--- author: TED date: '2026-02-01' guest: '' layout: post.njk source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IYKojMhBy4 speaker: TED tags: - team-communication - information-asymmetry - hidden-language title: 团队沟通失效：NASA火星气候轨道探测器任务失败的启示 summary: 本文通过NASA火星气候轨道探测器任务的失败案例，揭示了团队沟通失效是导致任务失败的关键原因。团队成员之间的沟通不畅、信息不对称和隐性语言差异等因素，都可能导致团队决策的失误。 insight: '' draft: true series: '' category: ai-ml area: tech-engineering project: [] people: [] companies_orgs: - NASA - Lockheed Martin products_models: [] media_books: [] status: evergreen --- ### 沟通失效：团队失败的根源 NASA于1999年9月23日发射的火星气候轨道探测器任务的失败，并非源于技术故障，而是团队内部沟通不畅导致的。探测器在进入火星大气层时解体，原因在于NASA和洛克希德·马丁公司在计算飞行路径时使用了不同的单位系统——NASA使用米制单位（牛顿），而洛克希德·马丁公司使用英制单位（磅）。由于双方未能及时沟通确认单位标准，导致计算结果偏差高达4.4倍，最终导致任务失败。这个案例揭示了一个深刻的道理：即使是高智商的工程师团队，也可能因为沟通失误而犯下低级错误。
Original English What happened on September 23, 1999? This is the day that the Mars Climate Orbiter went on a mission to Mars and actually failed considerably. This was this device that NASA sent over to Mars. It was designed to measure the weather on Mars, and also to serve as this communication device for the Mars Polar Lander, which was supposed to arrive a couple of months later. It just completely failed. It hit the atmosphere, burst into a million pieces, leaving the folks who worked at NASA befuddled, upset, pretty pissed off. These are not them. You have to use your imagination a little bit in this talk. Now these things happen. Sending things into space is tricky business, and quite frankly, as a psychologist, who am I to judge a bunch of very smart engineers who work for NASA for failing and having a bad day at work? But what makes this story extra special and super fascinating from my perspective is that the entire failure comes down to one thing: failed communication between these team members, and more specifically, the people working on this project were not talking to each other about the right stuff at the right time. It really is that simple. So I'm going to break this down for you. So it all started when they had to calculate the flight path. So any time you send something into space, you have to tell it where to go. And to do so you have to calculate the flight path. Now the folks working at NASA for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, they calculated the flight path using the metric system, and so they had the newton as their unit of force. Those working at Lockheed Martin, they were using the pound as their unit of force. When you're using these two different systems, the whole thing was off by a factor of about 4.4. Now at no point did the folks at NASA say, "Hey guys, you're using the newton as a unit of force, right?" "No, guys. We were using the pound." That conversation never actually happened. And so we have our first big communication mishap. Two sets of teams failed to communicate about basic information that seemed pretty obvious to everybody.
### 隐藏信息与团队决策困境 心理学家通过“隐藏信息任务”（Hidden Profile Task）实验发现，团队在做决策时，往往会忽略掉关键的独特信息。实验中，团队成员各自掌握部分信息，只有一个人拥有关键的独特信息，但如果这个人没有主动分享，团队很可能做出错误的决策。研究表明，即使团队成员都致力于做出正确的选择，也常常会因为信息不对称而失败。这种现象在现实中普遍存在，团队成员往往无法准确判断彼此掌握的信息，导致关键信息被遗漏。
Original English And just to put things into perspective, imagine instead of sending something into space, these folks were making a cake. And if I thought I was using a pound of butter and you thought we were using a kilogram of butter -- that's about 2.2 pounds of butter -- your cake would end up tasting pretty gross, like this one looks here. Now before we get too judgey about this -- it sounds pretty silly -- we do this all the time. We walk into meetings. You know, if we get lucky, there's that annoying, overly conscientious person who says things like, before we get started, everyone, let's level set and talk about, you know, whether there's ink in the printer at the newspaper we work or whatever obvious thing they want to get on the same page with. And we usually roll our eyes at this person and we tell them to stop talking because we want the meeting to end soon, and we want to get on to the important stuff. And we say things like, "We've done this a million times, do we really need to cover that kind of thing?" And the answer is yes, we should have that 22nd conversation so that our probe does not explode when it hits the atmosphere. But we often do not do this. Now the good news is this is NASA. There is no single point of failure. And so just because you miscalculate your flight path doesn't mean the whole mission is going to actually end in just a complete failure. And so people started noticing things were wrong. And the good news is you can actually recalculate a flight path. So people started bringing this up in various meetings, and they even had a conference about it. But then there was a big mistake that happened. Communication mishap number two. The people holding that critical information were ignored for a very dumb reason that I'm pretty sure everyone in this room can recognize. They did not fill out the right form.
### 隐性语言与沟通障碍 团队沟通中还存在着“隐性语言”的问题，即团队成员之间形成的特定术语、缩写或表达方式。虽然这些隐性语言可以提高团队效率和凝聚力，但对于不熟悉这些语言的人来说，却会造成沟通障碍和排斥感。即使团队成员都使用相同的语言，也可能因为隐性语言的差异而产生误解。为了避免沟通障碍，团队成员应该主动询问不理解的术语或表达方式，营造开放和包容的沟通氛围。
Original English Now all of us know that if you send an important message over Slack and everybody was on email, or over email and everybody was on Slack, we just miss that critical information. But we don't think that a failure to fill out the right form is going to be the difference between our mission to Mars failing and succeeding. We think that critical information will eventually make its way to the important people at the top. But often this is not the case. We get very married to our processes, and these can actually be our Achilles heel in really important group decision-making contexts. Things didn't end here. There were actually some last-ditch efforts to save this mission that didn't go so well. Someone got on the phone with another person. They sounded urgent about fixing it, but that person didn't actually recognize urgency. I think the quote was something around like, "They didn't sound anxious enough", and so they weren't taken seriously. So this miscommunication also worked around nonverbal behaviors, tone of voice and so on and so forth. So there's lots of ways in which this mission went awry. But I've been studying miscommunication for over 20 years now, and I have to say that what actually happened at NASA is much more the norm than the exception. That even when people are making really critical decisions, they often fall flat on their faces, and often for these very simple reasons. And this is the case even when we give people every piece of information they need to make the right choice.