Read time: 3.9 min.

{{First Name | My friend}},

When the explosion occurred, none of us understood what we had seen. We were children. Plus, the image quality on our grainy TV, which was seated on a cart with wheels, was poor. You really had to lean in to make out what was happening. I still remember talking with the kids around me as we asked each other what had just happened. When nobody knew, we turned our questions to the teacher.

She hustled to the front of the room, turned off the TV, and told us we would talk about it another time. Then, before she started teaching a math lesson, she encouraged us to speak with our parents when we got home.

I was in grade school when the Challenger launched.

I still remember my teacher's excitement in the lead up to that tragic day. The news that Christa McAuliffe was going to be the first teacher in space meant something to her personally. That day, every classroom in my school was viewing the launch. Then, suddenly, TVs were quickly turned off and classroom instruction rushed to silence the questions.

On the walk home, a classmate explained that the space shuttle had exploded. She’d overheard teachers discussing it in the hallway. I remember struggling to wrap my mind around it.

The confusion from that day stayed with me long after the full weight of the tragedy settled in. I had so many questions.

In the years that followed, I learned more about different aspects of what contributed to that horrible day. For a long time, the version I understood centered on the O-rings, the cold temperatures, and the decision to launch despite the conditions.

Only recently, after digging into the Rogers Commission's findings, did two words grab my attention and unlock something new. And that's what I want to share with you today.

The evening before the launch, engineers at Morton Thiokol raised serious concerns about O-ring performance in cold temperatures. Their recommendation was clear: don't launch.

Management reversed that recommendation.

Surprisingly, NASA's senior leadership never knew the reversal had happened. These were the people with the authority to halt the launch. So, even though the engineers with the clearest picture of the risk raised a concern and laid out their findings clearly, their recommendation never reached the people who needed to hear it most.

The missing piece was a path for that concern to travel from where it was raised to where the decision authority resided. The system that should have carried that information to the people who needed it most simply wasn't built to do so. As a result, the concern reached a boundary and stopped.

The concern existed. The path to carry it, however, didn't.

The Commission's findings point beyond the technical and human factors that contributed to the tragedy. They name the process itself as the flaw.

The Rogers Commission concluded that the root cause was "a serious flaw in the decision-making process."¹ There they were. The two words that drew me in: “serious flaw.”

This flaw governed how a concern traveled, or failed to travel, from where it originated to where the authority to act on it resided.

This finding matters because it names the mechanism precisely. It points to something beyond courage or communication, which is where some narratives gravitate. It points to the architecture of how concerns move through an organization when the stakes are highest.

Here's what makes that finding so resonant.

An escalation path doesn't emerge from the middle of an organization. It’s designed, or left undesigned, at the top. What the executive team establishes about how concerns travel, who can escalate them, and what happens when a concern reaches a decision boundary determines whether that path functions when pressure arrives.

At NASA and Morton Thiokol, the path that should have carried an engineering objection to the people with final launch authority didn't exist in a form that could survive the pressure of a launch decision. Thus, while many direct their focus to failures at the human level, that overlooks the failure of a system that was never built to carry the concerns the engineers raised.

The executive team sets the conditions. What gets designed, modeled, and practiced at the top determines whether a concern can make it from where it originates to where it needs to land. When that decision architecture isn't in place, concerns don't disappear. They stop at the boundary and wait for pressure to make their absence impossible to ignore.

And pressure tends to surface what the architecture left unresolved. So, here’s something to consider:

If a concern existed right now at a level below your leadership team, does your organization have a defined path for it to reach the leaders with the authority to act on it?

If you don't quite know the answer, I'd welcome the conversation. You can schedule time directly here.

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.