I’m a child of the space program ---which says more about my age than about any scientific or engineering intelligence I might have. Or rather don’t have.
I remember vividly watching the Apollo missions, placing flags on a map of the moon, and reading about the astronauts who quickly became my heroes.
The Apollo 13 mission remains one of my favorites --- the story of how, in the face of extreme danger and crisis, a group of engineers successfully brought three astronauts home safely. Although a later mission review report would describe the mission as a failure, I subscribe to Gene Kranz’s view that it was NASA’s “finest hour”.
Many of you familiar with my posts know that I am focusing on the learning cycle of:
Recognize – Extract – Reflect – Apply – Share
I’m using this to think about the process through which individuals and organizations can learn.
And to make my work a little bit more fun, I return frequently to movies and to NASA stories to identify illustrations of each of the steps to help me think through what is happening and what it might look like in real life.
So I stumbled upon an interesting website story --- 13 Things that Saved Apollo 13 --- and I post it here for your reading pleasure.
http://www.universetoday.com/62339/13-things-that-saved-apollo-13/
I’ve read through all the stories and they are really quite interesting. I think you’ll enjoy them.
Anyway, I was working on some content the other day, thinking through the reflection stage in the process, and wanted an illustration of what it might look like in real life.
In reflection, we identify specific things we need to do differently in our work or daily activities that reflect the information, new knowledge or identified behavior change we successfully extracted from the learning moment in an earlier stage. And we begin to create “hypotheses” about specifically what the situation demands of us.
Frankly, I was stumped --- so to lighten the work a bit and have some fun, I returned to the Apollo 13 story and began to ask questions about the mission and the numerous changed behaviors and new processes they put in place across the entire journey. Something leapt out at me as a wonderful example of the “reflect” stage of learning, so I thought I would try it out on you. I am not saying I have it right…but it sure was fun thinking about it in the context of Apollo 13.
If you’re familiar with the story, you know that Ken Mattingly was scrubbed from the mission before launch because he had been exposed to measles while working with another astronaut, which meant that Jack Swigert replaced him on the mission as command module pilot. Mattingly, being the astronaut he was, of course, was angry. But above all else, he was a professional and mission-oriented.
So when the call came for someone familiar with command module procedures to figure out and test a “rebooting procedure” for the command module’s computers, Mattingly was available and responded immediately. You see, the team had been forced to turn off the computers in the command module to save power. And now as the craft approached Earth they would need to fire it back up, upload navigation information, and execute the landing sequence.
But they only had so much power to draw on --- 20 amps, if I remember correctly, so if they simply fired up all devices on the craft at once, they’d blow the fuses and lose power. In other words, the standard procedure would not work.
Here’s where I think Mattingly is displaying the right behaviors for the “reflect” stage of learning.
They are cognizant of the learning moment, have extracted that the devices onboard draw too much energy, and now they must reflect specifically on what matters most and what all this means for the “workflow” ---the process of rebooting computers in space, a procedure never before tried. And Mattingly, played by Gary Sinise in the Ron Howard film, displays great hypothesis building and testing procedures vis a vis the workflow needed to succeed.
In the film there are countless scenes showing Mattingly sitting in the dark, air-conditioned simulator (he demanded conditions similar to the astronauts’ experience), trying different approaches. And after many simulated “fails”, finally, he landed on the right sequence, including only the most necessary devices that successfully restarted the computer.
Now you might be saying, wait a second, isn’t that “apply” ---isn’t he applying what he has learned? I’m open to the argument and certainly I have had this very productive discussion with one of my colleagues. I think it’s an open one.
And maybe it means the cycle, doesn’t look like my earlier diagram but looks more like this, a more integrated experience, where the stages overlap:
Recognize – Extract – Reflect – Apply – Share
Perhaps a more molecular model than a purely linear one.
That would mean each of the stages touch upon each other ---certainly the outputs of one serve as the inputs of another --- but the hard breaks illustrated in my more circular process shown previously should not be as definite as described. I’m open to that.
But to really understand what is going on, it might still be useful to think in terms of distinct stages. And if we do, in this case we see Mattingly “reflecting” quite well on what the extracted knowledge demands for the workflow. And then it was “applied” successfully by the astronauts onboard the craft. More on that in another post perhaps.
So feel free to disagree --- I think it’s fun to conjecture on this, and certainly would not be insulted. I simply want us all thinking about the need to actively reflect on how a learning moment ultimately demands changed behavior in our workflow, our daily behavior, and somehow we need to find and test hypotheses about what we believe the learning moment demands of us.
Hopefully, however, we won’t ever have to sit in a dark, freezing spaceship simulator when we do it.
