Reading 05: Whistleblowing and the Challenger

Discussing and thinking about whistleblowing is harder for me than the other topics that have been discussed so far in this class, mostly because I have less personal acedotes to relate and form my own opinions. However, after reading the articles about the Challenger and Roger Boisjoly, I definitely understand the issue better. It’s clear that all the signs were there in the days before the Challenger launch that there was a potential danger. Of course, in hindsight it is easy for us to wonder how they could ever ignore all the warning signs, but I can imagine how at the time the ring issue seemed to NASA management as just one other thing that could go wrong, but probably wouldn’t, in the launching of the ship. Even if the engineers at Morton Thiokol understood how real of a risk launching at low temperatures was, it probably seemed like one of many precautions that NASA had, and didn’t fully register as a serious problem.

I thought the reading’s discussion of how with so many people in a very long chain of command the idea of personal responsibility gets lost. The people making the very important discisions often haven’t interacted with the technical details of a project enough to understand them. I think the idea of having each person be responsible for some discrete action is a huge part of leadership. There is a lot of power in having a single person feel that it is solely their fault if some minute aspect of a project doesn’t get completed or if some task doesn’t get done. In every organization that I’ve been a part of a leadership team for, I’ve recognized the importance of delegation of tasks and acccountability for the tasks that you are delegated. It may seem harsh to hold a single person to such a large responsibility, but you know when someone feels that it will be their fault, not a spread out “I figured someone else would do it” feeling, the task is way more likely to get done.

Of course, this is all so far just a discussion of how to avoid the problem and the real question here is what actions should be taken after such a disaster. I definitely think that making the issue publicly known is a beneficial thing. I think that it will make engineers and managers, partically in critical situations, more aware of all the pieces that could go wrong in a project. In the end, they will definitely hold themselves to higher standards. I think that ideally, this would come from the company in a public statement about what went wrong, but of course that isn’t always realistic. In the end, I don’t think I could ever consider Roger Boisjoly’s actions to be unethical, although maybe it could have been addressed better. I got the impression through the articles, that his message was less about awareness about the issue and more an attempt for him to let the world know that he was right and he tried to stop the takeoff — definitely pushing the blame aware from himself and onto others. Regardless, I think whistleblowing as a concept is good and companies should be exposed for their poor actions. However, I think that many whistleblowing situations get blown up and get personal too fast.