Thirty-eight years after the January 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, it remains an event seared into the memories of people of my vintage. I can tell you where I was when I heard the shocking news and saw the shuttle break apart 70 seconds into flight. That ill-fated Challenger mission included star astronaut Christa McAuliffe, who was to teach lessons to kids across the United States from space. But tragedy interceded, and the outcome showed us what can happen when we let optimism, rather than the facts, drive our decisions.
Adam Higginbotham’s new book, Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space, tells the gripping story of the lead-up to the disaster and explores the many lessons learned in the aftermath. Although I am not a “science guy,” I could not put down this book and was drawn in by its fascinating stories about the astronauts and their families, the engineers, and the NASA administrators who changed our world through the Space Shuttle program. Higginbotham offers many insights about the characteristics of bad and good decision-making and of the potential consequences when we fail to push pause on a project to make the adjustments required to address what we’ve learned along the way.
Those lessons can be applied directly to how we at Goodman Law Group | Chicago represent our clients. Stopping, assessing, and adjusting are just as critical to success in litigation. Higginbotham’s book focuses on the information that was known and the adjustments that were not made due to the types of commercial pressures common to many businesses: a client did not want to hear bad news; a vendor was concerned about losing a contract; or a company didn’t want its employees to publicly call out errors by their supervisors. But as Richard Feynman, a physicist who participated in the Challenger investigation, concluded in the investigative report, “For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.”
The same holds true for us as lawyers. To be effective as counselors and advocates, we cannot turn our heads from bad facts, and we owe it to our clients to help them make sound decisions based on all the information at our disposal—good, bad, and indifferent. Challenger is a reminder of the importance of consistently revisiting what we think we know, adjusting for the information that we have gathered, having the humility to acknowledge uncertainty or error, and adjusting our strategies to account for what we have learned.
