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Mike Ciannilli
Former NASA Mission Leader
Former NASA mission leader Mike Ciannilli helps organizations make better decisions under pressure. Drawing from human spaceflight experience, he shows leaders how to manage risk, challenge assumptions, and maintain discipline as complexity grows—protecting performance, safety, and outcomes when the stakes are highest.
Bio
Mike Ciannilli is a former NASA mission leader and expert in how complex programs prevent failure under sustained pressure.
While supporting human spaceflight missions, Mike operated in environments where decisions directly affected mission success, crew safety, and public trust. He saw how programs rarely fail because leaders ignore risk. They fail when risk begins to feel manageable as momentum builds and expectations rise.
Today, Mike equips leaders and teams operating in complex systems to protect decision quality as conditions change. His work focuses on how risk is interpreted, how assumptions are validated, and how discipline is maintained when confidence increases.
His insights are especially relevant for organizations managing safety-critical systems, rapid technological change, and increasing reliance on automation. He connects mission-level lessons to the realities leaders face as systems grow more complex and the consequences of small decisions increase.
Keynotes
Featured Keynote
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Preventing Failure: Lessons Learned to Lessons Applied
Mike’s keynote is structured as a disciplined countdown that mirrors how Test Directors think and operate inside high-consequence systems.
Through powerful storytelling, humor, and real operational lessons, audiences experience a clear progression from explanation to prevention.
- T-05: Identify Risk Early - Leaders learn how small signals get dismissed, how normalization of deviance begins, and how to recognize risk before it becomes operational exposure.
- T-04: Align on What Happened and Why - Teams examine not only how events unfolded but why decisions made sense at the time, replacing hindsight with clarity.
- T-03: Apply Lessons to Decisions - Learning moves beyond reports and into real operational ownership, decision rights, and behavioral change.
- T-02: Challenge Drift and Assumptions - Leaders recognize false confidence, question assumptions, and strengthen communication under pressure.
- T-01: Commit to Prevention Discipline - Organizations leave with a practical framework for maintaining vigilance as urgency and complexity return.
This structure creates a keynote experience that is engaging, grounded, and operationally relevant.
Topics
- Leadership Trending
- Peak Performance Trending
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