Reading Room

Moondust

OK so Moondust isn’t an organisational development book, a human resources book, or even a business book, but not all the best ideas in business come from business writers.  Andrew Smith has realised that there are very few people on earth who have stood on the moon and looked back on the home planet.  With no missions planned and the astronauts aging it won’t be long before this unique human experience is lost, possibly forever.

Smith sets about his search to talk to as many of the surviving moonwalkers as possible, in an effort to understand their experience and to see what he can learn from it.

So what can we learn from this?  There’s plenty of technical detail, and concerns about how the event overshadowed the rest of their lives, but there’s also some amusing moments.  I didn’t know that the first moonwalk was slightly delayed as Mission Control had not planned on Neil and Buzz having to tidy away their dishes after dinner.  Washing up is a chore at the best of times, but leaving the dirty dishes in the sink without the aid of gravity is tricky.

We have people in our organisations that know stuff, stuff that we don’t know that we don’t know (at the risk of sounding like Donald Rumsfeld).  Recently we encountered a sales team that had no experience of asking their customers for a price increase.  Over the past ten years they’d been working with customers on ‘price down’ strategies.  When it became clear that this was no longer sustainable there was no experience in the team to help.  A senior member of the marketing team stumbled across a water cooler conversation on the topic and was able to relay her experience from her sales days which helped, by accident rather than design.

Price inflation is just one challenge that people may not have faced.  Energy outages like those seen in the 70’s may simply be happy childhood memories of toasting bread by the fire and playing board games by candlelight for today’s senior management teams.  A major energy crisis caused by gas or oil pipe failure is not beyond our imagining, no a new version of organised labour taking a stand.  Disaster planning helps, but drawing on the experience of people who have dealt with similar situations in the past may avoid many of the pitfalls and mistakes previously made.

Your employees may not have walked on the moon, but they have experienced a lot more than you may know.

To help unlock the knowledge in your organisation contact:

Claudine McClean
T: +44 (0) 1789 734333
E: claudinem@predaptive.com