OLEAD 100 – Introduction to Leadership – Lesson 12 Assignment

Columbia’s Final Mission Paper
The paper is the culmination of what you have been reading and learning this semester using the
Columbia’s Final Mission multimedia case as a way to analyze what you have learned.
The Lesson 12: Columbia’s Final Mission paper focuses on the four questions that were addressed in
the Mission Management Team (MMT) Meeting Course Discussion:
Why did the six NASA engineers and managers behave the way that they did during the MMT
meeting and the days leading up to the MMT meeting?
Why did NASA downplay the foam strike threat?
Who is accountable for the Columbia Space Shuttle disaster?
How can organizations, such as NASA, respond more effectively to ambiguous threats? For this
question, specifically focus on how to encourage dissenting views.
With this paper, you get the chance to review the multimedia case again from the perspective of the
entire course and all the material read in the course. Use evidence from the material that you have read
in Lessons 1-11 to address the above questions. So, the task here is to use the paper to relate the
questions from the multimedia case to the topics that were covered in the course, such as leadership
traits, leadership styles, strength-based leadership, leadership skills, power and influence, followership,
teams and leadership, listening to out-group members, organizational culture and more. When you
examine the multimedia case, can you see how some of these topics relate? What have you learned
from these topics that are relevant to the multimedia case? Additional questions to address in the paper
are:
How can the multimedia course discussion questions be used to demonstrate your understanding of
the interactional framework for analyzing leadership addressed in this course?
Since in the case of large-scale failures in complex organizations multiple factors can contribute to
the causes of failure, can you provide a comprehensive view of possible factors and solutions to the
Columbia Space Shuttle disaster from what you have learned in Lesson 1-11?
You will need to provide strong logic and facts to support your ideas. The paper should be complete,
reasonably free from errors, clearly organized, and well thought out. These questions should be
addressed in a double-spaced paper of 5-8 pages in length.