I Was SCARED To Say This To NASA... (But I said it anyway) - Smarter Every Day 293

Preparing for this talk was a humbling process, as these systems are so complicated! I'm grateful for the countless conversations I had with people from all over the country in preparation for this talk. Also, if you feel like Smarter Every Day adds value to your life and you'd like to be in on the Sticker Team and STICK with me, I'd love to have your support on Patreon! Here's the link 👉 www.patreon.com/smartereveryday 👈 Thank you for considerin

Destin, I work at NASA-JSC. Several people sent me this today. Your message is being heard. I will say that the redundancy and testing are still there, but Apollo took incredible risks that we cannot afford today. You are 100% spot on re: not relying on technological miracles. Some of the artist concepts make me wonder if all my work is in vain. NOTE: My opinions are my own. I do not speak for NASA.

NASA Scientists hate this one weird trick...

I am no rocket scientist, but as someone who has spoken up about problems in the workplace only to be fired later, thank you for helping to place a greater sense of value in communication. Not just for those who would speak up, but for those who need to listen.

I'm a 76 year old grandma. I loved this video. You have such amazing thought processes and my curiosity is similar to yours. I'm always asking myself: How did they do that? How does that work? Why did they change it? Can I try it? Thank you for this video. I watched the one on your eclipse photos first. That was so much fun, as at the age of 76 I saw my first eclipse ever, and it was a total eclipse. As an amateur photographer I wanted to see your equipment and was amazed at your results. I am no mathematician, nor an engineer, I am a grade school to college teacher. I ended up teaching medical terminology to nursing students. YOU are amazing! Thank you for giving my curiosity a shot in the arm!

In decades of working in Engineering I've worked with only one engineer that would hand me his design and ask me to tear it apart (a sort of pre-design review - design review). We'd later meet up in a glass walled conference room and discuss it. Often it would get quite animated. I later found out that my coworkers thought we hated one another as they took notice of our sometimes loud discussions. What they didn't know was that after those meetings we would go out to lunch together and yuk it up. In 30 years he was one of the very few engineers that had no ego and instead did whatever it took to make the design better.

I love how the video timeline, described from 14:30, actually describes the presentation. That the presentation started with personality & low complexity, then ramped up the complexity and lowered the personality, and finished with a return to high personality & low complexity. Destin actually modelled the behaviour in his presentation to NASA.

not accepting negative feedback is what made a certain CEO a literall paste for fish to eat near the wreckage of the Titanic

To me its insane how easy it is to listen to you! I think not many people are able to deliver a topic like you do

Destin, you say you were scared, but the importance of the message dictated you speak up. You prepared, you read manuals and reviewed other materials, you interviewed people who knew what happened in the past -- and held on tight to your courage and conviction -- and gave a presentation that hundreds of thousands of people are excited to see! Win-win-win all around. So proud of you!

Destin, this is by far my most favorite of all your videos I have ever seen. I have new level of respect of you after watching this. I enjoyed every second. For those that did not spot it. This was a Masterclass in asking very hard questions in a gentle way. You expertly framed it as a communications issue with no finger pointing. I have been a consultant in strategic IT solutions for more years than I would like to confess and asking these sorts of hard questions, without offending, is not an easy thing to do. It was so brave of you to stand up in front these people and say the things you did! One thing I have learnt over the years is that keep things simple and "if you think it, say it". Don’t be afraid. Great Job!

Watching this a second time, I remembered what an OHS Consultant told me what a lot of his work entailed. A company with a work injury problem would employ him to suggest problem fixes. He would go to the factory floor, ask the workers what the problem was and if they had any ideas on how to fix it. He would take those fixes, write them up in "Managementese language" and present them with a bill for consultancy. His point was that management's reluctance to accept that workers knew their job better than others, led to a breakdown in communication which hampered problem solving.

I worked as a bicycle mechanic for almost a decade and the guy I first trained under was honestly the best within a 200 mile radius of our shop. He still had me test ride and give feedback on every bike he worked on after he deemed the repair complete. If I thought something was off he would address it and explain to me either how/why he had failed to catch what was causing the particular issue or explain why what I had noticed was within acceptable parameters for that particular work order. There was never any negative emotions associated with feedback. We would always check each other's work and took pride in collectively doing the best job we could possibly do. That experience taught me so much on what I wanted my working relationships to look like. It doesn't matter how good you are as an individual, you will always be best as a collective with a unified goal. That only works, though, if you're humble enough to say "Hey, new guy. Tell me what you think about this"

This reminds me of Feyman's take on the Challenger disaster: "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled." — Richard Feynman

I'm an engineer. I have 40 years under my belt. Every single engineering problem in every single company I've worked for, especially the government (who I work for now) had its root cause in the lack of communication. It's always bothered me, I've always spoken out about it, and I've been fired because I called out some executives for their lack of it. What you've pointed out here is 100% correct, and I hope they all listened. FWIW, my uncle, the man who got me interested in engineering at age 9, worked on the Apollo program. It's a small world.

Not sure if this is a super old place to comment - but... GREAT JOB Destin! I am up at 1am now.. and could not stop watching your engaging presentation. I do lectures myself and helped a JPL mission director show his project to senior citizens - but his method was much like your reach to remind the NASA/engineers to simplify. His mission was a flawless success in the late 90s and so was his presentation last year - much like I'm sure your talk hit a nerve with many of those audience members! I especially liked your bike example near the end! Having a 4-year-old myself, I'm constantly amazed with how pliable his little brain currently is! He's topped me conceptually in ways I never imagined a little guy would grasp some deep physical/analytical concepts! ANYWAY... GREAT WORK! I've subscribed and hope to watch many more of your Smarter Every Day talks! THANK YOU again!

I'm sure this is a comment that will be lost in a sea of comments, but you indicated that you'd like to hear what we say so here goes. There should be someone to say something like this at every major project kick-off. I recently retired after a 35-year career with a major defense contractor, and I second you thoughts. The largest, most costly, and easiest to fix problem that I saw was over-engineering. I found out early in my career that if you are fighting to make a design work, it's probably the wrong one. Instead of forcing it to work, back off and rethink the design before you commit too much to it. The right design is almost always elegantly simple, easy to extend, and easy to fix. One of the problems I saw was a tendency to be on the bleeding-edge of technology. Engineers anxious to use the latest shiny toy without asking if it was the right thing to do. Enjoying you channel!

I was a former engineer on the Orion propulsion system working on Artemis-1, 2 and 3. All the folk in our branch used to always joke that Orion was always two years from launching but I don't think it ever really clicked for us just how big of a communication issue was going on, I realize now that a lot of us were just so compartmentalized in our work and not actually seeing the bigger picture of what we were trying to do. So thank you for getting this out into the open Destin. It's important for us to be getting that negative feedback so we can achieve more and be better engineers.

My experience as an engineer is that there is a communication blockade at middle management. I call this the "impermeable layer" inside a company. It is a combination of the fear of embarrassment and fear of loss of power. To overcome this problem, engineers need to learn to communicate themselves. If you are kicked out of a project for talking the truth, you probably wouldn't like to be part of it.

"Guys are we going? You should KNOW THIS" I think this gave me a small anxiety attack 😭