How a Food Court Metaphor Reimagined Rocket Launch Operations
A five-day systemic design inquiry helped a launch organization move beyond optimizing individual launches and begin imagining a continuous operating model.
The challenge wasn’t simply launching more rockets.
The range was being asked to behave more like an airport — supporting accelerating launch tempo, simultaneous activity, faster stand-ups, and less friction across missions, infrastructure, partners, and providers.
Design the conditions for the team to question its own operating model.
I designed the logic of the sprint, facilitated the arc across five days, protected the team from converging too quickly on familiar answers, synthesized the wall-level learning, and translated the emerging concept into a sponsor-ready narrative.
Turn a planning challenge into a systemic design inquiry.
Sequence divergence and convergence across five days.
Keep the room from jumping back to familiar solutions.
Harvest drawings, critique, and discussion.
Make the idea legible enough for sponsor challenge.
Frame Burn process.
Legacy Frame
Surface the existing system, assumptions, relationships, and dominant paradigm.
Alternative Frames
Challenge the legacy frame through different perspectives and ways of seeing the system.
Multiple Futures
Explore divergent futures to reveal new opportunities, risks, and consequences.
Prototype Future Concept
Make a promising future tangible enough to explore, challenge, and refine.
Reframing + Implementation
Translate what emerged into a new frame and a path toward action.
Before redesigning the system, draw the system you think you have.
The first artifact was intentionally crude. Its value wasn’t accuracy — it externalized a deeply familiar operating logic and made it discussable.
Prototype metaphor developed by the teamThe metaphor that unlocked the room: a food court.
Instead of describing a slightly better process, the team started imagining a fundamentally different relationship between government, launch providers, and customers.
Landlord: set rules, standards, and shared infrastructure.
Providers: operate with greater autonomy inside a defined envelope.
Kiosk: give customers a simpler front door to the system.
From central manager to ecosystem enabler.
The metaphor evolved into a “spaceport as platform” operating model — shared standards, infrastructure, data, interfaces, and decision rhythms supporting greater provider autonomy without eliminating government’s essential role.
Emerging operating modelto proceed.
After five days of systemic design and a leadership sponsor stress test, the team was directed to continue refining the concept and move it into the next stage of development.
The sprint earned another round of investmentGood strategic design does more than produce concepts. It changes the quality of the questions people are willing to ask.