“Space. The final frontier. These are the voyages of Mark House through NASA, IBM… and people 😉”
I was barely 22 when I worked on the Space Shuttle Display system. The equipment that was flying was built in the 60’s… when I was 5. They were JUST beginning to put CRT’s (basically TVs) into airplanes (F-18, Boeing 737). The state-of-the-art for displays was 8 colors. NASA wrote a requirement that the display had to provide 256 colors. When I first met the “lead” engineer, he had on a pink shirt, with a tie that had… 256 colors in it, none of which matched his outfit. I knew we were in trouble.
…the engineer who asks for more than anyone can build…
Tech people are rarely loud about what they love. They show it in what they ask for, what they build after hours, and what they look up at. If you lead them, that passion is the fuel in the tank… and it stays invisible until somebody asks about it. The Space between your question and their answer is where they decide whether you meant it.
You have one on your team. The engineer who reads the spec, smiles, and asks for 32 times what the market can deliver this year. The one with the odd tie, the 3 monitors, and the side project nobody approved. You have been managing the request, and missing the person who made it. Every request like that is a window into what they love, and most leaders close it with a budget conversation.
…a band that started with an engineer under the stars…
Thirty years ago this fall, in September 1996, Chris Martin and Jonny Buckland met in their first week at University College London. Guy Berryman joined them in 1997. Will Champion in January 1998, and that month they played their first gig, as Starfish, in the upstairs room of a pub in Camden. By the end of 1998 they were Coldplay.
Guy came to the band as its engineer. He enrolled in mechanical engineering at UCL, the son of an engineer who was a project manager on the Channel Tunnel… traded engineering for architecture… traded architecture for the bass. He still took flying lessons. Some people never stop looking up…
…a song that started with the sky…
Yellow came out of a night at Rockfield Studios in Wales, in 1999. The band walked out after a session under a sky full of bright stars, and the song came soon after. The producer, Ken Nelson, remembered it this way: “The stars were twice as close, they were so bright.” Then came the arguing. Will Champion said they tried it at tempo after tempo, because “You persist until it’s either dead or excellent.”
It came out as a single on June 26, 2000, and went to No. 4 in the UK, the band’s first top 5. It is now 4 times platinum in the US. Champion gave the credit for what changed it to the quiet one in the corner: “Obviously the thing that changed it was Jonny’s big, distorted guitar riff.”
Every request for 256 colors tells you what an engineer loves. Leave the Space to hear it.
…to engage is to ask, and then wait…
To engage is to start something and bring other people into it. With tech people it starts with a question most leaders never ask: what first made you look up? Not what are you working on. Not when will it ship. What pulled you toward building things in the first place?
The roadblock is the leader who fills the silence. You ask, they pause, and before the pause is 2 seconds old you have offered an answer, a next step, or a joke. The pause was the answer starting. Engineers think before they speak, and the quiet ones think longest. If you want to engage them, the hardest part of the conversation is the 5 seconds where you say nothing at all.
…what the tie was trying to tell me…
I was very underwhelmed with the talent at NASA itself – they were all old, burned out, and it was not the “fun” that I had anticipated. And… they were still there when most of the rest of the world forgot about the Moon, Apollo 13, the successes. This guy was in his mid 50’s – so was THERE for the heyday in the 60’s. I was too young, too much in a hurry to even see that. I thought he was someone I could just push past on my own climb… Ironically I picked very loud ties and matching suspenders to rebel against the “conforming” culture of IBM… maybe he was the one that I stole the idea from…
This week is about Space: the Space between people, the Space in music, and the kind over our heads. 7 days, 7 practices, a band that has spent 30 years writing about the stars, and a few stories from my years building computers for NASA. It starts with 1 question, and 5 seconds of quiet.
Your “Simple… Not Easy” move: Walk to the desk of 1 of your tech people, ask what first made them look up at the sky, and leave 5 full seconds of Space after the answer before you say a word.
If the answer surprises you, and you want help turning it into a conversation that lasts, let’s engage it together. Schedule time with me here.
Ask the question, wait for the answer, and watch the whole room turn… Yellow
