Paper #102 1 Abstract This paper addresses key challenges that would be obstacles to mission assurance ranging from responsibilities in safety, managerial and organizational issues, and contractual boundaries to the pressures of cost and schedule. It discusses some of the approaches to achieving break- through, by changing behavior. Some people may believe that cultural change can be achieved by lectures, intensive training or simply by good engineering processes. Experts in the field of organizational development, management and leadership suggest that these methods are not suf- ficient. This paper demonstrates the true inter-disciplinary nature of systems engineering by showing that such diverse fields as organizational psychology are essential to the success of a system. Introduction Mission assurance may be defined as the execution of all aspects of a program to ensure and promote mission success. While the term was coined in the space environment, its principles and goals may be applied to any endeavor in which high-consequence accidents, that is, disasters are possible. These include space, aircraft, nuclear power plants, chemical processing and others. Mission assurance can be considered to be an application of systems engineering in the broadest sense, that is, the development and of a product system, such as a spacecraft or aircraft, and also the flawless operation of the organizational infrastructure that is needed to develop, operate and support the product. Most mission assurance models include a culture element; that is, they recognize the impor- tance of beliefs, or paradigms, of the people working in that industry or domain. These para- digms can often be an obstacle to the accomplishment of mission assurance. Traditionally, organizations tend to deal with these paradigms in two ways: First, they de- pend to a great extent on executive influence, that is, leadership. They assume that if the organi- zation’s leaders are good role models, then this influence will filter down through the organiza- tion. Secondly, they depend on training to disseminate the message of the leaders. It is the thesis of this paper that these methods have been shown to be inadequate in the face of highly complex and vulnerable systems and that the science of organizational psychology can show us the way to better approaches. Common and Alternative Paradigms This section will enumerate paradigms extracted from the literature and from the authors’ experiences. In the authors’ judgment these paradigms are potential obstacles. That is the authors wish to refrain from making judgments regard which are the true paradigms since, in our opi- The Science of Organizational Psychology Applied to Mission Assurance Scott Jackson, scott.jackson@boeing.com Dr. Katherine Erlick, kathy.erlick@boeing.com Joann Gutierrez, joann.k.gutierrez@boeing.com The Boeing Company 2401 E. Wardlow Rd. Long Beach, CA 90807