What NASA and American Express Have in Common About Embedding New Ways of Working

NASA launches rockets. American Express processes payments. One deals with life-or-death precision, the other with millisecond transaction speeds. Yet both organisations cracked the exact same code for embedding new ways of working.

The secret? They stopped trying to change everyone at once.

I have worked with both organisations on transformation programmes, and the pattern is unmistakable. The companies that successfully embed new ways of working do not roll out enterprise-wide training programmes or mandate new processes from the top down. They create internal scouts.

The Scout System

At NASA, we identified engineers who were already experimenting with rapid prototyping methods in their own projects. These were not the loudest voices in meetings or the official innovation champions. They were the people quietly solving problems faster than their peers.

American Express did something similar with their customer experience teams. Instead of training everyone on design thinking principles, they found the relationship managers who were already having different conversations with clients. The ones who instinctively asked "what job is this customer trying to get done?" rather than "what product can we sell them?"

Both organisations gave these scouts a simple brief: keep doing what you are doing, but document how. Show others, do not teach them.

Why This Works When Training Fails

Traditional change management assumes you can transfer knowledge through workshops and slide decks. But new ways of working are not knowledge problems. They are behaviour problems.

You cannot PowerPoint someone into thinking differently. But you can show them a colleague getting better results with a different approach.

The NASA engineers started sharing their rapid iteration results in existing project reviews. No fanfare, no separate "innovation showcase." Just better outcomes using methods their colleagues could see and copy.

The American Express relationship managers began inviting peers to listen in on their client discovery calls. Not to teach design thinking theory, but to demonstrate how different questions led to different conversations.

The psychology here is simple. We adopt behaviours from people we trust and respect, especially when we can see the direct benefit. We resist behaviours that feel imposed or artificial.

The Multiplication Effect

Here is where it gets interesting. Both organisations saw the same multiplication pattern. Each scout typically influenced 3-4 colleagues within six months. Not through formal mentoring or structured programmes, but through normal work interactions.

Those newly influenced colleagues then became scouts themselves, not because they were designated as such, but because they started getting better results and others began asking questions.

At NASA, rapid prototyping methods spread through three engineering divisions without a single training session. At American Express, customer-centric discovery approaches became standard practice in two regional offices before leadership even realised what was happening.

What You Can Do This Week

Stop looking for converts, start looking for scouts. Walk through your organisation and identify people who are already working differently. They might not even realise they are doing anything special. These are your multiplication points.

Give scouts documentation tools, not teaching responsibilities. Ask them to record what they do differently, not why it works or how others should copy it. A simple video walkthrough of their process or a before-and-after case study. Let the results speak for themselves.

Create casual sharing opportunities. Do not build formal knowledge transfer programmes. Instead, create regular touchpoints where scouts naturally interact with peers. Project reviews, team huddles, cross-functional working sessions. Let organic influence happen in existing workflows.

The Patience Principle

Both NASA and American Express learned the same lesson about timing. Sustainable change happens through repeated exposure, not single events. The scouts who influenced the most colleagues were the ones who consistently demonstrated new approaches over months, not weeks.

This requires patience from leadership. You will not see dramatic adoption curves or impressive training completion metrics. What you will see is gradual shifts in how work actually gets done.

The irony is that this patient approach delivers faster results than forced rollouts. Because when people choose to adopt new ways of working rather than having them imposed, they stick.

You cannot mandate mindset shifts, but you can multiply them through the right people doing the right work in view of others.