Geveden joined NASA in 1990, and was a keen observer of the culture. “When I was coming through NASA,” he said, “I had the intuition that there’s a real conformance culture.” Early in his tenure, he attended a team-building class offered by the agency. On the very first day the instructor asked the class, rhetorically, for the single most important principle in decision making. His answer: to get consensus. “And I said, ‘I don’t think the people who launched the space shuttle Challenger agree with that point,’” Geveden told me. “Consensus is nice to have, but we shouldn’t be optimizing happiness, we should be optimizing our decisions. I just had a feeling all along that there was something wrong with the culture. We didn’t have a healthy tension in the system.” NASA still had its hallowed process, and Geveden saw everywhere a collective culture that nudged conflict into darkened corners. “You almost couldn’t go into a meeting without someone saying, ‘Let’s take that offline,’” he recalled, just as Morton Thiokol had done for the infamous offline caucus.