Thursday, March 09, 2023

The Apollo 13 Mission: The Shift


There were about five instances of goal revision. The most dramatic was the shift in goals from trying to continue the mission while repairing the problem, to calling the mission off and concentrating on returning the astronauts safely. In hindsight, this seems like an obvious shift, but the mission controllers and the astronauts resisted it. In industrial settings, such as running a manufacturing or production process, supervisors have trouble with this type of breakpoint, where they have to abandon business as usual and move to an emergency mode. Sometimes they wait too long to make this shift.

- From Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions by Gary Klein

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