The Social Effects on Scientific and Engineering decisions... the Hubble experience

[cbelt3]

http://www.techworld.com.au/article/4200..._from_it_/?

VERY good read.

""There's a bunch of research I've come across in this work, where people say that the social context is a 78-80 per cent determinant of performance; individual abilities are 10 per cent. So why do we make this mistake? Because we spend all of these years in higher education being trained that it's about individual abilities.""


DAMN. We've got a BIG hole in how we teach our young Engineers and Scientists.

[Paul F.]

That *IS* an excellent article!

[Jimmypoo]

If you want even more information of this type — read this book:

http://www.amazon.com/Apollo-Challenger-...1931719322

Professor Tompkins was a professor I had at Purdue. As his post-doc work, he set up the hierarchy for Von Braun
and NASA, so that safety first and low man on the totem pole made the system work.

He then created the Organizational Communication department at Purdue (a specialization subset/major
within Communication, of which I obtained, among others) - and then went off to Kansas to do the same
there with peers to establish another school of impeccable credentials.

He goes back in the book above to find out what in the hell went wrong just a decade or so AFTER he left
and the Germans were gone to cause Challenger on Jan 28, 1986 - one of my defining "JFK events” as a
creature with a memory.

And nobody was better qualified to go back and do the analysis than the person who created it in the first place.

It’s not a happy book to read about organizational failures - especially when you know that there was the
added pressure on them all with the State of the Union speech scheduled that night, and the White House
expecting to be highlighting the first Teacher in Space…

[mattkime]

I felt both joy and frustration reading that article as see similar errors at work on a frequent basis.