The Lizard on the Launchpad: What to do When the Call Goes the Other Way

Part 2 of the Lizard on the Launchpad series

A lizard on the launchpad

The first time I wrote about the lizard, I described the moment of disagreement. It is that primal lurch when the data points one way, the room leans another, and some ancient part of you reads it as being cast out of the tribe. The piece stopped where most advice stops: at the conversation itself. Say what you know. Get curious. Commit.

If you’ve ever been in this spot, you know that the lizard does not stand down when the meeting ends. It goes quiet and goes to work.

Early in my time on Orion, I was an operations engineer on a team that was understaffed and overworked. We were making the kind of mistakes that come from pushing people past their limits. I brought my program director a clean, well-reasoned case: two more engineers, one electrical and one mechanical. We could run opposing shifts so the work did not stop when someone needed a break. We could review each other's procedures and catch errors before they turned into rework. We would be sharper, safer, and faster.

He heard me out, and then he said, "Lisa, better is the enemy of good enough." We were behind. We were over budget. His direction was to make do with what we had and find more to cut.

I want to be fair to him, because the more years I spend in this work, the more I understand the seat he was in. He was managing a real constraint with real consequences for whether the program survived at all. He was not careless. He was making a defensible call with the money he actually had.

I was right too. The staffing level was unsafe and unsustainable. It cost us our health, our safety, our relationships, and in some cases our careers. Both of those things were true at the same time, and that is the part the tidy version of this story always leaves out.

The program needed someone to make the constrained plan work, and I went all in. I absorbed the two engineers we never got into my own body. The extra hours. The lost sleep. The health I deferred and the relationships I let thin out. I told myself this was loyalty. I told myself it was excellence. It was the same lizard on the launchpad, but now dressed as professional dedication, still doing the one thing it knows how to do, which is protect my standing by making sure I am never the one who let the mission fail.

Committing to the decision was the right move. The mission flew and it deserved to. We made real advances in returning humans to the moon, and I am proud of them. The mistake was in how I committed. I made the cost disappear.

A shock absorber's entire job is to make sure nobody in the vehicle feels the road. I became the shock absorber. Every hour I quietly absorbed, every error I caught by working later, smoothed over the evidence the organization needed in order to see that the lean call was costing more than it looked on paper. The staffing decision never got revisited, because I made certain it never had to be. Overfunctioning felt like devotion. What it actually did was suppress the signal.

There is a harder lesson sitting inside "commit with caveats." For many of us, when you commit to a decision you disagree with, you work hard to make sure the negative impacts you saw never come to fruition. That’s swallowing the caveat. What’s more important is keeping the caveat alive where people can see it — logged as risk, named in the review, attributed to the constraint that created it — rather than burying it under your own willingness to make the impossible work.

I wish I could tell you this story was a one-time sacrifice for one program. It became my default. Disagree, lose, then prove it could be done anyway by paying the difference myself. The pattern compounded quietly for years, until I was staring at a list of everything I was carrying, realizing I had been running at nearly twice my real capacity for months and calling it normal.

So here is what I ask of the leaders reading this, and I am asking it as someone who got this wrong, not as someone standing above it. When you make a hard constraint call (and you will, because the budget is real and the schedule is real), understand that someone is paying the difference. Find out who. Then do not let their willingness to pay it quietly convince you the call was free. A program that celebrates its success because a person (or twelve) stopped sleeping did not discover an efficiency. It took out a loan against a human being and recorded it as a win.

You know, the win is real and worthy of celebrating. That makes it easy to read the success as proof the approach worked. The success and the cost are not the same ledger. More often than we admit, the celebration is possible precisely because the cost stayed out of sight.

It would be easy to cast myself as the victim of that decision. The truth is that I was the mechanism that made it look cheaper than it was. Owning that is the only thing that lets me say the rest of it honestly.

If you lead people, watch for the ones who go quiet and simply absorb. The most loyal person on your team is often the one whose caveats you will never hear, because they have decided it is their job to make your decision work no matter what it takes from them. That is the next thing I want to talk about: how to recognize someone else's lizard before they go quiet for good. After that, the strangest version of all — what the lizard does on the day things don’t go your way.