Situation
NESDIS — the National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service — is the 700-person, $3-billion federal agency inside NOAA responsible for operating the nation's weather satellites. As its head Dr. Steve Volz had written in NESDIS's own strategic plan, the agency was actively preparing for a new paradigm: incorporating innovative approaches, pursuing emerging partnerships, and adapting to a rapidly changing technology landscape. By September 2021, with the Biden administration proposing a record $6.9 billion NOAA budget and the IPCC issuing alarm-bell climate reports, the window for transformation had never been larger — and the pressure to act had never been higher.
Complication
That strategic plan had been written in 2016. Five years later, nothing had changed. NESDIS was still an organization of scientists and engineers working in their own silos, polishing their own hardware, with little incentive to think about the impact of their work on end users or colleagues. Decisions got pushed up to Volz because no one wanted to be held accountable. New priorities were added constantly while nothing was ever stopped. The culture had a name for the roughly 25% of staff who actively resisted change: "pirates." They weren't the majority, but they were a drag on the 50% of the workforce still undecided on whether NESDIS could actually change.
What They Tried — and Why It Wasn't Enough
NESDIS had not been passive. By the time MMG was engaged, the agency had already produced four different sets of governance guidelines since 2018, brought in McKinsey and other outside consultants, and issued new directives from the top. None of it stuck. The pattern was consistent: decisions were made at the top, communicated downward, and then quietly ignored — not out of malice, but because the people expected to change their behavior had no ownership of the decisions and no stake in the outcome. The consultants had diagnosed the problem correctly. What they couldn't do was create the internal mandate to act on it.
Question
NESDIS had been trying to transform itself for years — producing strategy documents, hiring consultants, and issuing new directives — with nothing to show for it. The challenge was not a shortage of ideas or ambition. It was that the people who would have to change their behavior had never been the ones building the plan.
Answer
MMG convened a deliberately non-senior participant group of 24 people on September 27, 28, and 30, 2021: stars and change agents from across NESDIS and NOAA, chosen because they wanted to be part of the solution — not the senior leaders who had repeatedly failed to follow through. Dr. Volz participated as the sole Critic, a role designed to give him visibility into the recommendations without dominating the process. The workshop was structured across six topics — Value Proposition, Innovation, Prioritization, Whole System View, Workforce Transformation, and Partnerships — so that the 18 recommendations would form a coherent transformation system. Critically, those recommendations were designed as direct input to NESDIS's Fall Strategy Meeting — a 5-day gathering of 50 senior leaders — giving them organizational weight that a standalone workshop rarely achieves.
Output
Volz and his leadership team left the workshop with three things that years of consulting engagements had failed to produce:
- An honest internal diagnosis — a candid account of why NESDIS kept failing to change, surfaced by the people living the dysfunction: deference to leadership, the inability to stop anything, a speak-up culture that didn't exist, and a workforce that had learned that innovation was punished rather than rewarded.
- An 18-recommendation transformation strategy — organized into three clusters: clarify what NESDIS uniquely does and should prioritize; build a culture of innovation, flexibility, and accountability; and develop a workforce and partner network capable of executing the vision.
- A follow-on mandate — the recommendations were adopted as the framework for the Fall Strategy Meeting, with Volz and his team committed to presenting them to 50 senior leaders and beginning implementation immediately.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did four sets of governance guidelines and multiple outside consultants fail to produce the change NESDIS needed?
Because the people expected to change their behavior had no ownership of the decisions. Consultants diagnose correctly and recommend sensibly, but the recommendations land as external instructions — and in a 700-person federal agency, external instructions that bypass the people living the dysfunction are quietly ignored, not out of malice, but because no one had a stake in making them work. MMG's approach was the opposite: convene the internal change agents, let them build the strategy, and give the output organizational weight by connecting it directly to the senior leadership meeting where decisions would be made.
Why did MMG choose non-senior participants rather than the senior leaders who had been trying to drive change?
Because the senior leaders had already demonstrated the limits of top-down direction. Four rounds of strategy documents and outside consultants had produced nothing durable. The people with the most accurate diagnosis of why NESDIS kept failing to change were the stars and change agents living it — the roughly 25% of the workforce who wanted to be part of the solution but had never been asked to build it. Convening them, rather than the leaders who would need to approve the output, was itself a structural choice about what kind of mandate the recommendations would carry.
How do you make recommendations from a three-day workshop stick in a large federal agency?
By designing the output to connect directly to the decision-making structures that already exist. MMG structured the NESDIS engagement so that the 18 recommendations would feed directly into the agency's Fall Strategy Meeting — a five-day gathering of 50 senior leaders — rather than producing a standalone report. That gave the recommendations organizational weight that a workshop alone rarely achieves. Dr. Volz participated as the designated Critic, which gave him visibility without allowing him to dominate the process that produced the input.
We've tried consulting engagements before and nothing changed. What would be different this time?
The typical consulting model positions the consultant as the diagnostic authority and the client organization as the recipient of recommendations. That works for technical problems with knowable answers. It doesn't work when the real barrier is that the people who need to change have no ownership of the decisions being handed down. The question worth asking before any new engagement is: who is building the strategy, and what stake do they have in making it work?