Getting Unstuck: Learning from Apollo – a Conversation with Charles Fishman
“I think that what we can take from going to the moon – what we can take from Apollo in the 1960s – is the sense that there are no problems big, so big that we can’t tackle them and wrestle them to the ground. They didn’t know how to go to the moon, and eight years later, they had done it. Americans will do what they are rallied to do.”
Today on Getting Unstuck
My teen years coincided with the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo space programs of the 1960s. To say that I was captivated is an understatement. I was aware of the space race with the Soviet Union and what was at stake for the nation, but what held my attention was the complex answer to the simple question: “How are they ever going to…?”
Like millions around the world, I watched Neil Armstrong descend Eagle’s ladder into history. At the time, I my mid-western self was huddled around a small black and white TV in Polson, Montana where I was spending the summer of 1969 working in a lumber mill. The image on the TV may have been grainy, but it was grainy with pride and awe.
When journalist Charles Fishman published One Giant Leap among the plethora of books and articles that hit the bookstores and newsstands this past year, I secured my copy from Audible faster than you can say “That’s One Small Step for Man, One Giant Leap for Mankind.” Why Charles’ book? Because he focused on the people and the stories behind the headlines that made the program successful.
I also knew that I wanted to secure him as a guest on “Getting Unstuck” because of our focus on change that helps individuals and organization achieve their desired outcomes and have the impact they want to have. And the Apollo program, which involved some 400,000 scientists and engineers, and thousands of contractors and subcontractors was all about change: doing things differently than had been done before – in many cases, inventing machines and processes that didn’t exist.
The collective effort on Apollo overcame innumerable hurdles and setbacks, including the deaths of three astronauts. It required massive changes in computing, rocketry, organizational management, problem solving and attitudes. Fundamentally, it required everyone to remain insanely curious, to experiment to find out what worked, and to learn that what has never been done before didn’t mean it can’t be done now. President Kennedy may have laid down the challenge to the nation to “commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth,” but as anyone on the project would tell you, knowing how to go to the moon and back was an entirely different matter.
The team simply didn’t know what it didn’t know:
Charles engaging in all important research for his book, One Giant Leap.
• In the early ’60s, a rocket that was powerful enough to get astronauts to the moon didn’t exist. Nor was there an agreed-upon system to get them on and off the moon.
• Computers, which were going to be the single most critical component of navigating in space, were at the time the size of a large refrigerator or walk-in closets. Imagine that inside what we know today as the tiny confines of the Apollo Command Module.
• No one knew how to undock, dock, and re-dock two spacecraft in space. Solving that problem became a key determinant of success.
• Mathematics certainly existed, but the extremely complicated math formulas required to determine flight paths, and orbits, and docking maneuvers didn’t.
Oh, those pesky details.
And that becomes the focus of our conversation in this interview. Apollo becomes the backdrop, the historical context if you will, for talking about thinking and doing things differently.
“I’ve been amazed at the power of the clarity of the mission. Kennedy’s charge to go to the moon by the end of the decade and come back safely, people took that so seriously. And the simplicity and clarity of it doesn’t cover up or camouflage, the complexity behind what was necessary. But no one was ever confused about what they were doing. Does what we’re working on right now help us get to the moon, and back safely by 1969? That was the question for every moment.”
For reflection
Charles makes a particularly salient point at the end of the conversation when he addresses why we’re challenged as a nation to undertake an Apollo-type program relative to climate change. Listen especially for the points he makes regarding leadership and social behavior.
For more information
One Giant Leap on Amazon
50 Days to the Moon – Charles’ series of essays on Fast Company
These essays are a slice of the most fun elements of the race to the Moon. About one-third of them are about things that aren’t in the book at all e.g., the role of cigarette smoking during Apollo and NASA’s very early plan to use prison inmates as astronauts.
Jeff’s article on the role of constraints and the particularly powerful type of thinking that underscored many of Apollo’s innovations.