Challenge Everything

Is this just a general motivational statement or an actual program? I am having difficulty finding anything that is actually being done under this program, i.e. discussion or ideas proposed.

Well there's https://challenges.jsc.nasa.gov/, but it's really poorly implemented and nobody uses it so I'm not sure if that counts ...

I have little faith this is anything but a typical management fad. NASA cannot even challenge itself to use the metric system. Big talk, little action.

"what would happen if we could tap into the expertise of the 15,000 employees at JSC to solve any one of the difficult challenges that we are wrestling with?"

What an amazing combination and arrogance and ignorance. Obviously the expertise of NASA employees is being put to use to solve the challenges NASA faces. That's the whole point of them being employees! If they weren't helping NASA solve its challenges, why would they be on the payroll?

Nearly every organizational structure ever created was designed to get the right people's expertise focused on the right problems. Maybe this new NASA program does it better and maybe it doesn't, but to act like they invented the idea of getting the right expertise to the right problems is ignorant and arrogant.

Wow ... did you actually read the post? They don't make any claims about inventing this idea.

There are a lot of people whose work at JSC is very compartmentalized - you work on aspect X of project Y, and don't really get many opportunities to contribute to other projects. So NASA hires a lot of very smart people and pigeonholes them into a particular role, where their other skills are not used to the benefit of the program. The attempt here seems to be to use tap some of this unused talent. What's wrong with that? I think this is an admission that NASA isn't necessarily using all of its resources to their fullest potential, and there's nothing arrogant or ignorant about that.