The collaboration started around one year ago when Steven Hirshorn, chief engineer for aeronautics at NASA HQ, was visiting Sweden as a speaker. Marie Bengtsson, associate professor in business administration, got to ”borrow him” for Linköping University for an afternoon.
“That was the beginning of our friendship. And we´ve stayed connected”, says Steven Hirshorn.
The workshop is named ”Managing the Unexpected – Problem solving and decision making in times of great uncertainty and ambiguity". Work began in May 2025. Steven Hirshorn, Marie Bengtsson and Erik Herzog, technical fellow at Saab, which is also part of the collaboration, have had regular meetings on Teams. At the end of September, it was time for a pilot at LiU.
“This is the first time we have assembled things. It's a prototype,” says Marie Bengtsson.
The purpose is to let the participants practise and gain a greater understanding of, decision-making in situations that are challenging and unexpected.
“Making decisions on things in an uncomplicated environment is easy. But when you are suddenly faced with things you didn´t expect, what´s the process for make decisions in that environment? And how do you change your decision-making process?” says Steven Hirshorn.
Apollo 13 and South Pole expeditions
The workshop is held over three days. The first day opens with theory, which is later complemented with history – in this case with Amundsen and Scott, who raced to the South Pole at the beginning of the 20th century.
The second day focuses on Apollo 13, the space mission from 1970. About a day before they were to get to the Moon, a large explosion occurred on the spacecraft. Steven Hirshorn has used audio recordings from Mission Control. At first the staff didn’t believe that anything was wrong, despite their monitors telling them differently. Within an hour things changed drastically as they gradually realised how dire the situation was. Three people were on board.
“That evolution is what I'm trying to capture here. All through that, they're making decisions”, says Steven Hirshorn.
Forced to make decisions
“We wanted to put the students into a quasi-realistic environment where they're under pressure to make a decision, where they have less than 100 percent of the information” says Steven Hirshorn.
The exercise also contains some roleplaying. The participants are given different professions, which impacts the decision-making process.
“It will be uncomfortable, and they'll feel nervous, but that's part of it. Because that's what real life is like” says Steven Hirshorn.
Soon available to staff at NASA
LiU students, mainly from the two-year Master´s Programme in Business Administration – Strategy and Management in International Organisations (SMIO), and six employees from Saab participated in the pilot at LiU. In a few weeks the same workshop will be held at Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California. Perhaps slightly tailored to suit NASA´s engineers, but with the same content. This will also be considered a pilot.
The plan is to offer the workshop within the entire organisation.
“From a NASA perspective, this is not a topic that is taught. It´s not a subject that is taught to engineers, managers, decision-makers, people like that. It's new. And so historically, the way that people learn these things is by getting into a situation and figuring it out for themselves. The hope is that we can provide some preparation for NASA engineers so they get a little bit of experience before they would ever have to do it for the first time” says Steven Hirshorn.
At LiU, the workshop is intended to be used for commissioned education and perhaps for SMIO students.
Applicable in different areas
Despite its niche focus, the workshop can also be useful in other contexts.
“We have a lot of companies around us, Saab and many others, and managing the unexpected will look different there in practice, because space missions is not what they’re doing. But in principle there are many similarities between that kind of activity and for example starting new jetfighter development from scratch, because both entail decision making and problem solving under uncertainty and ambiguity. Things change quickly in the world. That means that they too need to learn to manage the unexpected, ” says Marie Bengtsson.
