’s social capital.11 They knew they were trusted and proved to be trustworthy over the years.
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- 1socialpost-queue, leadership, management, trust,

One of the fastest ways to establish trust is with face-to-face meetings. There is a body of research that finds that when people have met face to face, maybe even just a few times, they are able to establish swift trust. This alone is a solid argument for occasionally bringing together employees of geographically dispersed organizations.
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This story illustrates an important but not obvious point: strength without flexibility turns culture into a straitjacket that constricts growth and access to a wide range of knowledge and ideas. In an era when organizations increasingly recognize the value of diverse, agile teams exercising authority at the local level, the idea of culture as a monolithic thing shared by an entire organization may be on its way out.
- Location 1703
- organizational agility, organizational culture,
- [note::Having a strong, homogenous culture is a double-edged sword.]

Columbia University sociologist Diane Vaughan coined the term normalization of deviance to describe the role that NASA’s culture had played in the accident: “In the years preceding the Challenger launch, engineers and managers together developed a definition of the situation that allowed them to carry on as if nothing was wrong when they continually faced evidence that something was wrong.”17
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- [note::"Normalization of deviance" = Psychological safety?]

1. Signals and messages. Some of the strongest messages that managers and leaders send out are through hiring and promotion. These actions tell employees a story about the beliefs and behaviors that the organization values. This is particularly important when trying to build a collaborative culture: it is impossible to do so while promoting noncollaborative people.
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2. Social infrastructure. The way an organization uses and allocates physical space speaks to its attitudes about who matters and how work gets done. Spaces can be designed to encourage conversations and serendipitous encounters by providing simple signals for social interactions, such as coffee and snacks.
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3. Valuing learning and ideas. By subsidizing subscriptions to publications, encouraging conference attendance, and developing knowledge networks, an organization demonstrates its commitment to acquiring new knowledge and ideas. Much like hiring and promotion, the ways that an organization recognizes and shares new ideas also lets employees know what really matters.
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4. Shared mission and purpose. Through stories, examples, and cases, organizations can define their mission and create a sense of common purpose necessary for mission success. This is an important step in becoming a smart organization: a common understanding of the mission eliminates a great deal of noise, conflict, and transaction costs.
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- [note::Hmm, this seems kind of reductive. I wonder what proponents of having "non-coherent goals" would say about this.]

5. Eliminate mechanist metaphors for the organization. The image of the organization as a machine of ever-increasing efficiency needs to be eliminated to foster a culture that prizes learning and knowledge. A more human and organic metaphor should replace it, such as the organization as a living entity that feeds on ideas and a passion for the mission, and that reaches outside itself for sustenance as well as relying on internal sources of energy.
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“Netflix Culture,” Netflix, https://jobs.netflix.com/culture,
- Location 1762
- organizational structure, 1resource, organizational culture,

Robert I. Sutton, The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t (New York: Business Plus, 2007).
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- 1resource,

Bob Sutton, “Please Help Me Update! Places and People that Use the No Asshole Rule,” Bob Sutton Work Matters blog, February 8, 2012, https://bobsutton.typepad.com/my_weblog/2012/02/the_no_asshole_.html.
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- 1resource,

Don Cohen and Laurence Prusak, In Good Company: How Social Capital Makes Organizations Work (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2001).
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- 1resource,

For more about how this worked in practice, see Justin Bariso, “Netflix’s Unlimited Vacation Policy Took Years to Get Right. It’s a Lesson in Emotional Intelligence,” Inc., September 14, 2020, https://www.inc.com/justin-bariso/netflixs-unlimited-vacation-policy-took-years-to-get-right-its-a-lesson-in-emotional-intelligence.html.
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- 1resource,

See, for instance, Nitin Nohria and Robert G. Eccles, “Face-to-Face: Making Network Organizations Work,” in Networks and Organizations: Structure, Form, and Action, ed. Nitin Nohria and Robert G. Eccles (Boston, MA: Harvard Business School, 1992), 288–308.
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- 1resource,

One of the common mistakes of organizational life is the tendency to believe in the importance of individual development and organizational governance while assuming that smart individuals will figure out how to work effectively with each other once they’re thrown together on a project.
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Greg Oldham and Richard Hackman’s five-factor model of individual job satisfaction emphasizes the importance of task significance.1
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The dynamic capabilities framework first identified by David Teece, Gary Pisano, and Amy Shuen in the mid-1990s raises the importance of firms sustaining long-term performance through team-learning routines that support managerial strategy.5 From this vantage point, teams serve as the bridge between strategy and project outcomes.
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Another aspect of team performance that is simpatico with the dynamic capabilities framework is the development of sense-and-respond behaviors. As described by Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden, this is a vital capability that requires organizations and leaders to take in and interpret data from the environment in ways that allow for quick responses and experimentation.7 A core aspect of agile work and related methodologies is scanning the environment and using incoming insights to enable rapid adaptations to changing conditions. This can’t take place on the same time horizon as a strategic planning process; it must happen at the team level. It requires strong situational awareness and the ability to spot opportunities and mobilize teams to capitalize on them.8
- Location 1858
- agile, strategic planning, agile management, organizational agility,

Failures in complex projects can be categorized based on their degree of impact. At the earliest and simplest level are mistakes. These occur frequently and have small impacts on the project. Next are mishaps, which represent more significant losses to the project in terms of cost, time, or performance. A mishap is not an ultimate failure, but it is an inflection point for understanding and overcoming or recovering. Finally, there are failures at the project, program, product, or mission level. As the term suggests, a mission failure is catastrophic, leading to a total loss for the organization as well as the team. It calls for a thorough reexamination of the double-loop learning questions mentioned in our chapter 2 discussion of team learning—Were we doing the right things?—as well as the need for a new strategy or a different path. Mission failures often follow earlier mistakes or mishaps that were not adequately addressed.
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- [note::Types of project failures based on magnitude]

Project performance happens at the team level. Team members are closest to the work methods, domain expertise, and needs of their customers. Under the right circumstances, they can ignore organizational leadership, which is often too cautious, detached, or slow to respond. The popularity of the agile movement has been a repudiation of bureaucratic management that has helped to reset the balance of power in favor of teams. The strength of organizations like NASA typically resides in giving project units enough autonomy to self-organize and adapt to changing conditions without significant interference from senior leadership.
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STEREO was one of the early NASA teams to go through what is called four-dimensional (4-D) leadership, a comprehensive process developed by Charlie Pellerin, a highly regarded astrophysicist who has spent the second half of his career understanding the dynamics of leadership and team performance. The 4-D method supports projects by employing a short survey to collect data about perceptions of the team.
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- [note::Similar to my project pulse survey?]

So how did STEREO go from problem child to model project? The first step was taking the time to collect data. Many troubled teams put their heads down and plod through, maintaining the behaviors that created trouble in the first place. Next, the STEREO team leaders and members set aside three days to reflect, understand, communicate, and find a new way to work together. Then they accepted the truth of the survey data. This was a brave step. Confronted with poor performance, many teams either fail to admit reality or become defensive. STEREO’s leadership subsequently participated in multiple team workshops, individual coaching sessions, and periodic team reassessments. They developed the ability to practice appreciation, commit to shared goals, and create and adopt positive storylines about the project. Rather than perpetuating narratives that blamed their partners, team members consciously made an effort to tell themselves different stories based on a new shared understanding of the project. They designed an operating agreement that established a “badge-less culture” between the two organizations that would diminish differences between GSFC and APL employees and focus on accountability and commitment to sustained trust. In short, they decided to become a team that valued respect, inclusion, learning, and the open exchange of knowledge.
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- [note::Methods for turning around a "dumpster fire" project]

The challenge it raises is how to create a team culture that both respects and transcends organizational and cultural differences. A powerful starting point is to encourage behaviors and conversations of appreciation and gratitude for the project. A simple question like “What are you most grateful for as we start working together on this project?” can help build a sense of team unity.
- Location 1926
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there is often confusion and disagreement about the specifics of work goals. It is important to allocate time to discuss the mission, purpose, and goals of a project. A team of smart, highly diverse individuals will arrive at different conclusions that can corrode their ability to collaborate if time is not taken to arrive at an understanding of shared goals. Some project leaders use reviews and meetings to ask, “What are the three most important outcomes of the project?” This…
- Location 1930
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High-performing teams also expertly use stories and create storylines that promote team commitment, communication, and confidence. As a quick tool for predicting and understanding team performance, listen to the stories that project team members share. Simply ask how a project is going. Projects in distress will often produce stories of frustration, anger, blame, problems, and even illness: “I need to get out of here before this job kills me.” Projects in challenging but healthy situations will tell very different stories. They will…
- Location 1934
-
- [note::The sentiment of project team members' stories about the project is correlated with team cohesion and performance.]

In our experience, great teams are heard more easily than they’re seen. They have a sound. They are often noisy. Team members talk, laugh, argue, move, disagree, fight, and celebrate. They create space for each member of the team to speak freely. There is no fear of being too honest. They don’t confuse emotional intelligence with politeness; they are not afraid to speak truth to each other even if it might mean hurt feelings as part of the growth process. The best teams also have an emotional connection to their work. There is a shared sense of appreciation and…
- Location 1943
-
- [note::"Great teams are noisy"]

We have watched teams that are hard-working and cautious. They participate and engage, but they overly script conversations with senior leaders and key stakeholders to avoid being called out for mistakes. The quiet and polite appearance of collaboration masks an underlying fear of being wrong. Team members strain their necks to see the reactions of senior leaders. As a result, the team learns little to nothing from these conversations…
- Location 1949
-
- [note::Such a great point - quite and polite collaboration often indicates a lack of psychological safety. Also, love the phrase "impression management" - it nicely captures the idea of "walking on eggshells."]

The sound of success is noisier, energized, combative, and honest. An effective project review is probing, zeroing in on problems and gaps rather than strengths. (A NASA project manager whose father was a baker referred to this as focusing on the hole rather than the donut.) This is uncomfortable, but the best teams set high standards for their performance. They…
- Location 1953
-

The need for focused attention speaks to the challenge of making sense of work in organizations. Karl Weick coined the concept of sensemaking to describe the importance people place on making sense of the actions, goals, and behaviors desired in an organization.12 People waste time on the wrong things and become frustrated when they are unclear about desired outcomes. That frustration breeds skepticism, which contributes to a loss of productivity. Strategies to enhance sensemaking increase understanding and transparency and promote faster and more effective action.
- Location 1972
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The best teams are clear about their outcome. They know what to prioritize and how to spend their time. “A successful team picks out the 10 to 20 important things of the hundreds they could be doing,” says Ray Ryan of Square. “They know what’s crucial to fix and what’s nice to fix. They understand the difference between a flaw that’s embarrassing and one that’s fatal when working to make something shippable asap.”13
- Location 1977
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A simple, powerful technique is to periodically ask the team to define and describe the outcome it is working to achieve. This is a natural reflection point that facilitates alignment, and it provides an opportunity for a team to stop and assess whether they are proceeding in the right direction or if there is a need to make changes. Researcher Connie Gersick has found that teams go through extended periods of stasis that are then interrupted by sudden change. Her punctuated equilibrium model indicates that teams start in one direction toward an intended outcome, and then the need for change becomes desirable and welcome at a certain point. The key is to remain clear about the destination.14
- Location 1987
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While many organizations have traditionally tried to ignore or avoid emotions associated with problems, feelings, and interpersonal dynamics, successful teams have behavioral signatures that encourage and support empathy and open expression of emotion. This may partly explain the finding that the presence of more women on a team promotes higher performance. Women score higher than men on tests of social sensitivity, and this may help make diverse teams more effective at managing emotions.18
- Location 2008
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Scott Page of the University of Michigan coined the term diversity bonus to describe the value that a member with new cognitive tools can bring to a team: “If the field or the challenge is complex, then diversity bonuses can exist because different people master different relevant tools.”21
- Location 2037
-

“People from different identity groups will bring different knowledge, experiences, and mental models to the table for consideration, allowing for increased cognitive diversity and therefore better outcomes (predictions, creativity, decision making, problem solving, and so on),” writes Katherine Phillips of Columbia University. “Just like one’s functional training in engineering, psychology, or cultural anthropology shapes one’s cognitive identity, so too does one’s gender, race, cultural background, (dis)ability, and so forth.”24
- Location 2054
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Purpose provides fuel that can sustain a team through the inevitable setbacks and conflicts it will encounter. A simple act like reading a purpose statement at the beginning of each team meeting reminds the team why its work matters.
- Location 2081
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The distinction between purpose and meaning may seem like a matter of semantics, but it is worth defining. The shared purpose of a team gives it something to keep striving to achieve. The shared meaning illuminates the significance of the team’s experience to its members. A team can often only identify the shared meaning of a project through after-the-fact reflection and dialogue, particularly on fast-paced projects like VITAL.
- Location 2086
- purpose, meaning, 1evernote, team synergy,

Purpose statements and project charters may sound like feel-good exercises, but they are commitments that bind teams together and frame the way they approach their work.
- Location 2089
-
- [note::Project charters are not just documentation, they are tools to ensure alignment among members of a project team.]

Again, when long-running projects create a culture that transcends an organization, the message to outsiders is often “Nothing to see here. We got this.” This is a reality for high-performing teams of smart people. They like to be left alone to work and produce exceptional outcomes. Anything that gets in the way of their purpose is seen as a distraction and waste of valuable time. They trust in their own abilities to solve problems, which can lead them to resist anything that makes them stop work and spend time learning and sharing.
- Location 2101
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A strong sense of purpose can be a double-edged sword. Some teams like to brag about their speed and agility. A team unbound by rules can make decisions faster and outperform teams constrained by too much oversight. But every situation is different. There are decisions that involve low to minimal risk. A failed decision in such instances can be painlessly repaired, but there are other situations where a faulty decision can cause severe damage and even loss of life. Decisions require an understanding of context, and mission purpose requires striking a balance between getting the job done and building in time for dialogue and learning. The best teams consider the variables and commit to a purpose that accounts for outcomes, people, and reflection.
- Location 2109
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Focus on creating a sense of appreciation and inclusion for team members. Let them know they have an opportunity to do and be part of something special. At the start of a project, take time to acknowledge and introduce all of the team members. Ask them to discuss what they most appreciate about the opportunity to work on the assignment. A short gratitude activity like that can have a powerful impact by reminding team members about the benefits of the journey they are beginning. These conversations also allow team members to identify shared experiences and build rapport quickly.
- Location 2168
- project kickoff, team synergy, project management, favorite, fostering collaboration, gratitude,

One way to ensure this does not happen is to establish a team charter that explicitly identifies growth learning as part of the team’s purpose. Team members should be encouraged to plan for their own development and to think about how each project can improve their ability to work effectively in a team setting.
- Location 2175
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Teams get frustrated by two things. First, people don’t like to be considered “resources,” “assets,” or “capital.” (See “People first” above.) Second, teams get frustrated when they don’t know where to focus. A very common plea is for leadership to simply commit to clearly defined priorities. If everything is important, nothing is important.
- Location 2178
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Successful teams have conversations around acceptable risk, and create conditions for sharing insights from mistakes, mishaps, and failures. Resilience often comes from developing capabilities in response to past failures. Smart and safe failure means embracing risk-based thinking. A mindset that views risk as a resource will help to counter magical thinking and promote openness to learning from setbacks.
- Location 2185
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A team’s sense of purpose needs to be refreshed over time. People become complacent. Remind them about the project’s purpose in meetings. Find opportunities for team members to present their work and accomplishments so they can explain to others how their work fits into the greater whole.
- Location 2193
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Alex “Sandy” Pentland, “The New Science of Building Great Teams,” Harvard Business Review 90 (April 2012): 60.
- Location 2201
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Denise A. Bonebright, “40 Years of Storming: A Historical Review of Tuckman’s Model of Small Group Development,” Human Resource Development International 13, no. 1 (2010): 111–120.
- Location 2203
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David J. Teece, Gary Pisano, and Amy Shuen, “Dynamic Capabilities and Strategic Management,” Strategic Management Journal 18, no. 7 (August 1997): 509–533.
- Location 2208
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Jean-François Harvey, Henrik Bresman, Amy C. Edmondson, and Gary P. Pisano, “Team Learning and Superior Firm Performance: A Meso-Level Perspective on Dynamic Capabilities,” Working Paper No. 19-059, Harvard Business School, Boston, December 2018, revised January 2020.
- Location 2211
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Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden, Sense and Respond: How Successful Organizations Listen to Customers and Create New Products Continuously (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2017).
- Location 2213
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Teece, Pisano, and Shuen, “Dynamic Capabilities and Strategic Management.”
- Location 2216
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NASA Safety Center & Office of the Chief Knowledge Officer, Goddard Space Flight Center, “STEREO: Organizational Cultures in Conflict,” Selected NASA Case Studies (February 2009): 14–23, https://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/pdf/452484main_Case_Study_Magazine.pdf.
- Location 2217
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Charles J. Pellerin, How NASA Builds Teams: Mission Critical Soft Skills for Scientists, Engineers, and Project Teams (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2009), 54. This book offers an in-depth explanation of how leaders have used 4-D to conduct team interventions for NASA.
- Location 2221
- 1resource, 1action, collaboration,

Terry Little, “The Goal,” in Project Management Success Stories: Lessons of Project Leaders, ed. Alexander Laufer and Edward J. Hoffman (New York: Wiley, 2000), 120–121.
- Location 2223
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Karl E. Weick, Sensemaking in Organizations (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, 1995).
- Location 2226
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Connie Gersick, “Time and Transition in Work Teams: Toward a New Model of Group Development,” Academy of Management Journal 31 (October 1988): 9–41.
- Location 2229
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Charles Duhigg, “What Google Learned from Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team,” New York Times Magazine, February 25, 2016, MM20.
- Location 2234
- teamwork, collaboration, 1resource/article, group performance,

Anita Woolley, Thomas W. Malone, and Christopher F. Chabris, “Why Some Teams Are Smarter than Others,” New York Times, January 16, 2015, SR5, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/18/opinion/sunday/why-some-teams-are-smarter-than-others.html?.
- Location 2236
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Anita Woolley and Thomas W. Malone, “Defend Your Research: What Makes a Team Smarter? More Women,” Harvard Business Review 89, no. 6 (June 2011): 32–33, http://hbr.org/2011/06/defend-your-research-what-makes-a-team-smarter-more-women/ar/1.
- Location 2239
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Scott E. Page, The Diversity Bonus: How Great Teams Pay Off in the Knowledge Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), 27.
- Location 2246
- diversity, knowledge economics, group performance,

Katherine W. Phillips, “What Is the Real Value of Diversity in Organizations? Questions Our Assumptions,” in The Diversity Bonus, by Scott E. Page (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), 229.
- Location 2250
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Kathryn B. McEwen and Carolyn M. Boyd, “A Measure of Team Resilience: Developing the Resilience at Work Team Scale,” Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine 60, no. 3 (2018): 258–272, https://doi.org/10.1097/JOM.0000000000001223.
- Location 2264
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Sherin Shibu and Shana Lebowitz, “Microsoft Is Rolling Out a New Management Framework to Its Leaders. It Centers around a Psychological Insight Called Growth Mindset,” Business Insider, November 11, 2019, https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-is-using-growth-mindset-to-power-management-strategy-2019-11. See also Robert Martin, “Resilience Message: Change Your Mindset, Change Your World,” US Army War College Archives, August 23, 2016, https://www.armywarcollege.edu/news/Archives/12534.pdf.
- Location 2269
-

Where might that basis for collaboration come from? A long process of working together on official negotiations can gradually build the necessary confidence. Shared professional competence is also an important source of trust and respect. Engineers and others in related technical fields earn one another’s respect by displaying knowledge of their craft; they are, in effect, members of an informal community of practice, even when they live and work in different countries and have not previously been acquainted. They stand together on the common ground of a particular technical discipline. Another source of cooperative effort is demonstrated commitment to a clearly defined shared goal, proof that your partners are working toward the same important end that you are. Some confidence that your future partners want what you want is essential from the beginning. This sense of mutuality must be demonstrated and strengthened again and again during the course of the project.
- Location 2327
-
- [note::Collaboration = Trust + Shared Goal
Trust = Working Proximity + Respect + Shared Competence]

As the early history of preliminary ISS work suggests, a critical lesson for other large, culturally and geographically dispersed projects is that the necessary planning and negotiation take a lot of time and thoughtful diplomatic effort. Rushing to get to the “real work” is a potentially fatal error. Those early stages provide an essential foundation that will support the final structure.
- Location 2381
-

This is another key lesson for global projects: success depends on hiring people who have the cultural and relationship skills needed to foster agreement and cooperation, not just people with the necessary technical expertise.
- Location 2413
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Workable flexibility in operations and management depends on clearly distinguishing between bedrock principles that must be followed to avoid chaos and the areas where rigid adherence to detailed rules is unnecessarily restrictive and counterproductive.
- Location 2433
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- [note::I think The Leader Lab talks about this - achieving alignment by explicitly communicating priority in terms of must/should/could do and the level of quality desired]

Unless the teams are working toward a common result clearly understood and valued by all, no amount of mutual trust and respect will create the necessary coordination.
- Location 2451
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Tim Howell, a former ISS engineer, worked on Design Knowledge Capture (DKC), an initiative started in late 1997 to create a repository of real-world knowledge about elements of station design. The initiative was a response to the certainty that some or much of that mainly tacit knowledge would be lost over the possible thirty-year life of the station if nothing were done to preserve it.
- Location 2461
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“Capture, Index, Share” was the initiative’s slogan. Contacts at organizations involved in ISS design directed the DKC team to subject matter experts, especially the ones about to retire or join other programs. Discussions that focused on the essentials of how things actually work were video-recorded and the content indexed by topic on the DKC website so engineers could easily find what they needed.
- Location 2470
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The DKC team spent eight hours with a designer of an EVA airlock system, interviewing him and videotaping his tour of the airlock being assembled at his facility. A few months later, the engineer left the company. In many organizations, his departure would have meant a damaging loss of knowledge about the how and why of the system. The DKC initiative work avoided that common problem.
- Location 2477
- knowledge codification,

Managing the Unforeseen
- Location 2517
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Because it is impossible to plan for every possible contingency, having the freedom to respond to novel situations in novel ways is essential. As suggested, that flexibility has two sources: avoiding rigidity in procedures and regulations that would inhibit new approaches, and building strong working relationships that encourage mutual aid and entrust partners to act responsibly.
- Location 2519
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Invest time and effort in establishing mutual trust and understanding among participants. Organizations driven to get things done as quickly as possible are in danger of shortchanging this critical step. Without essential planning, negotiation, and relationship building, efforts to hit the ground running will lead to painful stumbles.
- Location 2551
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Hire people with relationship skills. The process of relationship-building recognizes that a lot of good work gets done through informal networks of relationships known as social capital. The ISS story is full of examples of problems solved and agreements reached thanks to personal connections developed between participants during the process of working together toward a shared goal.
- Location 2554
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Face-to-face communication matters. Much of the coordination of dispersed work happens remotely, using the increasingly sophisticated and reliable collaboration tools now available. But critical aspects of complex projects demand rich dialogue, subtle understanding, and trust that are only possible when people are physically together at work and in social settings. Difficult negotiations, key decision-making, responses to crises, and analysis of ambiguous information all call for in-person collaboration.
- Location 2559
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Involve everyone early. Part of achieving agreement and commitment is bringing all players to the table from the beginning and giving them a voice in planning and development. That early participation creates a sense of ownership and commitment that would be much harder to come by if plans were presented to teams as a fait accompli, a set of orders to be carried out.
- Location 2566
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Build in flexibility. The history of the station also makes clear the importance of flexibility in negotiation, planning, and operation. Any project that has a long life is going to run into challenges and opportunities that cannot be addressed by a rigid set of rules. People need sufficient autonomy to deal with the unexpected. Flexibility also leaves room for the various teams to make unique contributions to the project.
- Location 2569
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Focus on the purpose. Spend time ensuring that all participants understand the aim of the work and share a commitment to achieving the goal. Keeping the shared goal visible throughout the project helps overcome conflicts and problems that are likely to arise.
- Location 2575
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ASK Magazine staff, “The Challenge of Collaboration,” ASK Magazine 47, August 1, 2012, https://appel.nasa.gov/2012/08/01/the-challenge-of-collaboration/.
- Location 2583
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One result of radical uncertainty is epistemic uncertainty. All knowledge is temporal. A physicist working at the turn of the twentieth century could scarcely have imagined that the laws of classical mechanics would not hold at the quantum level. What works for today may not work for tomorrow, and this is particularly true as the velocity of change increases.
- Location 2659
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Stopping the clock is not always possible, but our experience is that too often the perceived need for speed shapes the decision-making reality.
- Location 2670
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- [note::This indicates the importance of continually communication the actual priority of tasks in days/weeks and the impact if those deadlines are not met. Otherwise, your direct reports will assume urgency when there is little/none.]

As we write this, Google has established a low-cost certification for information technology professionals that provides highly transferable skills in some of the most common computer languages in use today.9 At first blush, this sounds like a wonderful gift that can help to level the playing field in a deeply unequal society. But it quickly raises questions about the educational priorities of a tech firm with a market capitalization of $1 trillion. What aspects of ethics and social responsibility will be taught? Where will judgment and contextual thinking fit into the curriculum? How will a workforce trained by and for a private sector firm that owns some of the most powerful algorithms in the world learn to make decisions that have consequences for billions of people?
- Location 2707
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- [note::Great points - what kinds of important educational objectives are being left out of curriculums developed by tech firms?]

Access to critical real-time data is essential, but it is a category error to mistake curated data for reality. Leading organizations through radical uncertainty is not the same as piloting an aircraft through foul weather. It’s not possible to rely on instruments to hit the middle of the runway 99.9 percent of the time.
- Location 2719
- leadership, metrics, reality, project management, program management,
- [note::Don't confuse metrics with reality]

AI and machine learning will continue to tackle tasks that were once thought to be the exclusive province of technical experts (just ask any radiologist), but the social problems inherent in teamwork, collaboration, and organizational culture will always come down to people.
- Location 2736
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If we have emphasized one theme throughout this book, it is that focusing on the human dimension of project work offers the greatest potential for return on investment to an organization, its stakeholders, and society. As we said in the introduction, projects run on knowledge that can be technical, organizational, or political. Teams function within organizations that empower or constrain them through a combination of bureaucratic means such as governance and intangibles such as culture and a shared sense of mission and purpose. They explore, fail, improvise, and maneuver in response to challenges they didn’t or couldn’t anticipate, and as a result they learn the only way they can: together. The starting point for knowledge is not information. It is people.
- Location 2739
- favorite, project management, management, group governance, teamwork, collaboration, group performance,