MIT Sloan Management Review Article on How Shared Responsibility Can Shape a Compelling Vision

A sense of shared responsibility helped propel the U.S. to the moon — and it’s a crucial quality for high-performing leaders and teams.

On July 20, 1969, minutes before the lunar module Eagle was scheduled to touch down on the moon, dashboard alarms began to indicate an emergency. There was a hardware failure, and the onboard computer wasn’t keeping up with the calculations required for the landing. The reason we can now celebrate the 50th anniversary of the successful Apollo 11 mission and not a critical disaster is due to the work of Margaret Hamilton — a programmer who had a clear vision for how software should be engineered when lives were at stake.

Hamilton had architected the system so that in the event of an overload, the onboard computer would ignore all unnecessary tasks and only focus on a prioritized list that was essential for landing. Mission Control was able to give the astronauts the green light, and we all know what followed: The landing was a success, Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, and the United States achieved its “giant leap for mankind.”