The Mars Pathfinder Approach to "Faster-Better-Cheaper"

"It hides in every one of us.

Somewhere within, waiting for the call, there lies a creative spirit…a bit of the explorer…a love of challenge and personal adventure. Sometimes this part of our nature runs so deep and quiet we cannot feel its presence. Then sometimes it stirs, awakened by events that tap into this great potential.

So often these are difficult circumstances—we must put forth mighty efforts in order to measure up. We have to stretch, change our approach, put more passion into our work. It’s hard. But in some unexpected, peculiar way, it’s also fun. Hard fun. And it brings out our best.

These are among the high points of our lives. We truly live. We see more accurately how much more we can be and do.

Living through such an experience—or seeing others performing in this special state—we wonder how we might deliberately release this spirit in ourselves. Or how we could call it forth from others. Anything this rewarding we want to have within our reach. And we know it isn’t likely to occur by accident.

The Mars Pathfinder team lived such an experience, and these pages reveal the secrets of how you can make it happen for yourself. "

Following is an outline of the Pritchett & Associates, Inc. book, which the publisher cites as "an employee handbook in innovation."

Set goals that make you stretch

Let the power of great expectations drive you.
High aspirations fire the imagination
Stretch goals force us to go beyond gradual improvements, to extend our reach, trigger our competitive spirit, and turn in our creativity.
Mission-driven commitment tap into our creative energy reserves.

Let limitations guide you to breakthroughs

Look for the trap door of innovation, the escape route of creativity, the secret passageway to solutions.
Imagine new and better ways within our constraints rather than struggling to change the conditions.
Approach the situation as if it were a riddle.

"Necessity is the mother of invention." —Plato

Choose to do things differently.

See the need for innovation and act on it!
Actively search for new solutions.
Experiment; throw away the rulebook
Don’t wait for innovation to just happen on purpose
Decide up front to set the course for creativity

Discipline creativity

Align with team discipline and goals; commit to be a meaningful contributor.
Innovation is team-centered and purposeful, not reckless or self-indulgent.
Risks are informed and calculated, not careless or haphazard.
Experimentation is focused; improvisation is within team-defined boundaries
Random creativity won’t cut it
Reach for innovative ideas, but assure that they measurably improve the odds for overall success

Invite different perspectives

Innovation feeds on multiple points of view

"None of us is as smart as all of us." —Seneca

We often find more effective solutions by looking at situations through another person’s eyes; these varied perspectives round out your own.
Call a huddle; bounce ideas off one another, argue them, allow your thought to ricochet toward innovation
Apply the technique of peer reviews
Get input from diverse sources; break your established pattern of seeing and thinking
Read. Listen. Watch how others—even in entirely different fields—operate
Anyone you encounter might possibly be the person to spark a breakthrough idea.

Plan…and improve.

Use the double-barreled approach to innovation careful preparation and improvisation
Begin with "deep planning;" anticipate as best you can; but then be willing to bob and weave.
Understand that "no plan survives contact with the enemy," but good planning mentally prepares you to improvise.
In-depth planning at the outset helps you figure out what you don’t know and points you to those unmapped areas where you’ll have to play it by ear
Plan, but do not slavishly follow an obsolete plan; in the final analysis, skillful improvisation may account for more of your success than your most carefully crafted plans
Still, don’t get lazy about planning: Don’t kid yourself. The better job you do in planning, the more effective you’ll be in improvising.

Embrace eccentricity.

Now is the time to release the renegade inside.
Reach out; be novel; raise some eyebrows!
Beyond the conventional and the boundaries of "ordinary," you’re in a new zone that hasn’t been milked of its innovative potential.
Be willing to look a little silly, to be seen as outrageous, offbeat, or downright odd.
Add real value, though; the idea is not to be offbeat or eccentric just for the sake of being different; that difference must be viable…commercial…something that works!
The goal of eccentricity is to help your team achieve the intended goals and produce within the boundary lines set for the task

Proceed with optimism and a "can-do spirit"

Innovation comes easier when we carry ourselves with the right kind of attitude
Confidence, optimism, and possibility thinking set our minds to become more open-minded to opportunity
An upbeat outlook supplies the emotional strength to take risks—to experiment—to persevere
The "can-do spirit" is a mindset that sustains
Keep faith through criticism and your own confusion. Hang tough in the face of problems and disappointments

"Act as if it were impossible to fail." —Dorothea Brande.

Behave as you would if you knew success could be yours by persevering
Often our actions are guided and energized by certainty that we will prevail, we liberate ourselves. Believes: they shall be equipped to innovate

Develop robust solutions

The only acceptable outcome is success—there must be unbending end-game accountability.
Be innovative, but give keen attention to risk management.
Expose your ideas to relentless testing. Make smart mistakes: make them early on and capture the learning that occurs
Scrutinize for the vulnerable points that need to be improved for innovations to succeed in the real world
Intensive testing doesn’t guarantee a perfect solution, but it does help you be as prepared as you can.
Build in backups to compensate for the weaker aspects of your solutions
Do the testing, build in the margin necessity to protect you against the unknown you may encounter.

Maintain momentum and forward motion

Press forward and steadily cover ground in an aggressive approach…a relentless push for progress
Movement accelerates the discovery process with a bias toward action, operate with a sense of urgency
Wasted time is a precious and irreplaceable resource. Today’s innovation takes place in real time
Innovate on the fly instead of trying to figure out everything beforehand; rely on action to be our educator
Overall, forward motion is the most informative and innovation-friendly behavior you can find. The secret is to stay on the offensive. To keep moving and push ahead.

Be fully trustworthy

High-performance work groups require that everyone help create and maintain a climate of trust.
First, everyone’s performance must be "worth trusting."
The group must know it can count on each member for excellent, on-time performance.
Everyone is "mission critical:" results matter, and so do they!
See that problems and errors get surfaced, identified, resolved, and become vehicles for learning
Agreement is not necessary but mutual respect is!
Collaborative partner’s must be comfortable with one another’s character and competence
Day in, day out each member takes responsibility for building and maintaining the character of their team

Take personal responsibility for communication

Promote effective linkages: openness and free-flow of ideas strengthen teams and teamwork
Each person needs to take personal responsibility for seeking understanding: Actively chase down answers, push needed information through the team’s communication loop
Keep everything on the table until people have worked it through
High-quality communication doesn’t come easy, and hardly ever occurs by accident. Communication problems never remain just communication problems. They weaken everything else.

Demonstrate passionate commitment to success

Human beings serve as the most important hardware in the creative process The most important software, however, is found in people’s hearts and minds.
Emotionally flat or intellectually uninspired approaches keep innovation at its distance.
When the emotional investment in our work rises far above room temperature we are poised to become passionately committed to success.
When we fiercely care about outcomes, a "give what it takes" attitude takes over
If our hearts are set on the team’s success, we operate from a systems viewpoint; we look beyond the boundaries of our immediate responsibilities to consider the needs of the overall effort. You become emotionally married to the idea of accompanying your goals
People who are hell-bent on achieving their objectives have a personal intensity that is contagious; it inspires others; the whole becomes much greater than the sum of its parts.

Salute the past, embrace the future.

"If we examine the history of the human race, we see that exploration and innovation are part of our nature. We are born to discover. To create. And as the centuries have come and gone, we have demonstrated a rapidly accelerating ability to do things "faster-better-cheaper." Pathfinder is just another chapter in this great adventure story about our progress…about mankind’s process of "becoming."

The JPL team’s dramatic mission to Mars simply represents one more step toward our destiny. As we discover more about our universe, we discover more about ourselves—our possibilities—and we continue to extend our reach."

"This is an exciting time to be alive, and to be explorers." —NASA

Last updated on June 30, 2005 ||