Rick Searfoss
From space, are human beings just "grains of sand" -- as one audience member asked -- or "spiritual beings having a human experience," as stated by Wednesday's keynoter Ken Carter. To Searfoss, great advances are created by individuals who have perspective, purpose, people and programs channeled into "what we do on a daily basis."
"Passion is a very powerful thing," he told the mostly government audience. "Have a mission that matters. Public service matters." Flying has always been his passion, said Searfoss, and now that he's retired from the Air Force, he is flying experimental planes, and was chief judge on the Ansari X Prize that awarded a $10 million prize to a private team that piloted a rocket -- which according to news reports was powered by nitrous oxide and rubber -- more than 70 miles high.
One must work though complexity to arrive at simplicity, he said.
The second type of innovation, Searfoss called "development innovation." That's how you build the future, he said "with nimble focused teams, that design, build, and test, test, test, test." That way, you "fail forward" learning as you go.
Searfoss said the principles he uses are not new, but they work. Leaders must be aware of relationships, build trust and confidence. He said he became a jet pilot believing the United States and Russia might go to war one day. Then Searfoss showed a video of a Russian Cosmonaut carrying a U.S. flag, in a joint U.S.-Russian mission to the Mir Space Station. "Look at all the opportunities we have to open things up, to communicate," he said.
"Leaders are not lone eagles flying high above the ground," said Searfoss. "It's more like a bunch of penguins wandering around, crowded and a little smelly." A "leader penguin" looks down into the water and plunges in, and the rest dive in after him."
Opportunities are like sunrises in space, he said. They happen very quickly, and then they are over. Seizing an opportunity or photographing a sunrise must be done quickly, or the moment is gone. In the short term we overestimate what we can do. A project due on Thursday is still being worked on the following Sunday night. But in the long term, he said, we underestimate what can be done. Robert Goddard shot off his first liquid-fueled rocket in 1926 and was ridiculed by the newspapers for several years thereafter. One newspaper said he "missed the moon by 200,000 miles." But only 43 years after Goddard's first rocket attempt, Neil Armstrong stepped onto the surface of the moon.