Did I Though?
We live when we succeed. It feels like we’ve conquered the world. And in that moment we may well have. That’s certainly worth celebrating.
When we don’t succeed, we can keep trying, move on to something else, or wallow in failure. We can also just dismiss it with a declaration that we did our best. That seems like a comfortable enough declaration that we can absolve ourselves of anything less than perfection simply and directly because we put our best foot forward. We applied ourselves, practiced and executed as well as we possibly could, and the results just weren’t quite what they should have been.
I have never felt honest with myself saying “I did my best” when I don’t succeed. In fact, I don’t think I can often say it when I DID succeed.
For me to do my best at something, be it a small task, a major project, or something monumental like raising a child, I know I have to put my all into it. Undistracted, unrelented, and driven by the value of the result I’m seeking. If it is a small project, I tend to hyper focus on it and make large strides until it’s done and delivered.
I’ve learned in my professional life to perform a reflective assessment on a project – regardless of how well the project went – for lessons learned. If we don’t see anything we could have improved, we’re probably not being honest with ourselves. Some things don’t require this level of analysis. If I made a sandwich for lunch (a basic ham and cheese is my favorite several days a week), I’m probably not going to review the process or the product unless something about the sandwich was either phenomenally great or terribly bad.
I learned while earning my Six Sigma Green Belt (and later reinforced with my Black Belt) that targeting perfection in most cases is just unnecessary. And even if you’ve got things at 99.9 percent perfection, increasing that to 99.91 percent – in most cases – just has a diminishing return at a rapidly increasing cost.
Sometimes it is worth it, though. I was making the case for the adoption of a Six Sigma methodology on a NASA program at Langley Air Force Base several years ago. Several senior commanders and engineers were in the conference room where I was leading the discussion about program management approaches. To be fair, these guys know their business. Yes, they’re extraordinarily bureaucratic and sticklers for process, but they are also keenly aware of the implications – operationally, financially, and politically – of how they execute their jobs.
For context, not everyone at NASA is a “rocket scientist.” The roles range from pilots and engineers to maintenance and even facilities operations. And when you’ve got half a dozen different wind tunnels on base, each one designed to perform a very different set of tests, there’s a lot to maintain. My favorite was the National Transonic Facility that houses the aptly named National Supersonic Cryogenic Wind Tunnel where they test with speeds up to Mach 23 and temps as low as -250 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s fast and cold. I’m fact, they have a massive liquid nitrogen storage tank on site that enables them to dump as much as 20 tons of nitrogen into the wind tunnel for testing. It’s just impressive.
So as I stood there in front of this crowd of people that are clearly more intelligent than me (also not a rocket scientist), I was arguing for applying Six Sigma to the program. The commander called me out and said they simply cannot target 99.9997 percent perfection. I understood why six sigma (six deviations from the mean; 99.9997% perfection) wasn’t feasible, but the Six Sigma methodology isn’t about reaching that ridiculous level – it’s about measuring performance and constantly improving it.
At one point I used a phrase I’d heard many times before, and immediately regretted it. “Commander, if we shoot for the stars and land on the moon that’s pretty good!”
Half the people in the room tilted their head pretty much to the same angle before the commander responded.
“Mister Haines, you’ve just demonstrated a fundamental lack of understanding of what we do here at NASA. The scenario you’ve described would be a catastrophic mission failure.”
Well, duh. I mean, he was right, but that’s wasn’t the point I was making. Still, I didn’t have the credentials to use analogies on this base. I had the rank and seniority. I had the clearance and the badge. But I didn’t have the white pocket protector. Nearly everyone else did n the room was wearing a white button down shirt and had a white vinyl pocket protector with an almost identical set and order of pens, pencils, and the NASA mini pocket screwdriver. Without that I was an outsider.
I owned it. I accepted that my faux pas exposed outsidedness. What else could I do? Then I remembered something the commander had said several times throughout the discussion. He kept holding out his arms to make a circle shape and declaring that the pipe is only so big. The pipe referred to the budget, the tolerances, and the room for what they can do. And NASA is famous for getting stuck forever with programs they try once.
So as I owned up to my erroneous analogy, the commander put his arms up again and said the pipe was only so big. Then it clicked. I needed to use their language. Something one of the engineers had mentioned the day prior as we toured one of the wind tunnels was that turbulence was their biggest enemy. It creates heat, friction, wear, and pain.
“Commander, why if we could reduce the turbulence in that pipe by ten percent?” I made up the ten percent as a starting point for a discussion. I thought surely we could improve operations across the program by ten percent. To my great discomfort, several people around the room immediately started frantically doing math with their mechanical pencils and graph paper notebooks. What could they be calculating?
I half shuffled over to one lady sitting nearby as she applied her human calculator skills, but I couldn’t wrap my head around what she was calculating. Just as she finished, she looked up and seemed satisfied. Several others did the same. These people had calculated the programmatic effect of reducing operational turbulence by ten percent. I can’t express to you how discomforting it was for me to feel so lost.
You calculated the what? I used a second dangerous analogy – this time in their language – and they ran with it. AND THEY ALL CAME TO THE SAME FIGURES. I have no idea how, but it pushed them into an open discussion. I knew I was in over my head, but I ran with it.
I took this breakthrough as a chance to regroup. I asked someone to help me understand the programmatic issues with a Six Sigma methodology adoption here at NASA Langley. I held out my dry erase marker for him to break it down for me. One of the most expert Six Sigma gurus I’d ever worked with had shown me how this works. You hand someone the marker and let them spell it out. The writing process alone forces a person to structure their thinking as they visualize it.
He spelled out a process that I had not considered. Congress and the media pay a very close eye to anything visible that NASA does. Congress also pays a very close eye to anything NASA doesn’t do. Including failing to meet goals. If you have a budget of $18 billion dollars and your stated objectives are to accomplish X and Y in this fiscal year, anything short of that delivery is reflected in the next year’s budget.
It’s not just a NASA problem. It’s a federal government problem. But most agencies see it differently. If the DEA Special Investigations Unit has a $500M annual budget but only spends $480M in the fiscal year, someone in Congress or the Office or Management and Budget is going to presume they didn’t need that extra $20M and just allocate it somewhere else. It’s a terrible method that drives bad spending behavior. But at NASA the focus is even more on operations that budget.
The commander explained in all caps on the far right of the white board that falling short of any target would directly translate to cuts in operations and budgets. Achieving 99% perfection with a goal of 99.9997% perfection would result in a 0.9997% budget cut. That translates directly to a $5.4M budget cut the next year, and that’s a real hit to programs and people.
I got it. It all made sense. These scientists and engineers and pocket-protected gurus knew their galactic jobs better than anyone, and they knew that they’re always under a microscope. Then it occurred to me to try a different approach. If falling short of the goal by even a fraction of a percent is bad, what happens if we make a mockingly low target?
I walked up to the second white board and grabbed another marker. “Commander, what would happen if we set our program targets at ninety five percent perfection?” I wrote 95/100 on the board.
“That’s preposterous. We can’t fail five percent of the time here at Langley.” His words were excited but his tone was subtle.
I erased the 95/100 and wrote 99/100. “What if we set our target at 99 percent?”
In the same time he asked me which one percent of their operations would it be ok to fail with. He went right where I wanted him to.
“I don’t know, sir. Which programs CAN you afford to fail with?”
“None.”
So I erased the last goal and wrote 100/100, then 100% much larger just below it. “Exactly” he declared. “We must succeed on everything we do or we get hit.”
I put my dry erase marker on the aluminum tray below the white board and agreed. “Sir, if we cannot afford to fail, we need systems and processes in place that mitigate that risk. Constant and repeated improvement. We won’t achieve perfection, but we will be in a measurable path to it.” Or something like that. I hadn’t suddenly become smarter than anyone in the room; I had simply learned to describe improvement in terms that matched their reality.
I went on to explain that Six Sigma isn’t about perfection; it’s about removing programmatic defects as often as you find them. Our goal isn’t 99.9997% perfection; our goal is constant and persistent improvement by eliminating or correcting the processes and systems that enable defective outcomes. Only Nokia and LEGO reach statistical perfection.
The LEGO joke disarmed the situation a bit, and then Frank jumped in and shifted the focus away from who won the debate (before it could be perceived as such) and started leading the room through how we begin the work of understanding and applying Six Sigma.
To this day, I can look back at that project with gratitude and pride for our work on that program. But I still wouldn’t say I did my best. There are half a dozen things I wish I’d done better. What I was really learning in moments like this was that maturity looks less like personal brilliance and more like careful stewardship of the systems that outlive me.