‘Failure Is Not An Option’: How To Lead In A Crisis The NASA Way

No movie is perfectly historically accurate, but Ron Howard’s masterful Apollo 13 comes surprisingly close, especially Ed Harris’s Oscar-nominated performance as Gene Kranz, then NASA’s Director of Flight Operations, who utters the movie’s most memorable line: “Failure is not an option.” The real Kranz never actually said that, but he nevertheless chose it as the title of his autobiography, saying that it expressed the real spirit of the people in Mission Control. Apollo 13 may have been Kranz’s finest moment, but it was a different mission that gave rise to his mantra for what NASA should be: “Tough and competent.” After the deaths of three astronauts in a launchpad fire, Kranz rallied his team with as good an example of immediate crisis leadership you can find. The “Kranz dictum” remains at the center of NASA’s self-image:

Spaceflight will never tolerate carelessness, incapacity, and neglect. Somewhere, somehow, we screwed up. It could have been in design, build, or test. Whatever it was, we should have caught it. We were too gung ho about the schedule and we locked out all of the problems we saw each day in our work. Every element of the program was in trouble and so were we. The simulators were not working, Mission Control was behind in virtually every area, and the flight and test procedures changed daily. Nothing we did had any shelf life. Not one of us stood up and said, "Dammit, stop!" I don't know what Thompson's committee will find as the cause, but I know what I find. We are the cause! We were not ready! We did not do our job. We were rolling the dice, hoping that things would come together by launch day, when in our hearts we knew it would take a miracle. We were pushing the schedule and betting that the Cape would slip before we did.

From this day forward, Flight Control will be known by two words: "Tough" and "Competent". Tough means we are forever accountable for what we do or what we fail to do. We will never again compromise our responsibilities. Every time we walk into Mission Control we will know what we stand for. Competent means we will never take anything for granted. We will never be found short in our knowledge and in our skills. Mission Control will be perfect. When you leave this meeting today you will go to your office and the first thing you will do there is to write "Tough and Competent" on your blackboards. It will never be erased. Each day when you enter the room these words will remind you of the price paid by Grissom, White, and Chaffee. These words are the price of admission to the ranks of Mission Control.

Kranz begins by taking responsibility. He unflinchingly tells his people that each and every one of them -himself included - are directly responsible for the death of three astronauts. He doesn’t focus on a technical failure. Instead he goes to the root cause – the culture and performance of his team. Then he tells them how they’re going to ensure that it never happens again.

Why were “Tough” and “Competent” Kranz’s key virtues for Mission Control? Because Kranz knew that they were the two traits that enabled the success of his mantra for getting through a crisis – “work the problem.” What does that mean? Another great movie about space, Ridley Scott’s The Martian, explains, “You begin. You do the math. You solve one problem, then the next one and the next one. If you solve enough problems, you get to come home.” University of Virginia Professor Thomas S. Bateman lays out the steps in more detail:

1)     Define the problem

2)     Determine goals/objectives

3)     Generate an array of alternative solutions

4)     Evaluate the possible consequences of each solution

5)     Use this analysis to choose one or more courses of action

6)     Plan the implementation

7)     Implement with full commitment

8)     Adapt as needed based on incoming data

This approach isn’t just something from textbooks – it describes how New Zealand was able to outperform just about every other country in its response to Covid-19, which it has functionally completely suppressed. The United States, by contrast, is currently reporting more than ten thousand new cases a day – in Florida. Yet, in a 2019 study by Johns Hopkins, the United States ranked first in epidemic preparedness, while New Zealand ranked 35^th. How did Jacinda Ardern, New Zealand’s Prime Minster, steer her country to safety?

A timeline of New Zealand’s response under Ardern’s leadership reads exactly like a contemporary application of Kranz’s process. New Zealand banned travelers from China on February 3, 2020, only a day after the United States did. After that its course was radically different. New Zealand’s problem, like everyone else’s, was the virus (Step 1). Then they took their time (as I’ve discussed in a previous article, patience is a key component of successful crisis leadership) to decide on how they would handle the situation. A few weeks later, though, Ardern decided to swing for the fences and attempt to eliminate Covid-19 from New Zealand (Step 2). When New Zealand suffered its first coronavirus cases in late February Ardern expanded the travel restrictions to cover more countries (Steps 3-5).

Take a breath, think...and work the problem.

By early March, however, New Zealand’s case numbers were increasing. The government took in this new data and then moved to its fallback plan, where anyone entering New Zealand had to quarantine for 14 days and large gatherings were banned (Steps 8, then 3-5 again). As these measures were implemented, the New Zealand government was making its plans for further escalating its measures against the virus (Step 6).

On March 21 Ardern announced a four-level alert level system, with the severity of the alert determining the nature of the lockdown in response. It was initially set to 2, but two days later Ardern announced that it would be raised to Level 3, and would go all the way to Level 4 on March 26^th, which imposed a full nationwide lockdown on the country. The Level 4 lockdown was far more restrictive than anything attempted in the United States, even in New York City – it “meant grocery stores, pharmacies, hospitals, and petrol stations were the only commerce allowed; vehicle travel was restricted; and social interaction was limited to within households” (Step 7). When Ardern decided that the time for half-measures was over she acted with “full commitment, ” understanding that (as I discussed in a previous post) successful crisis leaders know that at crucial moments, you have to be willing to go all in.

At the same time, New Zealand’s government passed bipartisan economic relief bills and negotiated with banks to alleviate the hardships that New Zealanders faced during the lockdown. By early May the situation had improved so much that the Alert Level was brought back down to Level 2, schools could soon reopen, and lockdown restrictions could be largely lifted (Step 8), with the virus “effectively eliminated” by the end of April.

New Zealand is an island with a relatively small population, which clearly gave it advantages in dealing with the virus. That being said, its response remains a model that more countries should emulate, and that all leaders in a crisis can learn from. There were many ingredients in its success. It would not have been possible, however, if Ardern had not decided to “work the problem” – to pick an ambitious goal, rigorously analyze potential ways of achieving it, commit fully to her chosen approach, and adjust her strategy as new information presented itself. Her approach could not be more different from the one adopted by the Trump Administration, and her results speak for themselves. This approach to leading in a crisis saved the men on Apollo 13 half a century ago, and it saved lives in New Zealand in 2020. When you’re in a crisis, remember the lessons of Gene Kranz and Jacinda Ardern. Take a breath, think…and work the problem.