Monday Notes
Wernher von Braun ran NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center during the Apollo program. Thousands of engineers, dozens of projects, teams split between Alabama and Cape Canaveral. The usual management problem: how does the person at the top know what’s actually happening?
His solution was the Monday Notes. Every week, about two dozen lab directors and project managers sent him a one-page update. No forms, no templates — just a paragraph or two on what mattered that week. Problems, progress, concerns.
Von Braun read every one. He wrote comments in the margins — questions, suggestions, congratulations, challenges. Then his secretary copied the whole package, annotations and all, and sent it back to everyone who’d contributed.
Why it worked
The system solved three problems at once.
Vertical bypass. Information flowed directly from working level to the top, skipping the filtering that happens when updates pass through middle management. Von Braun heard about problems before they’d been softened or spun.
Horizontal visibility. Everyone saw everyone else’s notes. A propulsion engineer learned what was happening in guidance systems. A project manager saw what other projects were struggling with. Cross-functional awareness without cross-functional meetings.
Psychological safety through structure. Von Braun guaranteed “no repercussions for unsolved problems.” The format made honesty safe — you were supposed to surface issues, not hide them.
The annotations were the key. Von Braun’s handwritten comments proved he actually read the notes. That’s what made people take the exercise seriously. Without visible engagement from leadership, it would have been paperwork.
Why it died
After von Braun left, the Monday Notes became formalised. Required fields. Structured templates. The personal annotations disappeared.
It turned into bureaucratic overhead — the form without the function. People filled it in because they had to, not because it created value. The information still flowed, but nobody was listening.
The modern version
I use something similar with Teams Updates. Weekly prompts go out; people respond in their own words. I can comment directly, visibly — the digital equivalent of margin notes. Everyone sees the thread.
The pattern is the same: structured prompt, unstructured response, visible leadership engagement, horizontal transparency. The tool doesn’t matter. The design does.
What makes it work:
- Short and frequent — weekly, one page max, low friction
- Unstructured responses — their words, not your template
- Visible annotation — proof that someone’s actually reading
- Shared distribution — everyone sees everyone, not just up the chain
What kills it:
- Adding required fields
- Removing the leadership response
- Making it a compliance exercise instead of a communication channel
The Monday Notes worked because they were designed for information flow, not information capture. The moment they became a form to fill in rather than a channel to communicate through, they stopped working.
If you’re going to ask people to write, show them you’re reading.
Connects to Library: Viable System Model · Systems Thinking