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CRAZYWORKS

Crazy Might Work | Issue #1 | August 2022

“Half the cost of a project is socially determined.”

John Mather, NASA’s Nobel Laureate in physics

An exclusive interview with the former Director of NASA’s Astrophysics Division and the author of ‘How NASA Builds Teams’, Dr. Charlie Pellerin, helps us understand his journey through NASA and how they built high-performing teams. Dr. Charlie Pellerin shares with us the experiences that shaped his perspective of things as well as the lessons he learnt from others.

In this first episode, Dr. Charlie Pellerin gives us a backstory of the various challenges that he faced on his journey with NASA and how he came up with the NASA 4-D Leadership Program.

CRAZYPodcast is excited to present the release of this interview. Listen or watch episode one here:

Reality-Based Optimism

The willingness to face uncomfortable truths eventually led to the acknowledgement that the vast majority of NASA’s mission failures were ascribable to ‘social context’, not simply incompetence, or human error. Charlie designed the 4-D System to address these deficits, introducing four dimensions of leadership:

Nurturing

People-building with authentic appreciation and shared interests

Including

Team-building through appropriate inclusion and avoiding wasteful over-inclusion

Visioning

Vision-building by embracing new ideas and innovation from a base in hard reality

Directing

System-building to create alignment across roles, accountabilities and levels of authority

Astronaut Spacewalking

NASA 4-D Leadership Program for High-Performing Teams

Interested in learning the secrets of NASA's highest-peforming teams? Or want to know how your team fares against NASA? Join our public, virtual NASA 4-D Spring Program starting in October 2022, or contact us for an in-house program. Register Here!