Fitting a square peg in a round hole

The Times in the UK recently carried the obituary of the NASA engineer credited with helping save the lives of the Apollo 13 crew back in 1970. Ed Smylie was responsible for life support systems on the spacecraft, which was hit by “Houston, we’ve had a problem” when an oxygen tank exploded in the command module. 

The crew immediately abandoned its objective of landing on the moon and, in Crisis Solutions parlance, changed the ‘Strategic Intent’ to ‘bring the crew back alive’.

The problem was this could only be attempted in the lunar module, which was designed to support two astronauts on the moon for a day, not three astronauts on the four-day journey back to Earth. The life support filters on the lunar module were box-shaped and those on the command module were round. So, as Ed Smylie later put it “we were literally trying to fit a square peg into a round hole”.

As we know, the team succeeded, and the crew landed safely back on Earth five days later (if they hadn’t made it back Tom Hanks would never have been able to feature in Forrest Gump!). As well as the famous film depicting the crisis, NASA have published a great wealth of resource on the problem and resolution.

Crisis management is more than just following a plan. It’s about coming up with innovative solutions to situations that haven’t happened before, usually under time pressure and with unbearable scrutiny.

Well done Mr Smylie.