Kelly has an amazing conversation with Lindy Elkins-Tanton: a professor at UC Berkeley, Director of the Berkeley Space Sciences Laboratory, and lead of the NASA Psyche mission. Her new book is titled “Mission Ready: How to Build Teams That Perform Under Pressure.”  

This book comes from lessons you have learned leading the Psyche Mission for NASA. Tell us about Psyche. 

“So, this is kind of a mid-size NASA mission that I lead. To win this mission, we had to compete for almost three years against 27 other teams. And it ends up being kind of like the Super Bowl in the end, when it’s just whittled down to five, because the total budget is almost 1.3 billion dollars and it supports hundreds and hundreds of people’s livelihoods for for well over a decade. And so people really care and the pressure is extremely high. And we ran into the gigantic challenges, the sudden bad surprises, COVID: all the things while we were building the spacecraft. And this is not unusual. Every spacecraft has a million of these moments. But the learning, my goodness, the learning, and then piling that on top of leadership in academia and the private sector. But there’s something so focusing about a deadline and the threat that your whole project will be canceled if you don’t meet it. What we’re doing with this mission is we’re going to an asteroid named Psyche. So, we named the mission after the asteroid. We think that it’s made mostly of metal and has a metal surface. And this will be the first time humankind will ever have visited a metal surfaced object. We’re going to learn about a whole new class of solar system objects, and we don’t even have a photograph of it. So, it’s primary exploration. We’re going to get there in the summer of 2029. The spacecraft has been in flight almost a thousand days and it’s got a long way to go.” 

I had not expected to see you reference improv in the book. You write: “We need to become members of a team improv troupe. We need to say ‘yes.’ and instead of ‘no,’ and to work for the common good.” 

“Yes. Yes. Bless you. My gosh, Kelly. Right. At the time that I wrote that sentence I didn’t realize I was writing it for you, but I was completely writing it for you. I have actually stood in front of faculty meetings when I was chair or director and said, ‘Imagine that we are an improv troupe and that what you’re trying to work for is team success and not just your success.’ And then you go into a place like the Psyche mission where every person on the team understands that the purpose of their existence and work every day is to achieve success for the project. And the contrast of those two cultures has driven a lot of what I’ve written about.” 

In improv we are reflexive about taking a beat – using a pause as a way to properly pivot. You talk about that in your work. 

“Yes, that’s right. That’s right. Sometimes we even call it the twenty-four hour rule: If there’s a gigantic crisis, not to leap to conclusions, not to get everybody stirred up, but let’s find out the facts first and then we can talk about it. And I love that word ‘reflexive,’ I use it all the time, because that is not always where people are at their best. And also when you’re talking about herding kittens, you know, that is part of the joy of working with people.” 

Photo Credit: James Tanton