What’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind,’ said Neil Armstrong on 20 July 1969.
Over the next few years, eleven other astronauts landed on the moon and got back to earth. Certainly no mean feat then and no mean feat even now.
But can it happen again? Why is it that we haven’t had humans back on the moon since 1972? David W. DeLong in his book, Lost Knowledge: Confronting the Threat of an Aging Workforce, 1 has a very surprising answer—NASA no longer knows how to! He writes:
That’s because sometime in the 1990s NASA lost the knowledge it had developed to send astronauts to the moon. In an era of cost-cutting and downsizing, the engineers who designed the huge Saturn five rockets used to launch the lunar landing craft were encouraged to take early retirement from the space programme. With them went years of experience and expertise about the design trade-offs that had been made in building the Saturn rockets. Also lost were what appears to be the last set of critical blueprints for the Saturn booster, which was the only rocket ever built with enough thrust to launch manned lunar payload.
Wow! Can you believe that?
Do you know whether parts of your organization are reinventing the wheel, not learning from past experiences or making repeated mistakes?
Well, if your organization is even a few years old, this must be happening unless you put in place a robust knowledge management practice. Managers leaving or moving to new assignments always take valuable knowledge with them. This is not because of malice but because they just don’t know how much they know that the company would need. Neither does the company.
This story is from the November - December 2018 edition of The Smart Manager.
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This story is from the November - December 2018 edition of The Smart Manager.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
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