National Space Society Leadership Change
Letter from Paul Damphousse to National Space Society Board
“During the last year in this role it has become abundantly clear, however, that as long as elements of the existing leadership of the NSS continue to pursue courses of action– and perpetuate an atmosphere– that are not in the best interests of the Society, the challenges the organization face will become insurmountable. For both professional and personal reasons, I have decided to pursue other opportunities.”
Keith’s note: The NSS really needs to get its act together. This organization is already on the borderline of irrelevancy. When good, talented people like Paul Damphousse leave, you know that something is very broken.
I had the opportunity to meet Mr. Damphouse a few months ago and I was impressed by his candor and enthusiasm for space exploration. He was very engaging and encouraged me to become more involved in the organization. Its a shame that the NSS has become so divisive that good leaders choose to leave it. I hope that somebody has the fortitude and vision to improve NSS soon.
The NSS has served an important role and is worth preserving if possible. What were the principal divisive issues?
People who have been there for decades with perspectives that are decades old who by using political manipulation maintain effective control of an organization through many leadership changes.
Which is one reason I like term limits for positions in any organization…
Any organization? Really? Do organizations not have collective learning, a sort of installed software base? Or should they start over, from scratch, every term?
Neither solution makes much sense. I get your point but there must be a way to accumulate experience. It has great value to any organization.
I never suggested fire everyone at the same time or that the term limits should be short. Just that they should exist. Collective learning is not the same thing as institutional stagnation, which is what NSS is suffering from.
I think the entire organization needs to be rebooted – starting with its board.
People in the space field in general need to start paying attention to the rest of humanity. Back in 2011 The Economist had a few articles about space at the time of the last shuttle mission. What title did they put on the cover? The End of the Space Age. Let me finish by pointing to a rather long item on my blog I’ve titled The end of the Space Age?. I disagreed with The Economist’s views in 2011 — but only if there is real reform in the space field.
The NSS seems to get itself into this situation every few years. One or more significant members leave and then they carry on as before. Given the repetitive nature of this situation, I’d have to suspect that there is a fundamental problem with some of the long-time “leaders” that’s not being addressed, rather than any unique circumstance now. The wording in Mr. Damphousse’s letter seems to suggest this as well.
If, perhaps, some of the senior people are putting their own agendas ahead of the Society’s best interests (like Congress does with NASA), then I guess they’re fitting right in with the space program culture.
If the NSS doesn’t have common goals within its ranks, again which the letter seems to suggest, then perhaps a review of their mission statement is in order.
If you read the NSS Statement of Philosophy web page ( http://www.nss.org/about/ph… ), which states their Vision and their Mission, and then goes on to give their Rationale, Principles, and Beliefs, then perhaps the root problem can be seen. This page lists so many different “goals” that there is no way to pick out any one, or even a few, that represents the Society’s purpose or their methods. Also, most of the sentences on this key web page have (in my opinion) been written to sound professional, but don’t really communicate as clearly as they should, and most of it boils down to: We are in favor of this whole long list of things. Looking at the web site as a whole, I found lots of information about other people’s events, but almost nothing about what the Society itself does or is planning to do, other than basically one-sided web communications (Facebook, blogs, etc.). With no clear statement of the Society’s purpose and no description of its activities, I’m not surprised that there’s internal conflict.
The NSS has done some very positive things for the space program in the past, but every time this leadership conflict happens they lose all of their momentum. This sometimes ends up looking unprofessional and is a blow to space advocacy in general.
Yeeep.
My take on it: The National Space Society: organizational inertia and term limits
http://rocketforge.org/2013…
For the benefit of the readers here, Mike hits the nail on the head. It’s about organizational structure. The NSS has an unwieldy structure that a) prevents the Executive Director from properly doing their job and b) is so large and spread out it makes any progressive change a long drawn out process that lasts longer than their Executive Director’s terms.
The NSS is broken and needs fixing. At a grassroots level it might still work for local events, but at the national level, it’s a mess.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the SFF has shown similar symptoms over the years, although (from what I can see) to a much lesser extent, and has been similarly hamstrung in terms of what it might have accomplished if everyone was rowing in the same direction.
Perhaps someone should create a training course for space advocacy group management, or better still, a handbook. Many volunteer and amateur groups find a handbook to be the glue that binds people together, and makes both the goals and the rules clear to all. The ham radio gang is a perfect example — maximum cooperation and results with minimum of song and dance, and no unnecessary politics worth mentioning.
I think it would be a very worthwhile project creating two handbooks, one for managers and one for members of space advocacy groups. It would be important to make sure that both handbooks were available to both managers and members, so that they would be able to see things from each other’s perspective. And most important, these handbooks must not be indicative of or tailored to any one organization.
I wonder how hard it would be to make these handbooks international in nature and applicability, while still keeping the advocacy groups volunteer and amateur in nature. Perhaps there could be an appendix for each major space country detailing specific applicable legislation, laws and government interactions, along with a list of national and local space groups.
The major problem I see is that the handful of people who could do a credible job of creating these space advocacy handbooks are also the people whose time is already spread thin doing what they can (I wouldn’t want to suggest any names, like say, Dennis), and they would never get around to it because there are never enough weeks in a day.
Perhaps creating and reviewing them could be a cooperative effort, done as an on-line collaboration by experienced volunteers, but even that would require a “leader” to organize and orchestrate the efforts. Like many ideas, thinking of doing this is a lot easier than making it happen.
Bullseye!
As a new member (and now an officer in one of the NSS chapters), I could care less about the L-5/NSI heritage that appears to have given birth to (and has perpetuated) the convoluted NSS structure. If Paul wasn’t able to get the various factions in-line, then the group needs to let go of its past and achieve a serious reorganization.
It would be interesting to hear the perspective of other past NSS executive directors, like Lori Garver and George Whitesides.
I am the creator of that NSS organizational structural graphic on the NSS Web site. While it is still technically unofficial, it does properly depict the chain-of-command structure of the NSS as defined in the NSS bylaws and especially the NSS Corporate Policies document (CPD). These documents are published at http://www.nss.org/docs/.-D… what appears to be a mess, try to plot the entire organizational structure of Boeing or Microsoft on a single chart. This chart shows multiple levels and can/will eventually be made into several more pretty charts. But the bottom line is any large organization needs some kind of structure, and NSS is involved in a lot of different activities. It was the lack of such official structure in the NSS bylaws that led to the creation of the NSS Corporate Policies document (CPD) in late 2004.-For nearly two decades (1987-2004), NSS struggled with four unnamed Vice-Presidents (per the bylaws) whose roles and responsibilities varied with each NSS election. Ditto the committees, which had near zero authority. Since every Officer was either a voting or non-voting member of the Board of Directors, every little disagreement went to the Executive Committee or, worse, to the Board of Directors. Do NSS critics really want us to return to those chaotic times???-Since the CPD, the NSS has made great strides in getting “its act together” (in the words of Mr. Cowing). We have a Strategic Plan (also published in /docs) and have been making progress towards achieving its goals. That too was also a product of governance activities that began in 2004. We invite you to review that and other corporate documents and send us your feedback — or better yet, become involved! NSS is a very democratic organization — with all that comes with democracy.-The dashed “coordination paths” were meant to show that an NSS leader does not need to go up and down the chain to talk to other leaders — so I have to disagree with Mike on that point. In fact, it seemed to me that Paul LIKED the NSS chain-of-command and was happy to let his “boss” (the SOO) control the flow of information to and from him. But in this time of email, instant messaging, tweets, and texting; it remains far to easy for any NSS leader to immediately contact any other (Paul did so as well). In reality, these “coordination paths” are still all over the map, so the real intent of the CPD was to clarify the chain-of-command for decision-making.-Since the creation of the CPD, there has been much less arguing AFTER a decision is made by the appropriate authority. The current crisis in the NSS leadership can “easily” be resolved by a vote of the NSS Board of Directors, because the current argument is between the two highest Officers of the Society over the scope of authority of the NSS Policy Committee. The NSS bylaws apparently is not clear enough, which means the Board of Directors needs to revise the bylaws and/or add a clause in the CPD to make it clear who is responsible for what. So yes, NSS actually needs a bit MORE bureaucracy (of the right kind) than less.-I encourage you all to read the NSS bylaws and the CPD, because there seems to be a misunderstanding of the role of the Executive Director in this particular Society. Unlike other organizations to which you may be comparing NSS, the NSS Executive Director is not a dictator and is not in charge of everything that happens in the Society.-The bylaws (written a very long time ago) makes it clear (and Paul knew this) that the “Executive Director shall: (a) Manage and direct all activities of the Society as prescribed by the Board of Directors and the Executive Committee; (b) [hire staff]; (c) [supervise staff]; (d) Serve, if he or she so desires, as an ex-officio member, without the right to vote or the right to be counted as part of a quorum, on the Executive Committee and any or all other Boards, Committees and other bodies of the Society; and (e) Perform such other duties as may be assigned by the Board of Directors or Executive Committee.” So (again, correcting Mike) Paul (like all past EDs) was a very active participant on the Board of Directors and Executive Committee, and any other committee of interest.-Since the creation of the NSS in 1987, the Executive Director has always been the recipient of directives from the Board of Directors, Executive Committee, and its Chair (CEC). The CPD is an Executive Committee document of official directives. While inserting the SOO as well, the CPD provides a structure to formally clarify roles and responsibilities of the various Vice-Presidents and their operatings committees, and their working relationships with the Executive Director and HQ staff, Chapters, and individual volunteers. Paul very much understood this.-And as for why we have TWO internet committees (I am Chair of one), it is simply the difference between a set of elected/appointed non-Web-savvy content owners and a set of volunteer/contracted Web-savvy developers. Most large companies have this arrangement. For more information see, http://www.nss.org/voluntee… NSS is not a NASA cheerleader per se, we very much believe that NASA is an extremely important part of the space movement. And, yes, NSS really was an early vital player in promoting commercial space (ask our new NSS Governor, Jeff Greason). Also see our back issues of L5 News (back to 1975) and Ad Astra magazine; some on our Web site.-Truth is, NSS is short-staffed, short on volunteers, short on money, and unfortunately increasingly short on members. Yes, NSS is hurting and needs YOUR help. General interest in space and NASA is going down and NSS is very much intertwined with that fate. These are tough economic times, not seen since the Great Depression, and the nation is once again looking inward rather than outward. It is hard to think about venturing out to the Moon or Mars when five years from now we may be at war.-But to paraphrase a character played by our NSS Governor, Bruce Boxleitner, is NSS our “last best hope” for the space movement? Do we let NSS die or work together to fix it? Is there any other organization out there that has/can replace NSS as the world’s leading organization promoting the expansion of human civilization into space, and the use of the vast resources of space for the dramatic betterment of humanity?-Despite a tremendous lack of resources, NSS leaders at the national and chapter level (thank you Mike) work every day to provide for a positive, hopeful, future for humanity. If you have not yet “backed” our Kickstarter campaign to put these words into inspiring videos, please do so by February 16. http://tinyurl.com/nsskicks… Astra!
NSS is a mess and is in desperate need of a total overhaul – that includes shrinking (and replacing) its board. These diagrams only serve to show how clueless NSS leadership is right now.
Both Dennis and Steve had made some insightful and useful observations on the issue of NSS management.
Michael – I responded to your question regarding the two internet committee’s approach (which I am responsible for) over on your blog.
I do not believe that term limits is a useful solution because it removes both the good and the bad indiscriminately.
Personally I think that there should be an attempt made to institute a new management philosophy. By this I mean a restructuring of how volunteers and teams are managed and how tasks are defined, managed, and executed.
NSS is really a unique institution and has had a number of successes over the years – many as a direct consequence of the dedication of its volunteers. There is no reason why it can not continue to have successes in the future.
There seems to be a lot of dancing around the details here. What is the policy dispute going on, who are the individuals involved? Mike Mealling is absolutely right that the NSS org structure is an abomination, especially for an organization that can barely pay one full-time staff person. I’m glad Ronnie got it down in writing, but that should have been motivation to fix it, not to enshrine it.
I recognize that NSS has helped inspire many great people in space activism and space policy. I spent the better part of a decade supporting NSS as a donor and volunteer, I was even on the executive committee for a while, though I flatly refused to join the board when asked to run. I now firmly believe the good things have come *despite* the organization, not because of it. It provides, however incompetent, a gathering-point for like-minded individuals who inspire one another, and the context of space exploration and development is naturally hugely inspirational in itself.
The tragedy is I believe it could have done so much more. When I was involved volunteer time was wasted in pointless debate and grunt work, or worse volunteers were called upon and then left standing around not knowing what to do. NSS has a huge “Board of Governors” of prominent people apparently linked to the organization, but almost never called upon to help in any way. Vice Presidents were given all sorts of authority but essentially no funding to carry anything out; the handling of money was kept obscure even from members of the executive committee. Ronnie talks about saving money, but that’s really hard to tell – a lot of decisions to me seemed penny-wise and pound-foolish, as the old saying goes. The bulk of NSS’s budget at the time went to hard-copy mailings – I tried to push that online at the time but there was huge resistance, I don’t know if that ever went anywhere. I don’t see any sign of it.
It’s been 7 years since I was heavily involved so maybe things are better. It doesn’t look like it from the sound of this resignation though.