Back in 1999, NASA sent a spacecraft to Mars. It was a climate orbiter, designed to measure atmospheric conditions among other things. It was built by some of the best engineers alive at the time, and cost $327M.
Along its 10-month journey, it had to use thrusters to course-correct and maintain its trajectory. However, as it approached the Red Planet its trajectory was actually off by a pretty significant margin. It got a little too close and ended up being torn apart in the atmosphere.
Turns out that the thruster data provided by Lockheed was in imperial units, while NASA wrote their software to read that data in metric units.
Every decision that the orbiter was programmed to make to keep itself on track throughout its journey was throwing it more and more off course.
I think about this often. I first heard this story in a spaceflight dynamics course I was taking in college, and it’s really stuck with me throughout my career. The major lesson for me is that the trajectory of any system is the cumulative expression of decisions.
When I say any system, I mean any. I believe it to be true about companies, projects, individual careers, and even whole communities and governments. It’s so important to me that it’s one of the System Dynamics of my decision framework. It will likely end up as a core principle at some point, but I’m still iterating.
It sounds obvious, right? Make bad decisions, and your quality of life drops. Make good decisions, and your quality of life can improve. Why, then do so many suffer? Why do so many people make so many bad decisions?
I think much of it is incentive. The system adapts to the incentives it experiences, after all. I don’t think that explains all of it, however. I think people don’t set up the systems in ways that allow people to make good decisions in the first place. It’s hard to say sometimes whether that’s intentional or simply another bad decision.
It is worth thinking about, though, as you’re making decisions throughout your day, your career, or your life. What are your decision boundaries? What would a good result look like? What downstream effects will this decision have on the long-term trajectory?
Thinking in these terms has dramatically improved my trajectory. I hope it helps yours as well.
Onward.