What makes some teams thrive under pressure while others collapse? In this engaging talk from Prodacity 2025, Ed Hoffman, former NASA Chief Knowledge Officer and CEO of Knowledge Strategies, LLC, shares insights from decades of leadership at NASA, including lessons learned from space shuttle disasters, Mars missions, and large-scale project management.

Hoffman introduces the concept of the Smart Mission—the combination of knowledge, relationships, and purpose that drives high-performing teams. Whether you're leading government programs, software teams, or digital transformation efforts, his insights will help you build resilient teams that can adapt, innovate, and deliver results—even in high-stakes environments.

🔹 Key Topics Covered:

• The Smart Mission framework: Why knowledge and relationships drive success
• Lessons from NASA’s mission control teams & space exploration
• Why trust and collaboration are just as important as technical expertise
• How to lead teams through turbulence & uncertainty
• The role of storytelling, learning, and failure in high-performance cultures
• What government & business leaders can learn from NASA’s approach

🕒 Key Highlights & Timestamps:
[00:03] - Introduction: NASA’s legacy & lessons from space missions
[02:24] - Inside JPL’s mission control during the Curiosity landing
[05:34] - Why no plan survives reality—how great teams adapt
[07:36] - The two essentials of success: Knowledge & relationships
[10:12] - NASA’s culture of mission-driven leadership
[12:45] - Lessons from the Columbia space shuttle disaster
[15:50] - How NASA’s ventilator project during COVID-19 exemplified Smart Missions
[19:15] - The importance of kindness & psychological safety in teams
[22:12] - What businesses can learn from NASA’s problem-solving approach
[25:06] - Final takeaways: How to build a Smart Mission in your organization

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Connect with us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/rise8/

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Ed Hoffman (00:03):

Hello Earthlings. I figured we could go beyond Nashville. Hello Earthlings. I am from NASA. Spent 33 years. There was the founding director of the NASA Academy for program project engineering leadership, which was started up after the Challenger Space Shuttle disaster, and I was NASA's first chief knowledge officer. What I'm going to do in the 20 minutes or so I have with you is to share some of the key tips that to me make the difference between a team, a project, the project, the mission being successful and one that doesn't do that. But I got to start that. This has been an incredible session and round of applause for the Udacity people and the speakers and all things that have been taking place.

(00:52):

I told John as he was coming off, he gave me one of the most important pieces of information when I learned that Goo Goo Clusters is actually a vegetable. So when I speak to my wife tonight and she will ask me, how are you eating? I can say basically just having vegetables. So I preach that opportunity. What I want to basically start with is what leads to success? Basically, my career was brought to NASA. I have a psychology background, organization development, and what they're looking for is the learning, the development, the capabilities to increase the likelihood of mission success in advance of the missions. And there are fundamentally a couple of things broadly that shape everything that we've been talking about. But I want to start with a short little video clip. We'll run for about one minute and it will take you into one of the mission control offices locations, this one at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, where you can see the team watching the curiosity landing on Mars and watch the reaction, watch the tension, watch what's taking place. The only thing that I would say is to watch for is what do you notice about this team? So we will hit the button.

Speaker 2 (02:24):

Things are looking good, coming up on entry reports, entry interface, not beginning to feel the atmosphere as we go in here. It's reporting that we are seeing Gs on the order of 11, 12, 13.2. We are now getting telemetry from Odyssey. We should have fair sheet deploy around 1.7. Parachute is deployed. We are decelerating, has separated where we found the ground, we're down to 90 meters per second at an altitude of 6.5 kilometers and standing by for batch separation. We are in powered flight. We're an altitude of one kilometer descending, standing by for Sky main Sky Crane is started

Speaker 3 (03:42):

Single us. He remains strong, confirmed we got thumbnails.

Ed Hoffman (04:39):

Long after you have forgotten me, you'll probably remember that image. And truthfully, that tells you everything you need to know about mission project team success. There's a lot to unbundle there. We're not going to get into discussion, but knowing these people for a period of a decade, there's a lot that goes into this from the standpoint of reality. A smart mission I define as where there's a commitment to a direction to an approach to where we want to go. We've heard about this for the last two days. We'll hear about it for the day three. Nothing ever goes as planned. Nothing ever goes as planned. The budget, they promise you will be descoped within a week. Nothing ever goes that way. The most effective teams and organizations, they have the capability and talent to respond to it, and it's because they have two things typically in place.

(05:34):

Number one is knowledge. Knowledge is working knowledge. It's the expertise, it's the smarts. Could be the data, could be the ai, could be technology. It's often the relationships, the experiences that we have. So we can go to people and solve that thing that we did not anticipate. You will know that. You'll anticipate that you spend your lives on that. The other thing that has to go with that is relationships. The relationships are built on openness. Exchange enough trust so that I will share with you my knowledge. If I have a trusting relationship with you, then I'll give you what I have. If I am not sure or if even worse I do not trust you, then the knowledge you have for me will be minimal. You need both. By the way, the other thing is true too. I've seen teams that really like each other, but they didn't have the expertise, the tools, the resources.

(06:35):

That's equally doomed in many cases. So the message is you need these two things. I want to give you a couple of stories to give you a example of what we're talking about. I linked this together to Bowie's and his colleagues, lean enterprise principles. Everything that I've heard up to this point is completely consistent with what we're talking about here. And what I consider my potential contribution is when you're thinking about what's happening with this team, with this organization, with this country, do we have the knowledge, the techniques, the technologies, the capabilities to do what we need to do from that knowledge standpoint? Do we have the relationships that are going to help us be successful? Those are the two things that I'm always looking for. Well, lemme tell you the first story. It happened my very first day at NASA and I've told some of my colleagues and friends that I loved working at NASA.

(07:36):

By the way, is there anybody who's from NASA here? No. Okay, well then I can tell any story and you know the difference, but it's an amazing place. It is such a great place that one of the bizarre things that goes through my mind is that if I was reincarnated and I came back, one of the pressure points for the first 18 years of my life would be, how do I get back to NASA? They basically say at NASA, you go for the mission, but you stay for the people, you go for the mission, you stay for the people, right? Knowledge and relationships. Story one was that first day I was brought on board, this was 1983, and the first thing you do, at least in the federal government at that time, is you go to the security office. Basically you sign papers, you sign a commitment to protecting the government and the constitution.

(08:34):

And at least in those days, they fingerprinted you. I dont' know, do they still fingerprint? Okay. Saying yes. I get to the security office not expecting anything and it sounded like a holiday party. There's noise, there's excitement, there's laughter, there's loud voices that are clearly very engaged and I don't know what's going on. I was waiting for the fruit punch and the Reese's and all this kind of stuff. It was just a happy moment, didn't expect it. As they get closer to the line, I see a woman who is the security agent who is taking care and fingerprinting people. And when I get to that line, has a huge smile. She takes my first hand and as she's rolling my fingers, she said, welcome to NASA. You have got to be so happy. This is the greatest organization on earth. Your parents must be so proud of you.

(09:25):

Your friends must be thrilled. I love working here. I take the bus in every day. I tell everybody on that bus, I work for NASA and I tell them how great it is. By the way, we have a launch going up on Wednesday. Launches are amazing. We have the shuttle taking place. She looks at me in the eye and the final finger says, congratulations on being here. I hope you have a wonderful career. I get emotional. I knew this woman for five minutes and I walked away with a whole sense. This is about purpose. If you think that's one instance, I've had many others during out my career, including at the beginning of people doing things that would bore the life out of me, but they were on fire about what they were a part of. And this gets into the notion of, to me it starts with mission.

(10:12):

I'll talk about the smart mission. It starts with mission, but then it has to do with team. The kind of culture, the learning, the knowledge, the kind of collaboration you have. Let me tell you a second story, it's a different one. And it fits in with this larger notion. This goes a number of years later, 2004, 2003 was the Columbia Space Shuttle disaster, time of major reflection. How do we do things differently? For a variety of reasons. I was asked to lead a very small writing team to redo the NASA strategy and governance. And one of the people that I admired considered a friend and a phenomenal leader was Bryan O'Connor. Bryan O'Connor at that time was heading up Safety and Mission Assurance was an astronaut. He led the space shuttle program. And as we're doing this, the administrator at the time was Mike Griffin, brilliant guy, very intense.

(11:12):

Basically says the section on values. We don't need safety, massive values. I think to this day, our team excellence, integrity and safety. I said my, I don't think if you have mission excellence and you have team, it's redundant. You can take it, say get rid of safety. I called Bryan O'Connor and said, Bryan, this is what he immediately says. Absolutely not. I've been here in this organization for over 20 years. When we do stupid things like this, we always come to regret it. We set up a meeting, Mike Griffin, the administrator, Bryan O'Connor and myself, first 10 minutes, Mike is explaining his thinking, mission excellence means safety. And Bryan gets to this point where he basically takes his badge, throws it on the table and says, Mike, I respect you. I work for you. If you want to do this, you do this. But I'm out of here.

(12:12):

I've been to this place where we justified not needing safety as a focusing point, and we always come to regret it. And Mike Griffin turned to Bryan, he said, look, I hear you value. Keep safety in. We get up and I walk out and I look at Bryan, I said, man, you are a cool dude. You always say things that no one else would say. What happens if he picked it up? He said, I would've left. That's how important this thing is to me. And he said to me, he said, if you want to know why I do these kinds of things, come up to my office. I went up there very briefly. He said, I've always valued the courses you do. I always value particularly your emphasis on the soft skills, on the collaboration skills, on the human aspects. And I said, yeah, I really appreciate that.

(13:04):

You've always been a major supporter. And he said, the starting point of that is that I was a young engineer in the challenger spatial launch decision room. And as the decision was being made, and that was the tragic one that led to a loss of seven lives, Bryan said, sitting in the room, I was sitting on the outer circle, senior leadership and experts in the middle, and he said, I had a feeling and intuition that something wasn't being said, that something was wrong. And I wanted to say something, but frankly I was scared, I was intimidated. I looked at the people in the room. These were the best in the organization. They knew much more. They had much more experience than I did. And I looked around the room and Ed, you know the rooms, they have pictures, pictures of Neil Armstrong stepping under earth rockets going places.

(13:56):

And I got small and he looked again at the slides and all the numbers logically added up for the decision to launch. But he had this intuition. I wasn't taught as an engineer, said at that time to trust intuitions. And so I didn't say anything. And I don't know. He said if I had said anything, would've had any difference. But I always walked away from that feeling diminished. And he promised himself he was ever on any team in the future, any project or if he was ever a leader, he would always say what he felt and what he saw and he would expect and demand from anyone to work with him to do that very different story. This to me is part of what we see in terms of this notion of the smart mission. In the 10 minutes I have left, I think you can see where I'm going when I work with a team at NASA, when they're doing a review of a project, I used to joke with some of the folks leading the organization to say, you'll take a couple of weeks to work with to pay typically industry consulting firms to do an assessment.

(15:06):

And I can walk in. If I'm with a team in 30 minutes, I know kind of what's happening. You can feel it. You can see it how things are taking place. This was somewhat unconsciously the framework that I was looking for. And what I'll do in the time is I want to give you an example of how this works in operation. So that when you're working on your teams, when you're starting your own organization as an entrepreneur, if you're with a legacy organization, if you're a Department of Defense or energy or where you're at, I would suggest keep these things in mind. The starting point, we've kind of alluded to, what's the mission? If there is no mission, if there is no problem, if there's no sense of purpose, then I worry.

(15:50):

You can go into all kinds of examples of that. But it starts with why are we here? That is one of the most powerful fuels for humans that exists. I had a tremendous benefit. I worked at NASA. People come there because they're excited to work here. If you're in the military, if you're in certain places, most of the time people are there for something that matters. But that's not enough. A smart mission means these other six factors also are taking place. So lemme give you a specific example and let me take you back to March of 2020. Now you're not so thrilled with me because Ed, we don't want to go back to March of 2020. That's the start of Covid and David Van Buren, Rob Manning, two leaders at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. David, a excellent project professional. Rob I think was still heading up as the chief engineer for the organization and the chief knowledge officer.

(16:53):

And they're talking together at a coffee shop. Anybody ever at JPL. It's a beautiful campus and it has little coffee shops, latte shops where you can go and eat. It's kind of cool. It's around mountains, all that kind of stuff when they're not on fire, it's a beautiful place. And they were having latte in eating. And by the way, this is one of the advantages of being together is that as humans, we talk, we innovate, we come up with ideas when we're eating, drinking, talking together. And one of the things that they said is, look, this covid thing is going to be a lot worse than the politicians are saying. And they said, it's awful that we have a shortage in our hospitals of ventilators. And they basically said, we're NASA. We have some of the best engineers, scientists in the world. Let's get a little bit of funding from NASA and let's develop prototypes for ventilators, low cost off the shelf that any hospital in the world could use to address this.

(17:53):

And basically they got an agreement, it was like a two month funded project, about 60 days, and they were able to then put together their team. This by NASA standards is very low cost. How do they approach this? A couple of things. First of all, starting with team, you always want to think about the nature of the team you have. Do you have the kind of expertise knowledge that you have and do you have the kind of team that can work together? We'll talk about the knowledge part, but the relationships part was interesting. Carey Weisberg was the executive assistant. She's a optical engineer by trade. She was asked to be in what NASA does, that's well from a learning standpoint is that they move you into different positions. This way you don't lock in. You have to unlearn to be able to be successful. So she was set up as the executive officer. So the first thing that we did is we looked at characteristics of the team we had was going to be a small team. They had things listed there. No surprise, like creative, the ability to work in an agile fashion. They had one thing in there that I'd never heard before. We want members of the team to be forceful and kind. Forceful at NASA, easy kind, I'd never heard of before. Why do they want people on their team to be kind?

(19:15):

Why do you want kind people on a two month mission? What so they don't kill each other? Thank you. So they don't kill each other, which is, I've seen fist fights almost break out into some of these things. There's a lot of tension on the kind of work you did. They wanted the forceful part. They had two months, they had short time. They couldn't deal with bs. They needed everyone on the team to say what they saw. If there was a problem, they'd raise it. But they wanted a dynamic of kindness where they would take care of the team. They could not afford to lose people. So they thought about the concept of team. They did. Other things related to that, what do you need in every project? Knowledge, expertise, data, technologies, smarts. Does NASA have expertise in ventilator medical technologies and dealing with viruses?

(20:04):

This is where you shake your head. No, no head. You don't. So what are they doing? Well, they had world-class engineers. They had to get knowledge. What do you do when you don't have knowledge on your team? You buy it, you do it. 90% of NASA's work is industry. 90% of NASA's missions are international participation. I would always say to the folks at NASA, if you cannot find knowledge working at NASA, you're not going to find it any place You can get most, any organization, most anybody in the world who will support you because the nature of the mission and the nation of how people were thinking about it. So what did they do? They went to Huntington Memorial Hospital. They the head of pulmonology, Dr. Gurevitch, and he said, look, give me two hours with smart engineers and I could tell 'em what they need to know about viruses, what we know about this one, and issues around ventilators that got in touch with organizations and industry that did ventilators.

(21:04):

Here's the requirements. They also did something that project teams, at least at NASA hate to do. They involved regulatory people upfront. Project teams often don't regulatory people because regulatory have that annoying tendency to say no to things, but they brought them in, experts from the uk, experts from the US saying this is what will work. This is what will not work. Learning. Learning is environment. That's vital. Barry, you will love this. One of the things that they said is that he had a principle. We are going to be comfortable being ignorant until the point where we are not. We are going to be comfortable being ignorant until we're not. I asked Karen, I said, what's that all about? Never. She said, oh, ed, you know NASA? I said, yeah, I know NASA, but what's the, I've never heard of this before. She said, we can be arrogant.

(21:51):

Arrogant means means that we want to pose that we have the knowledge, we have the answers. It cuts down on learning. We didn't have time for that. We're basically pulling in a lot of people, nurses, physicians, technologists. We want to be open and honestly asking questions. So we set up this whole notion of being comfortable, being ignorant until we're not. As part of the principles found a couple of minutes. You can see where the cultural aspects from a standpoint of collaboration, it was a large community that was coming together that was working on this. It involved a variety of different stakeholders. They had what was called radical transparency. Another thing that project teams often hate, meaning that they were working. I think through Google collaborative tools, every member of the team would share exactly real time what they're working on.

(22:43):

Project folks hate that. They want to get things ripe until they share it. In this case, I could see anything instantaneously. So I can say, I think you've gone in the wrong direction. I like this. You may want to speak to that. This is the notion of a smart mission. There's more to this, but you can basically get it. It starts with the notion of knowledge. Where do we have it? Where do we find it? How do we bring these people on? The challenge with smart people, how many of you are smart people? Only three hands going up. Well, smart people basically want to be heard. They want their smarts to be heard. They want to have a voice. So if you work for a manager or a boss who basically says, I'll ask you when I need to speak to you, you're not going to hang on there.

(23:23):

The smart mission leverages the knowledge, it finds it, it creates it, it shares it in an open manner and it values the relationships. We are humans. When dogs come together to build trust, they smell, they sniff each other. Humans typically do not do that. What we do is we eat, we drink, we talk together, and we build trust. Those are the two essentials in terms of moving in the last minute, A couple of things this holds for shuttles. I've been involved in major shuttle problems that led to success because of how they work together. Also, part of teams where we had major failures. Some of the things to have discussion with your teams are these questions. What are, what's the best lesson you've learned from work? Just talk about it and I think it'll hit on the notion of knowledge, expertise, capability, learning, and it'll also talk about the relational aspects of what's happening.

(24:14):

What do we need to do to be successful? Teach a course at Columbia, navigating the future of work, one of the things that are going to change and how do we respond to that? Another thing, learn from failures. Failures, particularly if there are others are beautiful. We learn from them. What are the troubled projects? What happened? What can we learn? NASA was a heavy storytelling culture. We'd use it to say, what were we doing right to do more of? To build our policies and training off of what are the things that aren't working? What can we learn from that? It's around the team. Deal with people in the present. Appreciation, respect, inclusion. I like having you here. Thank you for showing up at this. The second thing on the people side is people want to know how they're developing, how they're getting better, how they're growing, what is taking place when they work with you.

(24:59):

And then the other side is the task. What's the blue sky? What's the mission? Where we're going? And then how to implement it. These are ways of measuring team performance. Again, we've heard a lot about measurement, and so basically the smart mission is driven towards what we're trying to do. A sense of purpose and the future. If nothing else, make sure you have a dog or a cat. This is puddles or a dog. And I'm just always happy when puddles around total lunatic french bulldog. But it creates a lot of joy and so that brings a lot of happiness. So knowledge, relationships, mission driven, take care of each other and billion times of turbulence. That is usually the time of greatest opportunity. If you have a strong team and a lot of expertise, you'll be successful. Thank you for your time. I'll be signing against the book later today.

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