Learning Culture

Building Cultures of Learning at Work

If only it weren’t for the people . . . earth would be an engineer’s paradise.

—Kurt Vonnegut

As an avid scuba diver, Luca Parmitano was familiar with the risks of drowning. He just didn’t realize it could happen in outer space.

Luca had just become the youngest astronaut ever to take a long trip to the International Space Station. In July 2013, the thirty-six-year-old Italian astronaut completed his first spacewalk, spending six hours running experiments, moving equipment, and setting up power and data cables. Now, a week later, Luca and another astronaut, Chris Cassidy, were heading out for a second walk to continue their work and do some maintenance. As they prepared to leave the airlock, they could see the Earth 250 miles below.

After forty-four minutes in space, Luca felt something strange: the back of his head seemed to be wet. He wasn’t sure where the water was coming from. It wasn’t just a nuisance; it could cut off communication by shorting out his microphone or earphones. He reported the problem to Mission Control in Houston, and Chris asked if he was sweating. “I am sweating,” Luca said, “but it feels like a lot of water. It’s not going anywhere, it’s just in my Snoopy cap. Just FYI.” He went back to work.

The officer in charge of spacewalks, Karina Eversley, knew something was wrong. That’s not normal, she thought, and quickly recruited a team of experts to compile questions for Luca. Was the amount of liquid increasing? Luca couldn’t tell. Was he sure it was water? When he stuck out his tongue to capture a few of the drops that were floating in his helmet, the taste was metallic.

Mission Control made the call to terminate the spacewalk early. Luca and Chris had to split up to follow their tethers, which were routed in opposite directions. To get around an antenna, Luca flipped over. Suddenly, he couldn’t see clearly or breathe through his nose—globs of water were covering his eyes and filling his nostrils. The water was continuing to accumulate, and if it reached his mouth he could drown. His only hope was to navigate quickly back to the airlock. As the sun set, Luca was surrounded by darkness, with only a small headlight to guide him. Then his comms went down, too—he couldn’t hear himself or anyone else speak.

Luca managed to find his way back to the outer hatch of the airlock, using his memory and the tension in his tether. He was still in grave danger: before he could remove his helmet, he would have to wait for Chris to close the hatch and repressurize the airlock. For several agonizing minutes of silence, it was unclear whether he would survive. When it was finally safe to remove his helmet, a quart and a half of water was in it, but Luca was alive. Months later, the incident would be called the “ scariest wardrobe malfunction in NASA history.”

The technical updates followed swiftly. The spacesuit engineers traced the leak to a fan/pump/separator, which they replaced moving forward. They also added a breathing tube that works like a snorkel and a pad to absorb water inside the helmet. Yet the biggest error wasn’t technical—it was human.

When Luca had returned from his first spacewalk a week earlier, he had noticed some droplets of water in his helmet. He and Chris assumed they were the result of a leak in the bag that provided drinking water in his suit, and the crew in Houston agreed. Just to be safe, they replaced the bag, but that was the end of the discussion.

The space station chief engineer, Chris Hansen, led the eventual investigation into what had gone wrong with Luca’s suit. “The occurrence of minor amounts of water in the helmet was normalized,” Chris told me. In the space station community, the “perception was that drink bags leak, which led to an acceptance that it was a likely explanation without digging deeper into it.”

Luca’s scare wasn’t the first time that NASA’s failure at rethinking had proven disastrous. In 1986, the space shuttle Challenger exploded after a catastrophically shallow analysis of the risk that circular gaskets called O-rings could fail. Although this had been identified as a launch constraint, NASA had a track record of overriding it in prior missions without any problems occurring. On an unusually cold launch day, the O-ring sealing the rocket booster joints ruptured, allowing hot gas to burn through the fuel tank, killing all seven Challenger astronauts.

In 2003, the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated under similar circumstances. After takeoff, the team on the ground noticed that some foam had fallen from the ship, but most of them assumed it wasn’t a major issue since it had happened in past missions without incident. They failed to rethink that assumption and instead started discussing what repairs would be done to the ship to reduce the turnaround time for the next mission. The foam loss was, in fact, a critical issue: the damage it caused to the wing’s leading edge let hot gas leak into the shuttle’s wing upon reentry into the atmosphere. Once again, all seven astronauts lost their lives.

Rethinking is not just an individual skill. It’s a collective capability, and it depends heavily on an organization’s culture. NASA had long been a prime example of a performance culture: excellence of execution was the paramount value. Although NASA accomplished extraordinary things, they soon became victims of overconfidence cycles. As people took pride in their standard operating procedures, gained conviction in their routines, and saw their decisions validated through their results, they missed opportunities for rethinking.

Rethinking is more likely to happen in a learning culture, where growth is the core value and rethinking cycles are routine. In learning cultures, the norm is for people to know what they don’t know, doubt their existing practices, and stay curious about new routines to try out. Evidence shows that in learning cultures, organizations innovate more and make fewer mistakes. After studying and advising change initiatives at NASA and the Gates Foundation, I’ve learned that learning cultures thrive under a particular combination of psychological safety and accountability.