CRAZYWORKS
Crazy Might Work | Issue #1 | August 2022
“Half the cost of a project is socially determined.”
– John Mather, NASA’s Nobel Laureate in physics
An exclusive interview with the former Director of NASA’s Astrophysics Division and the author of ‘How NASA Builds Teams’, Dr. Charlie Pellerin, helps us understand his journey through NASA and how they built high-performing teams. Dr. Charlie Pellerin shares with us the experiences that shaped his perspective of things as well as the lessons he learnt from others.
In this first episode, Dr. Charlie Pellerin gives us a backstory of the various challenges that he faced on his journey with NASA and how he came up with the NASA 4-D Leadership Program.
CRAZYPodcast is excited to present the release of this interview. Listen or watch episode one here:
Reality-Based Optimism
The willingness to face uncomfortable truths eventually led to the acknowledgement that the vast majority of NASA’s mission failures were ascribable to ‘social context’, not simply incompetence, or human error. Charlie designed the 4-D System to address these deficits, introducing four dimensions of leadership:
Nurturing
People-building with authentic appreciation and shared interests
Including
Team-building through appropriate inclusion and avoiding wasteful over-inclusion
Visioning
Vision-building by embracing new ideas and innovation from a base in hard reality
Directing
System-building to create alignment across roles, accountabilities and levels of authority
