Purgeport II

I was fascinated by the process and incredibly complex structure of technology teams working on the Hubble Telescope project.  Fascinated may be a poor choice of words, perhaps mind boggling is better.  I could hardly keep up with the different team functions and many varied objectives all focused on this one aspect of such a large project.  It seemed a miracle to me that there were not more problems.  I’ve got three words, Technical Bureaucratic Chaos.

Strangely enough, I toured the Goddard Space Flight Center last summer with a group of teachers who were attending a Summer Science Workshop that my office collaborated on with the Smithsonian Institute.  I had not read about nor did I know much in general about the Hubble project when I visited; however, I recall having some of the same feelings of being overwhelmed by the complexity of it all.   At the time they were rushing to complete the parts that were to be sent up to repair the Hubble scope.  Even in the spotless and very sterile feeling of the building, there was a sense of urgency.  Our guide told us that it was the President’s push to have Hubble repaired prior to the end of his term.  I bring this up in light of our reading and knowing it was this same urgency, combined with the budget problems, that was the root of the original problem.  Unbeknownst to me at the time, I was seeing (well feeling actually) some of the same organizational issues that were present in the seventies and eighties.

The picture is me wearing a ‘space glove’ that was worn during an old Hubble mission.

I experience some of the same budget and time pressures in my own job.  More to the point, I believe there had been (yet to see what the future holds) a strong tendency of reporting that which was positive and downplaying the negative and that this part of my organization’s culture was systemic and in response to a previous leader.  This was an unspoken fear that I observed in many people, a refusal to disappoint.  Is bureaucracy and bureaucratic chaos built into the climate at some organizations as a means to some end?  Is each part of these types of organizations trying to ground its own feet and justify its worth by creating layers of control?  Someone please remind me to talk about the federal I-9 form in class and the incredible amount of control built around this one form and the organization that now audits and controls it… the Department of Homeland Security.

This all takes me back to organizational culture again and how to influence that from the middle so to speak, without putting oneself in a pickle when that culture might be inconsistent with the larger organizational culture.  Schein (sp?)…I’m hoping you are going to help me out later this semester.