Design Your Culture, Apollo 13 Style
Are you worried about how to create culture now that hybrid work seems here to stay and COVID variants are extending work from home? Today’s blog offers inspiration from an unlikely source for the third step on the Path Forward 2 Work, Designing Your Culture.
An iconic movie line spoken by Astronaut Jim Lovell, played by Tom Hanks in the film Apollo 13, was quipped by a generation every time something went wrong in the summer of 1995.
Burn the steaks on the grill? “Houston, we have a problem.”
TV on the fritz? “Houston, we have a problem.”
Someone not show up for work? “Houston, we have a problem.”
Misplace your keys? “Houston, we have a problem.”
In the last 18 months, this phrase has not been part of our vernacular despite the fact that, indeed, we have had many problems. Maybe because 1995 was a long time ago, even for classic films. And maybe because, with all that’s happened, we would’ve uttered this phrase so many times in one day or week that it would just be too discouraging!
But right now, as we grapple with ongoing disruptions, uncertainty, and continued changes that upend the way we work, this is a good time to revisit and draw inspiration from Apollo 13.
It’s a story of professionals who spent their entire careers preparing for a once-in-a-lifetime mission to the moon. But technical failures disrupted their mission, necessitating the mission be abandoned and for them and their team of flight engineers to refocus on a new mission: Getting them home safely to earth. This required all the ingenuity, courage, applied science, and collaboration they could muster.
Yes, this seems relevant to us today.
You can watch the entire movie here - after you finish reading this post! ;)
What Inspired Me
“We’ve gotta find a way to make ‘this’ fit into the hole for ‘this’ using nothing but ‘that.’”
Image credit: Apollo 13 by Imagine Entertainment and Universal Pictures, 1995.
Here’s the scene from the film that’s inspiring me right now, that we are helping teams to tap into on their Path Forward 2 Work.
(If you watch it now, be sure to come back and find out why it’s important!)
Mission Control realizes the astronauts do not have enough oxygen to make it back to earth. With every breath they are expelling carbon dioxide into the capsule slowly poisoning themselves. The NASA flight engineers back on earth gather together around a table where boxes of stuff are literally dumped out. This, they are told, is what the astronauts have in the spaceship.
Image credit: Apollo 13 by Imagine Entertainment and Universal Pictures, 1995.
Their challenge: Retrofit a square carbon dioxide filter to fit in a round receptacle to clean the air in the capsule so they have enough oxygen to make it back to earth. Create a prototype the astronauts can build themselves. Use only what’s on this table.
In the iconic scene, the engineers sort through all the stuff and fashion a solution. Later, over the radio, they teach the astronauts to build it. And Tom Hanks, Kevin Bacon, and Bill Paxton, errr, I mean, Astronauts Jim Lovell, Jack Swigert, and Fred Hayes, make it back to earth!
What’s that have to do with us today?
Most of us have had significant disruptions to our business models and operations. Our old strategic plans for 2020-2025 have largely been scrapped. Our mission may be the same, but how we achieve it has probably changed. What customers want, what employees expect, what is valued, what suppliers can provide, and more have all changed. We are grappling with how work will be done, by whom, and where. And once those decisions are made, what cultural practices will support our success?
How do we create a strong culture now?
The challenge of culture is confounding many leaders who have come to value culture as a competitive advantage, embracing Peter Drucker’s maxim that “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” But the cultural reinforcers we are familiar with were largely dependent upon being in-person. Because of this concern, some leaders are insisting on a fulltime return to the office, a decision not driven by business requirements like equipment location, customer needs, employee satisfaction, licensing, or efficient handoffs, but by concern for culture.
Culture is created when we work together.
No matter where, when, or how we work, we are creating culture. As we work, we share beliefs, values and assumptions about how we work. We adopt habits, norms, rituals, celebrations, and practices that communicate what is important and expected. This is our culture. So we absolutely have culture right now during work from home, hybrid, or other variations of work.
But the real question is, how do we create a positive culture? What we have now may not be totally satisfying. So how might we strengthen our culture to better live our values and achieve our purpose within the boundaries of our opertional realities?
In many cases we’ve been trying to cope as best we could. Some things have worked well while others have not.
But in this time of limbo, we may not have completely embraced our new reality and the challenge of actually designing new cultural norms within that reality. We need to follow the example of the Apollo 13 NASA engineers.
It’s time to dump it all on the table and get creative!
We should gather our team members, virtually or in-person, and dump on the proverbial table all our organizational “stuff” - our customers’ new expectations, our employees’ new expectations, our refreshed values, our new operational requirements, and so on. This is the stuff we have to work with, and just like those flight engineers who were told, “We’ve gotta find a way to make ‘this’ fit into the hole for ‘this’ using nothing but ‘that’” — we have this culture design challenge:
“We’ve gotta find a way to make a new set of cultural practices fit into these operational realities using nothing but ‘that’.”
We should engage our whole team in this challenge. After all, they figured out how to make our businesses and operations work this year. They have the ingenuity, care, and commitment for the task. And here’s a bonus: People are more likely to support what they help to create.
Whatever your “stuff”, your team can design cultural practices to reinforce your values and achieve your shared purpose.
Will you have hybrid work with team members in the office on varying schedules?
Do you want the option of hiring from multiple timezones?
Do you need customer interactions to be fifty-fifty in person and virtual now?
Can work hours or location be flexible as long as the work gets completed on time?
Are Millenials becoming a larger portion of your workforce and ascending to leadership?
Are balance, trust, well-being, and belonging rising to the top as core values?
Are you struggling with communication and visibility?
Do you want to make work more human-centered? More climate-friendly? More equitable and just?
With these kinds of considerations, invite your team to the challenge. Tell them:
“We need your help to create the very best work experience possible, with positive habits and norms that support our shared values, with open information sharing, with learning and growth opportunities, with strong relationships, sharing stories about what matters to us, with celebrations and rituals that are fun and lift up our best work. How do you think we can best do these things? What might that look like? What’s important to you? Let’s design our work culture together.”
Host a series of workshops, gather all their input into a set of new practices, and try out these ideas. Check in periodically to see what’s working. Make it fun. Make making the cultural practices part of the culture. Retire with humorous ceremony what doesn’t work. Celebrate what everyone ends up loving. Keep circling back and creating.
Who, you might ask, will lead this effort? While executives should sponsor this, your middle managers can be deployed to lead and coordinate it. A lot of middle managers don’t know what their new role is if they are not in the office watching over employees. Instead, managers can champion culture as a key to performance, in addition to coaching and supporting employee well-being. Another option is for managers to collaborate with and perhaps be coached by internal change managers, strategic HR business partners, and organization development partners. More on the new work of managers in a future post.
Your Apollo 13 Cultural Challenge
Remember, if the Apollo 13 astronauts had ignored the oxygen levels in the tanks, they would not have made it home to earth.
If the flight engineers had built their solution out of parts that were not in the spacecraft, the astronauts would not have been able to replicate the prototype and would not have made it home to earth.
In the same way, we have to work within our new realities. That is true for operations decisions, and its true for culture too. It’s time to stop looking back at our broken “space ship” and the way things used to be. Instead, it’s time to design operations and cultural practices that support our values and lead to the performance we need in the new reality.
Culture can still be your competitive advantage! And designing it is Step 3 on the Path Forward 2 Work.
Get our Path Forward 2 Work Map and Assessment, and let us know if you’d like to talk about support for going Forward 2 Work.
This is the next in a series of posts examining the five key steps on the Path Forward to Work. After “Reconnect with Care” and “Discover What’s New”, this is Step 3, “Design Your Culture.”
