Read time: 3.2 min.

{{First Name | My friend}},

On September 23, 1999, NASA's Mars Climate Orbiter fired its engine to enter Mars orbit after a 286-day journey.

The mission cost $327 million. Two separate teams, one at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and one at Lockheed Martin, spent months in coordinated effort to get it there. The work was precise and the commitment was real. By every visible measure, the mission was on track.

Fast forward 45 minutes: The spacecraft was never heard from again.

The loss of the Mars Climate Orbiter was traced to a single, specific gap. Are you ready for it?

Lockheed Martin's navigation team had been transmitting thrust data in imperial units, pound-force seconds. While NASA's navigation team had been receiving and processing that data assuming metric units, newton seconds.

The discrepancy was present for the entire duration of the flight. It passed through reviews, through handoffs, through months of coordinated work between two highly capable teams.

No one had ever confirmed which units each team was using.

The NASA Mars Climate Orbiter Mishap Investigation Board concluded that the root cause was a failure to identify and verify the units used in a key software interface.¹ A subsequent review by the NASA Mars Program Independent Assessment Team noted that the error went undetected across multiple levels of review. They specifically pointed to assumptions embedded in how the two teams understood their shared work.²

Here's what made this possible.

Each team was operating on an assumption so embedded in its own way of working that it never surfaced as a question worth asking.

The assumption wasn't hidden. It was never made explicit.

The investigation named the mechanism. What it also revealed was where the gap had been living the entire time.

I want to emphasize that both teams were working from accurate information within their own systems.

Both were doing exactly what the mission required of them. The gap lived in the space between them, in what each team assumed the other understood, and what each team assumed had already been confirmed.

Sit with that.

Both teams were competent, resourced, and fully committed. The mission still failed. Because two groups of highly capable people, working toward the same goal, were each carrying an assumption that the other shared their frame of reference. That assumption was never tested. It was never spoken. Consequently, it governed the work until the moment it couldn't.

This pattern isn't unique to spacecraft.

Inside executive teams navigating consequential decisions, the same dynamic is present. Two functions align on a direction in the room. Work begins across both. Each team moves forward carrying its own understanding of what was decided, what was meant, and what the other side has already resolved.

The commitment is genuine. The effort is real.

And somewhere in the execution, something surfaces that no one anticipated. It may show up as a timeline that turns out to mean different things to different people. Or it manifests as a standard that two leaders defined differently without realizing it. It may even appear as a scope that each function understood in a way that was never reconciled with the other.

While the work continues, the friction starts to cost more than it should.

From the outside, it often looks like a coordination problem, a communication gap, or two leaders who need to get better aligned.

But the source of the friction is more specific than any of those diagnoses suggest.

It was present the entire time and embedded in how each part of the organization was moving. It just remained invisible because no one thought to name it.

What might each person on your team be carrying as mutually understood that has never been made explicit?

Until Next Sunday,

Shawnette Rochelle, MBA, PCC
Founder, Excellence Unbounded
Executive Decision Systems That Drive Organizational Momentum

If you’re curious to learn more about my work with executive teams, you can find it here.

If you want to have a conversation to learn more, schedule it here.