Lunch & Learn special session, outside the 13 chapters. Source: the note Houston, we have a problem! and the mechanics from Chapters 2, 4, 9, 10 and 11 of From Code to Team (Second Edition). 20 minutes: a story before the first slide (under 4), 12 talk, 4 discussion. Verbatim script; timing marks are the running clock. Slide numbers match the deck.
Room: mixed — leads, aspiring leads, and engineers who never intend to lead. Everyone in this room has, at some point, known something was wrong and not said it yet.
0:00Told with the title slide up and nothing else. Under 4 minutes. Not on any slide. Presenter's voice; swap in your own, keep the shape.
Twelve minutes. Say it, then stop. Twelve minutes into a dive we had waited 8 months for, and the newest diver on the boat put her thumb up.
If you have never dived: a thumb up does not mean good. It means we are ending this dive, now. And there is one rule in scuba that is more important than every other rule put together, and every instructor says it on day one: anyone can call the dive, at any time, for any reason, and nobody argues. Not the guide. Not the most experienced person in the water. Anyone.
Here is the day. A wreck 2 hours out, a boat chartered months ahead, 8 of us, and the weather had given us exactly one window. We had been on the water since 5 am. And at 12 minutes, at 22 meters, with the wreck just coming out of the gloom in front of us — the thing we had all come for — Priya, on her 14th dive, looked at her gauge, looked at the guide, and put her thumb up.
I want to be honest about what I felt, because it is the whole point. I felt annoyed. I looked at my own gauge — fine. I looked at the wreck — right there. And a voice in my head said, very clearly: she is nervous, it is nothing, we could just… And I watched the guide, a man with 3,000 dives, look at her, look at nobody else, and put his own thumb up without a second's pause. Eight divers turned around 15 meters from the thing they had waited 8 months for and went slowly back up the line.
On the surface, on the boat, nobody said anything for a bit. Then somebody — not me, but I was thinking it — said, "So what was it?" And Priya said her regulator had started breathing wet. A little water on every breath. Not a failure. Not yet. The kind of thing you could probably have finished the dive on. She said she had spent about 30 seconds deciding whether it was worth ruining everyone's day over, and then remembered the rule, and put her thumb up before she could talk herself out of it.
And the skipper, who had been listening from the wheel, said the sentence I have kept: "That rule is the only reason I have never lost a diver off this boat. Not because every call is right. Because nobody on this boat has ever had to decide whether they were allowed to make one."
We went back 6 weeks later and did the wreck. It was still there. And the thing I have thought about since is not Priya's thumb — it is the 30 seconds before it, and the voice in my head after it. She almost did not say it because it might be nothing and the day was expensive. I almost wished she hadn't for exactly the same reasons. The rule existed to beat both of us.
That is what today is about. A crew 320,000 kilometers from home who said the sentence calmly, and a room full of engineers the night before a launch who said it too — and were not heard.
3:30Three seven UTC, the 14th of April, 1970. Fifty-six hours into the flight of Apollo 13, an oxygen tank in the service module exploded. And the first words to the ground were not a scream. They were Jack Swigert, flat and clear: "Okay, Houston, we've had a problem here." Jack Lousma, the capsule communicator in Houston, said: "This is Houston. Say again, please." And Jim Lovell, the commander, repeated it: "Ah, Houston, we've had a problem. We've had a Main B Bus Undervolt."
The film changed the tense and gave the line to Lovell, and that is the version everyone quotes. The real one is better. We've had a problem. Past tense, one specific reading off one specific gauge, no adjectives, said within seconds. It is my favorite sentence in the history of engineering, and not because of what happened next in space. Because of what it made possible on the ground.
5:00Three people 320,000 kilometers from home, a spacecraft losing its oxygen and its power, and the first move was to describe the problem accurately to the people who could help. Not to solve it alone. Not to soften it. Not to wait until they were sure. That sentence turned 3 astronauts and several hundred engineers in Houston into one team with one goal for the next 4 days — and every hour of what followed depended on the ground knowing exactly what the crew knew, the moment they knew it.
That is the handle for today, and it is 3 sentences. Say it early. A problem reported at 56 hours is a problem with options; the same problem reported at 60 hours is an announcement. Say it plainly. Facts, a reading, no blame, no cushioning — we've had a problem is a report that can be acted on; we're experiencing some issues is not. And make it cheap to say — which is the leader's half, and the half this session is really about, because the crew of Apollo 13 could say it in 4 seconds for one reason: nobody on that flight deck had ever had to decide whether they were allowed to.