Astronaut brings out-of-this-world perspective to leadership challenges

Like one-third of the world, Chris Hadfield was inspired by watching the Apollo 11 crew walk on the moon. He was nine years old.

Unlike most of the world, he rode that inspiration, and a few rockets, into space as a member of the Royal Canadian Air Force.

While flying two Space Shuttle missions and commanding the International Space Station, he reflected on what it took for humanity to reach the moon.

“They had to learn and become skilled at doing things that they couldn’t even ask anybody about, that nobody had ever done,” he told the NACo Annual Conference General Session audience Sunday. “They had to change how they worked together and try as a group of three to do things that no individual ever could.”

What country leaders could take away from that was that the driving force behind the effort was President John F. Kennedy’s rhetoric, which set the tone with his 1962 Moonshot speech.

“He didn’t do it as a boastful thing, he did it because he recognized that if you want people to rise above, you need to give them a challenge,” Hadfield said. “You need to inspire them.”

But words aren’t enough, he said. You need a clear vision of what you want to do and the courage to grow.

“If you truly want to change your county, if you want to change your role within the country, if you want to change the opportunity for the people that you’re responsible for, that doesn’t just take a vision of leadership, it takes actual change. And the thing that you, as an individual, have the greatest control over, of course, is changing yourself.” 

Although Hadfield changed from an elementary school student into a test pilot and later an astronaut and focused his career on science, he retained an appreciation of the arts that he brought into space with him. Before hearing his story, most audience members would have been familiar with him from his viral 2013 video playing David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” on the guitar that he brought with him to the International Space Station.

Now as an academic and an advisor to businesses in the spaceflight industry, he focuses on the strategic aspects of outer space travel and its potential to remake the geopolitical order and how those changes will be reflected on Earth.

“The moon is just part of a new economic system, but the real point of all this is how do we improve the quality of life for as many people as possible in a sustainable way? That is the great challenge of our generation. How can we improve the quality of life for as many people as possible in a sustainable way?” 

 Some of those people may be part of a permanent human habitation on the moon someday, but the skills needed to navigate that new world won’t be all that different from what it takes to live on earth.

“Moon, schmoon, you guys got counties to think about, right?”