How Do Rocket Scientists Learn? (aka, knowledge management lessons learned at Goddard, NASA)

NASA creates things that don’t exist yet. Doing that takes incredible talent. At NASA, the talent lies not in its complex technologies, shuttles, spaceships, or intranets, but rather in its people.

The products are certainly breathtaking and wondrous, but the success of the things that come out of NASA are a reflection of the knowledge of and collaboration between thousands of brilliant people.

“we didn’t hire smart people so we could tell them what to do; we hired them to tell us what to do.”

people with similar backgrounds and skills should be interchangeable

to make sure that anyone from a particular unit that is assigned to a project has all the skills and knowledge developed in that content area within the unit. Each mission should get the knowledge of the whole department when you work with an individual.

Knowledge Management is “better application of collective knowledge to the individual problem. So we need to develop some systems and do a little more work to share collective knowledge and make us smarter.”

At Goddard, it really seems like it is about empowering people to share and reflect on what they know best.

I really like that they put people in the center of this work, and start from a place of abundant knowledge in people rather than a lack of information in systems.

If you really want to be able to get rapid, trustworthy answers or enhance or accelerate results on a project, it will be important to develop those strong ties.

Main Takeaway: Social media has a lot of potential, but you need to think about how to facilitate different kinds of (online and offline) relationships between people so that their thinking is improved, innovation occurs, they can get quick answers to complex problems, in order to enhance and accelerate business outcomes.

creating and capturing the knowledge at the same time.

in order for this to truly work people have to be willing to collaborate in the open throughout the project lifecycle.

If you share what you know and what you don’t know in the middle of a project, you give people an opportunity to share specific knowledge that can help you in the moment. If it works, this can help save time and money.

Main Takeaway: Sometimes learning in public is a difficult process, but the feedback, support, and resultant improvements are worth it. Read more at www.govloop.com