April 30, 2004—When the Columbia Accident Investigation Board’s (CAIB’s) seven-month investigation into the February 1, 2003 Space Shuttle Columbia tragedy revealed that organizational safety climate and culture contributed as much to the accident as any mechanical failure, NASA officials began to focus on making mission safety the highest priority throughout the organization. To that end, NASA selected Behavioral Science Technology, Inc., with a 25-year record of behavior-based performance improvement, to facilitate its three-year culture change initiative.
According to CEO C. Patrick Smith, BST is distinguished from other consulting organizations by its technology. Smith says BST’s use of performance improvement and organizational development tools derived from the applied behavioral sciences is a significant departure from the “train and hope” approach frequently associated with culture change efforts. “BST has an unsurpassed record of delivering real behavior change and quantifiable performance improvement in organizations committed to creating a strong performance-oriented culture.” Other organizations that have contracted BST services include the United States Marines Corps, Genentech, GlaxoSmithKline, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Lockheed Martin Missiles & Space Company, and over 1,650 other organizations worldwide.
In communications to employees, NASA leaders have emphasized that the BST-led culture change effort will be the integration point for all other organizational culture efforts related to the CAIB recommendations, including OneNASA, Return-to-Flight, and the Diaz Implementation.
The NASA culture change initiative began in March, using a BST survey to conduct an agency-wide cultural assessment. Results were published on NASA’s Web site. Among the conclusions, the report noted, “Safety is something to which NASA personnel are strongly committed in concept, but NASA has not yet created a culture that is fully supportive of safety.”
In order to improve the agency’s safety culture without compromising its strengths, the culture change effort will include behavior-based leadership development, cognitive bias training, and comprehensive team and individual effectiveness processes. The core of the change effort will involve BST helping NASA personnel to identify the behaviors critical to successful outcomes and implementing mechanisms that systematically capture data on the occurrence of these behaviors.
These efforts will be followed up with data-driven interventions that root out organizational barriers and help individuals adapt to safety expectations. The initiative will engage NASA employees from the agency’s lowest levels to supervisory staff and upper-level management.
