When my father and I used to talk on the phone, I'd be going on and on about one problem or another and what I was doing. He'd always ask me, "What's plan B?" That was the voice of a successful manager.

Today we were hoping to run Boudreaux, the robot, in a scouting expedition across the road. But having not completed the testing the past day, and hearing that the chief Mobile Agents engineers were expressing some doubt, I realized we needed a plan B. Here it was Thursday and it was time to get some testing done outside. But go out too soon and we might have to scrub after hours of setup. Wait too long and we wouldn't find out what's not going to work when we finally put everything on the wireless network with live differential GPS and biosensors.

I was surprised how many plan Bs we produced:

• Teleoperate Boudreaux through all the steps, gathering the GPS data and photographs we needed to plan the astronaut EVA
• Send out a person on an ATV with a touch screen and Mobile Agents computer, to simulate Boudreaux
• Carry out an astronaut EVA without Boudreaux

We discussed some of the pros and cons at the 0900h meeting, and I said we'd decide at 1100h which plan to follow (if not the hoped for scouting run). One trick we used was to pursue the favored plan while preparing for our favored plan B, in this case the third option.

Over the past few days, I've written about activities, reactive behavior, and communication. Creating plans and decision making are classic topics in the psychology of problem solving, and form the basis of artificial intelligence software.

But out here in the wild (as cognitive scientists call real-world settings), we find an organizational strategy, which goes beyond the logic of planning and reasoning. We not only developed contingent plans, we broke into two groups and actively pursued two approaches in parallel. It's a valuable strategy if you can manage it: Hedge your bets and invest in two methods. The result for us was advances in two areas—Boudreaux's scouting and astronaut EVAs—both of which are necessary for what we hope to do next week. Sure, neither culminated in a successful run, but we are now closer to our objectives on two fronts.

NASA has announced a related approach for developing the Crew Exploration Vehicle. Two contracts are expected to be awarded and the winners will demonstrate their approaches in a few years. One contractor is expected to be funded to continue work (a competition called a "down-select"), possibly combining ideas from each. So when you read later this year about the CEV awards, you will realize one is plan A and the other is plan B.