"Take risks but don't fail" was something that Brian Muirhead had once been tasked with by his supervisors in his role as role as chief engineer at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). While it may seem like a contradiction, it is not an impossible prospect, he told the crowd.
"The answer to that riddle, to taking risk and not failing, is being creative in what you do and how you do it. That is the essence of innovation", said Muirhead, as he walked the crowd through some of the ways his team was able to work through the very difficult engineering problem of landing progressively larger exploratory rovers on the surface of Mars from the first success in 1997 with the Pathfinder mission to the landing of Curiosity just shy of a year ago.
While Muirhead's missions didn't necessarily risk human life like those in the shuttle or moon programs, they did place a great deal of the public money on the line and it was Muirhead's job to create an environment that could minimize risk while still pushing the bounds of exploratory technology. Some of the key ingredients to success included building a solid team, establishing effective lines of communication and enabling for rapid decision making. But perhaps as important is keeping aware of the risk paradigms for the organization and the project at hand.
As he explained it, between the Pathfinder project and the Spirit of Opportunity, the risk paradigm for Mars missions changed dramatically. JPL went from being very risk tolerant to extremely risk averse and that drove the innovations made and the decisions his team made. For example, Pathfinder was targeted to land in rocky, difficult terrain that looked very interesting to explore from a very scientific perspective whereas the landing zone for Spirit of Opportunity was picked for its likelihood of a successful landing.
"I want to step back and talk about risk a little bit because it's such a big part of what you guys wrestle with at Black Hat," Muirhead said. "This is about paradigms; make sure you understand the risk paradigm and be very careful when it looks like it might change, because it will drive your systems, drive your processes and it could drive the success of what you're trying to do."