My Personal Genghis Khan 
Just a quick rant about the lack of processes, or the removal of processes in the cause of cost saving activities. Over the years and in different companies, I have had experience of several figures who have arrived on a project and made life hell for people one way or another.
Each time this happens I wonder if I could do something to avoid us being" damned to repeat history".
Know yourself.
In the Space Industry projects tend to last a long time and senior management staff turnover is usually the fastest. Middle management tend to stay longer usually at least 25 years. From an engineering perspective sometimes it seems senior management make decisions about things they don't really understand, as they dont like consulting the technical teams who can seem unhelpful,arrogant or eccentric. They see their role to take decisions and consultation as adding unnecessary delays and complications.
Technical teams often do not appear to see their role to advise senior management they sometimes prefer to be told what to do or to avoid confrontation. On both sides this can be a severe abdication of responsibility. When teams have a weak team leader it can leave a team with increasingly impossible tasks,cancelled holidays and no possibility of success. Quite often if a bad culture is recognised, unless you have reasonable authority or decision making powers it probably is better, where possible, to leave the project.
Mental Health - a touch of madness
I have noticed over the years that there have been some managers (sometimes senior engineers) that really have a touch of madness, this seems only to be obvious to all parties only once they have left, by which time most of the dept have left or gone off sick with stress and all employee diversity is removed ie At this point the only people left may be a small set of hardened contractors that have weathered somewhere extreme like Afghanistan - well you get the picture. Quite often your personal Genghis is very charming and highly intelligent and you will not win if you take them on head to head. As I said before if you recognise a bad culture and you havent been able to get reasonable seniority it is time to start to update your CV.
The Last bus home
So what can one do to avoid this happening again to confront ones own personal Genghis Khan?,.
My feeling firstly is probably there should be a mental health check. Maybe easier for HR PR to call it health check but Im guessing, asking a few questions on a regular basis to all project team members could get a project mental health temperature reading.
The second one is that cost saving should not mean leaving one person to make all the decisions without any support. Roles and responsibilities collapse to save cost but the distribution of the work is not fairly distributed and it appears some people are kept permanently too busy to keep them from becoming effective decision makers. Strategies that we are happy to talk about in the abstract, like game theory or Fault Investigation Diagnosis and Recovery are completely forgotten when the space industry comes to people management strategies. It may be necessary to really start the conversation going where we demonstrate the desired patterns of behaviour for project teams. If we can manage to recognise good patterns of behaviour we may have a chance to replicate desirable artificial intelligence algorithms. Ignoring the crazy behaviour that happens in human stressful situations only stores up problems for us when really working in space, where when we find ourself abandoned by our project team, or cornered by our personal Genghis Khan, we cant just get the last bus home.
I have noticed over the years that there have been some managers (sometimes senior engineers) that really have a touch of madness, this seems only to be obvious to all parties only once they have left, by which time most of the dept have left or gone off sick with stress and all employee diversity is removed ie At this point the only people left may be a small set of hardened contractors that have weathered somewhere extreme like Afghanistan - well you get the picture. Quite often your personal Genghis is very charming and highly intelligent and you will not win if you take them on head to head. As I said before if you recognise a bad culture and you havent been able to get reasonable seniority it is time to start to update your CV.
The Last bus home
So what can one do to avoid this happening again to confront ones own personal Genghis Khan?,.
My feeling firstly is probably there should be a mental health check. Maybe easier for HR PR to call it health check but Im guessing, asking a few questions on a regular basis to all project team members could get a project mental health temperature reading.
The second one is that cost saving should not mean leaving one person to make all the decisions without any support. Roles and responsibilities collapse to save cost but the distribution of the work is not fairly distributed and it appears some people are kept permanently too busy to keep them from becoming effective decision makers. Strategies that we are happy to talk about in the abstract, like game theory or Fault Investigation Diagnosis and Recovery are completely forgotten when the space industry comes to people management strategies. It may be necessary to really start the conversation going where we demonstrate the desired patterns of behaviour for project teams. If we can manage to recognise good patterns of behaviour we may have a chance to replicate desirable artificial intelligence algorithms. Ignoring the crazy behaviour that happens in human stressful situations only stores up problems for us when really working in space, where when we find ourself abandoned by our project team, or cornered by our personal Genghis Khan, we cant just get the last bus home.
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