The Space Shuttle and the Horse’s Backside: How context shapes everything.

If you read any articles on LinkedIn, the majority of them will simplify leadership. One of my favourite lines is that “Leadership is all about empowering people and just letting them get on with it”.

I thought about this and asked myself the question, “why do we have command and control then?” If leadership is all about empowerment, surely there is no need for taking command and telling people what to do.

Both of these approaches can be right and both of them can be wrong.

They’re two different leadership styles that both work IF applied in the correct context. When time is short and lives are at risk, it is entirely appropriate to take command, make decisions and tell people what to do.

The issue is that people overuse this approach. If you only tell people what to do, they will wait to be told what to do… which means they’re not thinking, making decisions and moving the organisation forward to achieve the vision.

If people are not acting to deliver the vision, then the pace of execution starts to slow down. Paradoxically, when leaders see the pace of execution slow down, they often adopt tighter control measures which makes things worse!

So how do you learn to understand the context before making decisions. Context is hard to define – it is about placing the relevant information in an order so that things make sense. When I am coaching people, the first question I usually ask is; ‘Tell me the story of your life, starting from where you were born to how you ended up in this role and situation today?’

This gives me a lot of information that helps me understand the individual. The information they share is obviously relevant but so is the information they leave out. The challenges they’ve endured, what’s important to them. Why they’ve made certain decisions. All of it gives me a sense of the context that has shaped the individual. I also get a sense of how well they’re able to communicate, do they go down rabbit-holes and head off on tangents or do they communicate concisely?

The same approach applies to teams and organisations. If you want to understand why things are the way they are – and why certain challenges might exist, you have to understand the context facing the team and/or organisation.

One of my favourite stories that illustrates this point is the story of the space shuttle and the horse’s backside.

The standard gauge (the distance between the rails) of U.S. railroads is 4 feet, 8.5 inches. This peculiar measurement is derived from the original specification for an English railway, which in turn was derived from the wheel spacing of horse-drawn wagons. These wagons were built to this width to fit the ruts of roads in England, which had been sized to accommodate the width of Roman chariots. Roman chariots were designed to be just wide enough to accommodate the rear ends of two horses.

When American engineers were designing the first railroads, they used the English system as a model, thereby perpetuating this chain of decisions. Fast forward to the 20th century, when rockets were being transported by trains to the launch sites. The tunnels and bridges the trains had to pass through were only slightly wider than the railroad gauge itself. As a result, the size of the rockets (and by extension, components of the space shuttle) could not exceed the width of these narrow passageways, effectively making the space shuttle’s width a derivative of the space needed to fit two horse’s rear ends side by side.

This story highlights how the context, the past in this instance, shapes the present. I appreciate it simplifies and dramatizes the historical connection but it does contain an element of truth about how legacy decisions continue to affect the world we live in today.