[geofft]

You don't manage to get that high up the ladder if you let a silly thing like your conscience bother you.

(This is not a good thing, to be clear, and whoever figures out a systematic solution to this problem will save countless lives in many generations to come.)

[xapata]

I doubt the people high up the ladder think themselves without conscience. Quite the opposite.

[bostonsre]

I think there are people in both the camps. There are some with consciences that believe in doing the right thing, but also those that are in the sociopath camp. The news is full of the bad leaders that take ridiculous risks (e.g. Boeing) but the good guys don't make the news often.

[geofft]

If there had been good people in power at NASA at the time, the most important thing they could have done to save lives (not to mention run an effective organization) would be to refuse to promote folks without a demonstrable conscience to management positions.

It's all well and good to celebrate Allan McDonald for courageously speaking up, but the hard question is this: had Larry Mulloy or George Hardy ever been in the position where they had to make a decision about whether to courageously speak up, at any point between when they joined NASA and when they got their management roles?

If your promotion criteria says that someone's qualified for a higher-level job because they've been doing good work in fair weather, you have absolutely no way to know whether they listen to their conscience - you simply have no data about what happens when they have to make tough calls. And in fact your process is slightly biased against people who do, because sometimes people who don't will take an unwise risk and get lucky. And so over time, as long as disasters remain less common as worries about disasters, the folks who don't listen to their consciences get a little bit more done during their career compared to their peers.

We know that Thiokol demoted McDonald for speaking up and sidelined the others who also did. This is a system that systematically avoids empowering the good guys.

(And, from all evidence, Mulloy and Hardy were highly capable engineers. I'm not saying NASA should have never hired them - they should have had senior IC roles to fit their strengths and NASA should have looked for folks more like McDonald to make the launch decisions.)

[burrows]

> If your promotion criteria says that someone's qualified for a higher-level job because they've been doing good work in fair weather, you have absolutely no way to know whether they listen to their conscience

How can we possibly know if someone else listens to their conscience? Their conscience is not accessible to anyone else.

[geofft]

I mean, we can go back to the original article for that. Why are we praising McDonald? Why did his obituary get posted here, and why did Mulloy, who passed in October, not get any press? Their consciences were unknowable, yes, but fortunately we're not actually looking for the ineffable conscience. McDonald did a praiseworthy thing, which we wish to encourage. And maybe Mulloy had a stronger conscience, but he just was more deferential to the pressure on him to launch. Maybe he did listen carefully to his conscience, but he had too much of a sense of optimism and so didn't internalize the worry. Who knows? In the end, whatever the reason, he pushed for Challenger to launch.

We're looking for whether someone is empirically willing to make a decision that's unpopular but right, whatever the reason. If they did something like McDonald did, where they were under pressure (including career pressure) to do something, they refuse to do it, and the data eventually shows they had good reason for it, then you've got some data. If they do like his colleague Bob Ebeling did and they write a memo to upper management because they don't feel their direct management is taking concerns seriously, you've got some data, too.

What I'm saying is that, if the person you're considering promoting has never faced a hard decision, and you're promoting them because they had the good fortune to face years of easy decisions through which they could do high-quality work, you know you don't have any data. I agree that it's hard to get the data (and there are obvious problems with that metric turning into a target), but if you don't even try, you're certainly not going to succeed.

All the engineering process in the world will not save you if your hiring and promotion processes incentivize the wrong things. Hence my question: did NASA have a process for deciding that Mulloy and Hardy were good at making life-or-death decisions, or did it simply have a process that determined that they were good engineers?

[M2Ys4U]

> I doubt the people high up the ladder think themselves without conscience. Quite the opposite.

Some might, and just not care. Psychopaths aren't that rare (although how frequent the incidence is within Nasa is I have no idea)

[ghosty141]

> Psychopaths aren't that rare

Any evidence for that statement? Wikipedia and its sources suggest otherwise.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy#Frequency

> 1.2% of a US sample scored 13 or more out of 24, indicating "potential psychopathy"

Those 1.2% are only "potential psychopaths" so the real number might be even less. An illness that only affects <1% of a population can definitely be seen as rare.

[spacemanmatt]

Funny thing about power ladders and sociopaths, though... they do love to climb.

[simonh]

Alan McDonald, the subject of this thread, is clear proof that this is obviously false.

The fact that so many people believe this is true, however, is why avoidable accidents like this happen. Being willing to compromise your ethics isn’t bravery.

[geofft]

Not a single person with McDonald's sense of ethics had the authority to scrub the launch. And multiple ICs, not just McDonald, had serious reservations.

If you want to say that my "You don't" is technically false because, if you listen to your conscience, you might get proven right after seven people die and a major investigation happens that remains world news for decades afterwards, and even then you'll get demoted and sidelined until the US Congress intervenes, then ... yes, you can. I will rephrase to "You usually don't." (But even so, that just gets you promoted at Thiokol, and my statement stands for NASA.)

Why didn't anyone scrub Columbia's launch? Why did the investigation board say that NASA had most of the same cultural and leadership flaws that the Rogers Commission had raised concerns about?

The SREs have a saying, "Hope is not a strategy." You can hope that the person you promote will have a sense of ethics, and maybe they will, but that does nothing to ensure that you'll have ethical decision-making.

[jiofih]

Is it though? The company demoted him and his career was only saved by direct intervention from the congress.

[ClumsyPilot]

It it were true, the management would face consequences and McDonald would have been put in charge, instead he was sidelined.

How many people do C-levels have to kill for heads to roll?

[177tcca]

Don't have 300 rung ladders.