(Note: Don't miss my post from yesterday--a recap of a lecture given by Stephen Hawking on Monday. Along with this post, that completes the two recaps I've been promising on Twitter.)

On Wednesday, I gave a talk at the Spring 2008 NASA Masters Forum, a semi-annual meeting that brings "together some of the best project managers and engineers from NASA, private industry, and other government agencies." I received the invitation from the editor of NASA ASK Magazine--who I met by chance on an airplane several months back. As mentioned previously, I have an article published in the most recent issue of that magazine, and my presentation yesterday was essentially on the same topic: lessons NASA program managers can learn from the teams competing for our prizes--especially the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge.

When writing that article, I put in calls to several of the teams competing for that Challenge. I told that that I had a an opportunity to be a mouthpiece directly to a group of NASA Program and Project Managers, and that I wanted to give these team members an avenue to pass along lessons that might be useful to the agency. In my estimation, a lot of these teams have a bit of a love/hate relationship with NASA--they love what it is meant to do, and love a lot of what it does, but hate the agency's inefficiencies and a number of the policies and directions the agency has taken over the years. However, when presented with an opportunity like this to provide some guidance and direction to the agency, the "love" side of that relationship clearly kicks in, and they were all happy to share.

From those conversation, I pulled out four major points to highlight in my article and, later, in my talk. I hope you'll read the full article (and give me feedback!), but I'll summarize the main points below:

• Build, Test, Fly, Destroy, Repeat. I could (and, at some point, probably will) do an entire blog post on this one. For now, suffice it to say that small, entrepreneurial teams seem to understand better than large government agencies the value of not being afraid to fail every once in a while.
• "Not Invented Here" Leads to "Not Invented". I've mentioned this a few times in the past, but I find continually impressive and heartwarming the extent to which these companies in direct competition with each other for sizable sums of money freely share data, analysis, suggestions, et cetera. Things like the aRocket email list have become great resources for the community.
• Size Matters. Most of our teams / companies are extremely small--in the two to ten people range. Teams this small can work incredibly efficiently. No matter how good a manager is, no one can coordinate labor among a group of 25 people the way that, say, a father/son team like Unreasonable Rocket can.
• We're Entrepreneurial Space, and We're Here to Help. Many of the above lessons--especially "Size Matters"--could never be applied by NASA. Although spinning off small "tiger teams" or "skunk works" operations is possible (and often advisable), there are some projects which by necessity involve large numbers of people. Additionally, political and financial realities sometimes mean that certain practices that work well for a small entrepreneurial company can't be put into place at a large government agency or major prime contractor. For those types of occasions, I urged the program mangers in the room to think about how theycan engage the private community to outsource work--taking advantage of those companies' efficiencies when they can't be copied. This last bullet point is extremely similar to what was talked about at the US Air Force / FAA-AST Summit a few weeks back, so I presented a condensed version of my notes from that event.

I stuck around after the talk for a few hours, and had a chance to listen in as the participants engaged in a recap session going over what they'd heard in the first day and a half of the Masters Forum. It was clear that many of the attendees had quickly parsed my talk into some valuable nuggets to take home, as the focus of the comments seemed to be on two main topics: incentive structures for teams or individual employees; and how to view risk as a positive tool, rather than something to be feared. The first one has obvious bearing on any X PRIZE talk; the second is a good way to boil down the "Build, Test, Destroy, Repeat" section of my talk.

I was very pleased to hear these NASA managers talking this way. They raised some interesting dilemmas and though experiments, talking about how NASA can engage risk. It's a fascinating question to think about, in my opinion. As one participant pointed out, NASA is on the one hand uniquely well suited to accepting risk--given their large size, large and relatively stable budget, and reputation for doing really hard things--but on the other hand is uniquely poorly suited to do the same thing--given the huge amount of political and popular pressure on the agency to succeed in every single mission. Figuring out how to balance the two is a difficult and extremely important job for everyone from the NASA Administrator to the media pundit.

So, all in all, I was very happy and honored to have a chance to talk to this crowd. They were clearly a good group of people, and many of them seemed to get quite engaged. One other thing I really liked was that there was a "Graphical Facilitator" there taking a cool set of graphical / artistic notes. Below is my quick photo of the notes the artist took during my talk (Click to view much larger). I thought this was a very useful and very cool idea.

Visual notes taken during my talk at the NASA Masters Forum yesterday.
Artwork by Nora Herting. Photo Credit: W. Pomerantz, X PRIZE Foundation.

Finally, one last note: a while back, during a blog post about Arthur C. Clarke, I mentioned that maybe I should go and talk about the X PRIZE Foundation and about the wonderful things our teams are doing at Science Fiction conventions. I'm pleased to report that I've followed up on that... and that I'll be speaking RavenCon in Richmond, VA, this coming weekend.