Tabling the problem.

On the other hand, The Washington Post reports that Wayne Hale, the new head of NASA's management team for shuttle missions, "is talking about the importance of the shape of the table" at meetings. He thinks that a redesigned table would change the agency's culture One hopes he knows that a more impressive signal to everyone in the organization would be to fire the people who suppressed or failed to act on information about the hazards that destroyed Columbia, and to promote or otherwise reward those who saw the hazards and tried to do something about them. This is exactly what was not done at NASA after the Challenger disaster, and the failure to act perpetuated a culture that rewards those who refuse to hear bad news and threatens those who bring it.

I should note that "bad news" might not be the best term to describe what I'm talking about. Certainly in the case of the Niger uranium, it was good news that the uranium was not going to Iraq. But it was good news the Bush administration didn't want, which is why Joseph Wilson and Valerie Plame had to be punished. So maybe instead of "bad news," we should say "news the top guys don't want to hear."