Stars rather than shoestrings come to mind as metaphors for ISRO’s (Indian Space Research Organisation) spectacular success. But both stars and shoestrings or straps, if not stripes, are essential for evaluating ISRO’s performance, because ISRO’s reach for the stars has truly been powered by a shoestring budget. Two years ago, India’s Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM), for example, was successfully launched at one-tenth of the cost of a similar project by the US.
When MOM met Mars and other stories
On that historic occasion, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said with a twinkle in his eyes, “Mom has met Mars! Mars has met Mom today”. Modi also highlighted the odds against such an achievement: “Of the 51 missions, a mere 21 had succeeded, but we have prevailed.”
Similarly, in June this year, ISRO launched 20 satellites in one shot – leading to a ‘twenty for the price of one (bees ka ek)” sort of street-smart slogan. Just a month earlier, ISRO had successfully tested the Reusable Launch Vehicle (RLV), which highlighted the principles of thrift and smart recycling of resources even in cutting edge space technologies.
I remember my ‘morning after’ interview for The Economic Times with K.Madhavan Nair, the then ISRO chairman, after the success of their moon mission; “How was it to be on cloud nine?” I had asked. His answer had gently brought me down to Earth: “The feeling was one of getting a boon or a var after doing a long penance or tapasya”, he had replied. Chandrayaan had become the pet project of the whole organisation he said. But the scientists, technicians and supporting staff were also fully clued into the myriad ways in which the mission could have gone wrong.
“What was gratifying is that none of those things went wrong, Murphy’s Law which says if things can go wrong they will, did not come into play and the whole organisation breathed a collective sigh of relief,” he said, “when Chandrayaan succeeded.”
For all that talk about tapasya and long penance, there is no secret mantra to ISRO’s success: every one of its glittering achievements is neither a fluke nor an accident. This is because ISRO has pursued a work culture of openness, which welcomes ideas and inputs from every segment and, most importantly, “We don’t go witch-hunting after any failure”, the chairman had emphasised.
In fact, the first action was to pinpoint lapses only to learn from them, to ensure that they were not repeated. ISRO was also forced to develop indigenous solutions to fiendishly complex problems. For all that, the desi space agency’s success rates (90%) are on par with those of most developed videshi countries, notwithstanding the miniscule budget.
In an interesting aside, the ISRO chairman also told this writer that after looking at the images of the Moon sent by the spacecraft, he was no longer able to think of the satellite as a paragon of beauty. As seen by the camera built by ISRO scientists, the pock-marked surface of the Moon appeared more like a dermatologist’s nightmare, rather than Waheeda Rehman’s dreamy cheeks (from the movie with the moon in its title: Chaudavin ka chand).
Learning from mistakes
Another illustrious ISRO chairman, K.Kasturirangan, spoke about this ‘can-do’ spirit of his organisation during our public interview in Mumbai, which was conducted on behalf of a US-based Foundation. “We never put down venturesome ‘mistakes’,” he said to me. “Instead, we analyse them thoroughly and learn from them. That’s the best way to unshackle initiative, to empower people.”
Had it been otherwise, ISRO would not have got past its very first launch, which came just ten years after the agency was set up: In August 1979, the SLV-3 rocket instead of soaring proudly into space, went out of control soon after launch, and ended up ignominiously in the Bay of Bengal. But scarcely a year later, all those glitches and gremlins were sorted out and the rocket put the 35-kg Rohini satellite into orbit.
Similarly, ISRO’s Augmented Satellite Launch Vehicle (ASLV) had to cope with not one but with two successive failures before scoring a success with the third launch. The Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) also had its own share of vexing teething problems. All these were met head on and resolved: PSLV went on to become a reliable work-horse for a variety of missions.
The legendary tycoon, the late Dhirubhai Ambani, articulated a similar strategy of winnowing golden grain of success by blowing off husks of failure: I had met the iconic businessman at his house during a dinner he had hosted for a visiting Nobel laureate from Japan. What would be his advice for a young girl on the verge of her post-graduation, I’d asked. At first, Dhirubhai tried to laugh off the question by saying he himself was only a matriculate. But he became seriously reflective when I persisted; the advice was for my own daughter. “Tell her to always remember: there are no problems only opportunites. She must also learn to unlearn her own prejudices”. He added, “Tell her to keep learning from mistakes without compromising her creative ability to go after opportunities.”
ISRO’s saga of success has turned out to be a role-model for some pedagogues. At the Stanford Technology Ventures Programme, for example, students are encouraged to write ‘failure resumes’ too. These are supposed to summarise the biggest gaffes professional and academic, even personal screw-ups of the wannabe tech entrepreneurs.
But the critical part of the resume comes at the ‘What I wish I knew when I was 20’ stage, where the aspirant is required to sum up his or her learning experience. Looking at experience through the lens of failure teaches the aspirant to ‘own up’ their past mistakes and to extract vital lessons for the present and the future perfect!
ISRO’s strategy of rescuing success from the jaws of failure is also echoed and endorsed by its counterpart in America, NASA (National Aeronautics Space Administration). The US Space Agency’s Chief Knowledge Officer told a three-day Knowledge 2020 conference last year that some of the world’s greatest engineering innovations started with a mistake.
But it was also vital to remember that not all mistakes are alike; some belong to the class of careless screw-ups in large necessarily complex projects. Other mistakes are ‘exploration failures’, which are “inevitable” and “instructive missteps on the journey into the unknown”.
Organisations like ISRO or NASA are like Charles Dickens’s happy families, they all share certain common features: First, they empower rather than hobble employees into admission of error without fear of reprimand or loss of job. Also, their fault analysis focuses on the process rather than on the individual. This also calls for providing effective leadership and team-building with a “missionary”, pun intended, sense of infectious energy and enthusiasm.
But speed and transparency are also important. Identifying issues and fixing them speedily, in a procedural rather than personal manner, is easier said than done. This is a crucial parameter that separates the true-blue ‘winners’ like the Indian Space Research Organisation from other chalta-hai sort of ‘sinners’ from our public sector.