We choose to go to the moon. 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, and the others, too.

The NASA of today is probably at least 100× larger than the agile agency that launched those Apollo missions back in the 60′s, and, according to an article published by NPR, their bureaucracy is employing a lot of “innovation-blocking behaviors.” Not satisfied with the status quo, a veteran astronaut created a satirical video intended to call out the problems he’d been seeing at the agency. Watch this video and see if any of it rings true for you.

OK, so no one’s going to win an Oscar for their performance in this video. Here are the innovation-blocking behaviors I noted while watching the video:

• Blind adherence to existing procedures or specifications
• Compartmentalization
• Emphasis on employee roles in the organization rather than the quality of their ideas
• Fear of challenging the status quo (and those who maintain it)
• Too much reliance on the chain of command
• Tendency to “shoot the messenger”
• Premature acceptance of resource constraints
• Overly complex processes
• Too comfortable in “the comfort zone”
• Valuing process over results
• Too much emphasis on past experience

It’s easy to criticize without suggesting solutions, so I was impressed to see Part II posted 10 days ago.

I think you can summarize Part II pretty easily. Build innovation into your organization’s processes intentionally. When the innovation is “baked in” to the structure of an organization it sends a message to all employees that the organization is keenly interesting in what they have to say. And that is an crucial step in building an innovative culture.