Modern change management: Thanks to the Mercury spacecraft ...

In the late 1950s, McDonnell Aircraft Co. of St. Louis was awarded the prime contract to design and build America?s first space capsule, the Mercury spacecraft.

Upon receiving that contract, the company sent three employees to set up shop at Cape Canaveral, now part of the Kennedy Space Center. My dad was one of those three. So my parents piled us in the ?55 Chevy and drove us to what was then the little hamlet of Cocoa Beach, Florida.

There, for the better part of the next decade, my dad and his colleagues pioneered how to send a human into space and return him safely (it was a ?him? in those days). A normal day in the office for them was answering questions that not only had no one ever answered before; many of the questions no one had ever asked before. They did things no one had done before and even things that some people said couldn?t be done.

That?s where we, as children of the space pioneers, first learned that nothing?s impossible; some things just take longer.

It was a great place to grow up as a kid. Nearly every other kid I knew was from somewhere else, and all of us were there because our dads (again, this was in the early 1960s) worked for NASA or one of their contractors. Everyone was there to put a human on the moon. Whenever there was a manned liftoff in the Mercury, and subsequently the Gemini, program, school was let out so we all could go over to the beach and watch the launch.

Space exploration was a way of life for us kids. I remember my dad coming home and talking about meeting with Al (Alan Shepard) or Gus (Gus Grissom) or John (John Glenn) or the other Original 7 astronauts just like they were any other people at work. I remember the day Alan Shepard came to our Cocoa Beach Elementary School for ceremonies renaming it Freedom 7 Elementary School in honor of his first American voyage into space. I remember my stay-at-home mom jumping into action as part of the team when Walter Cronkite and everyone else descended on Cocoa Beach for a manned space mission.

But what I really learned from those unique times in American history was not apparent until years later, after I?d joined the business world. We, the children of the manned space program, grew up assuming that all work was like our parents? back then: facing the unknown, exploring new ideas and ?thinking out of the box.? What to many people is ?thinking out of the box? was, and still is, just plain old normal thinking for us, the children of the manned space program.

When my family moved back to St. Louis in the late 1960s, I encountered thinking that?s all too common in business today. I was just a kid, but my friends? reactions were, ?Yeah, OK, we?re putting a man on the moon. So what? Let?s talk about the Cardinals or school or The Beatles or something else.? Not that those topics weren?t worthy of discussion. But the spirit of exploration and opening one?s mind to possibilities that had surrounded us in the shadow of Cape Canaveral was missing.

Unfortunately, that spirit of exploration and opening our minds to possibilities is also missing from many workplaces today. Too many environments encourage ?safe,? status-quo thinking. When it comes to change and improvement, the environment encourages employees to say, ?Why should we look at that?? rather than ?Why shouldn?t we look at that?? No one moves forward with thinking like that.

The world hasn?t achieved progress by doing things the same old, easy way. Neither will your business. As John F. Kennedy said when he challenged America to put a man on the moon within a decade, ?We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win.?

Whether you want to send a human to the moon or change your enterprise for the better, you?d be wise to follow the trail left for us by the Mercury pioneers of the manned space program.

Question to ponder: When it comes to change, do you seek to explore possibilities, or do you encourage the same old status quo?

Airports, CA Reitter Consulting LLC, change management, Chuck Reitter, employee motivation, leadership, Small/Medium Businesses

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