In this TEDx talk Tessa West shares the story of the disaster that played out during NASA’s Mars Mission in 1999 and one of the main reason (among others) for the failure – A simple yet fatal communication gap.
The teams working across continents were using different metrics to measure pressure, each assuming that the other would use the same as well.
The question we need to ask ourselves is the following –
What are the most basic assumptions we are making when interacting with our colleagues, specially, if they are from a different culture from our own?
Breakdown in communication is the most simple and most common reason for teams failing to deliver high performance.
The reason for this could be varied – hidden assumptions like in the story above, lack of trust, lack of psychological safety, political jockeying, information asymmetry or a culture where power plays are common.
As they say, the reason why we fail can be varied but all successful teams have a common baseline – trust and communication lines are kept open and sacrosanct.
Do you see communication breakdown in your team? Why do you think it occured? What are you planning to do about it? This might be the highest leverage activity that we could do as leaders.
