I first heard about the concept of ‘Launchpad Chicken’ in a recent article by Jean-Louis Gassée (former CEO of Apple Computer) concerning Apple’s recent botched launch of a set of internet services called MobileMe. The phrase denotes a situation where nobody wants to be the first to step forward and admit that there is a serious problem:
Picture the NASA control room before the launch of an expedition to the Moon. Hundreds of (mostly) men in white short-sleeves shirts, pocket protectors and eyeglasses, hunched before screens, keyboards and telephones. Each one monitors a subsystem: left liquid hydrogen tank, backup gyroscopes, main engine telemetry… In the huge air-conditioned control room, five of these men are sweating, something’s not quite right with their baby. The temperature keeps rising, the pressure is falling, the telemetry link is weakening. Almost but not quite in the red zone. If the parameters keep drifting like this, they’ll have to pick up the red phone. But who wants to be the one who aborts the launch? So, they sweat some more and hope someone else blinks first. There you have it: Launchpad Chicken.
Upon hearing the news that Gordon Brown believes that the economy is set for a swift recovery, launchpad chicken was the first thing that jumped into my head. It seems to be worse than our wildest nightmares: our Prime Minister clearly believes that the economy is bullet-proof and is trying to act accordingly, where outside his bubble we’re increasingly becoming aware of how bad this could really get.
The only question is will somebody step into the firing line before it’s too late, or will we end up calling Houston with a problem on our hands.