Below, Lindy Elkins-Tanton shares five key insights from her new book, Mission Ready: How to Build Teams That Perform Under Pressure.
Lindy is a professor at UC Berkeley, director of the Berkeley Space Sciences Laboratory, and leader of the billion-dollar NASA Psyche mission, a robotic space probe bound for a metallic asteroid, for which she won NASA’s Outstanding Public Leadership Medal. She is the author of A Portrait of the Scientist as a Young Woman.
What’s the big idea?
In Mission Ready, NASA Psyche mission leader Lindy Elkins-Tanton argues that high-performing teams are built not by charisma, rigid hierarchy, or flawless planning, but by culture: how people communicate, solve problems, handle conflict, and respond under pressure. Drawing on her experience leading a billion-dollar space mission—where mistakes can’t be corrected once the spacecraft leaves Earth—Elkins-Tanton offers a practical, deeply human guide to building resilient teams that can tackle uncertainty and complexity together.
Her lessons range from encouraging early problem reporting and productive conflict to preserving institutional knowledge and refusing to give up when setbacks hit. At its core, the book makes a compelling case that every team member, regardless of title, shares responsibility for shaping the culture that determines whether a mission succeeds or fails.
Listen to the audio version of this Book Bite—read by Lindy herself—in the Next Big Idea App, or buy the book.
1. Need a great team? Start with yourself.
All the work we do can be divided into two parts: What we do and how we do it.
You and every member of the team need to excel at both parts: the technical aspect of the work (what we do) and the cultural aspect (how we do it). The cultural part, how we do our work, makes all the difference in the world to whether we hit our milestones, whether we collaborate and communicate effectively, and how good our product is. That famous quote, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast,” says it all – it’s how we work together that determines whether the team excels, and the “how” is in each of our hands.
This is the same as saying that, in the most successful teams, each member is a leader in their own actions. That’s why we start with ourselves. Every person is a leader when it comes to how we do it.
Here are a few of the most important things each of us can control within ourselves to become the most effective team members and leaders. We can each communicate clearly, calmly, and on topic, and we can listen with respect. We can take responsibility for our relationships with every other team member. We can be self-reflective, analyze our own processes, and be great problem-solvers. Great problem-solving—that’s key! And it’s up next.
2. Constantly scan for problems and greet them with joy.
What is the main job of a project team? The main job of a project team is to identify and solve problems together.
Maybe you see a problem, and it’s not in your job description, so you assume it belongs to someone else. But if you are noticing it, it’s likely that no one else has picked it up. So you need to pick up that problem, hold it, and take responsibility for it until you find its proper owner.
This isn’t an unusual event or an exception to your regular job, and it shouldn’t feel like an inconvenience. Having challenges to solve is the very fabric of life. And finding problems in time to solve them is the fundamental job of a team member.
“Having challenges to solve is the very fabric of life.”
We have a motto on the NASA Psyche mission team: The best news is bad news brought early. Brought early enough, in fact, to solve them in time.
Imagine what that means for our team: We are building a spacecraft that needs to work in space, near-flawlessly, for years and maybe even decades. But once it’s launched, no repair person will ever visit it. No pressure! We need to know what’s wrong in time to fix it. Our spacecraft launched in 2023 after six years of building it, during which we discovered, and then fixed, problem after problem after problem. That’s the fundamental nature of building a new thing. And now the spacecraft has been flying in space for years, and it is doing great.
How do you help ensure that problems are discovered early? By enabling the foundational team members who discover problems to speak and be heard. Who is going to know when something is wrong? Maybe the CEO or the VP figures out there is a problem, but mostly, they get their information second-hand or third-hand from other people. So, on the Psyche project, the problem-discoverer could be me, the project manager, or the operations manager, but it’s more likely to be the person actually typing the line of code or soldering the wire… the people with boots on the ground doing the work.
But those people are often unable to speak up and be heard. So every single person on the team needs to set the culture so that everyone is invited to speak, and when a problem is uncovered, it’s taken seriously and met with respect, never with punishment. That way, junior people on the team will reveal problems in time to solve them.
This practice is a big risk reducer for the project and, at the same time, a great way to respect and elevate each person’s contributions. Your team will have great results for the project, and also for every individual on the team.
3. There’s a good kind of conflict for a team: It’s when you’re figuring out which solution to select for the problem you’re facing.
How many times have you been in a meeting and, when considering some barrier or problem, one person speaks up using a voice of assurance and states what has to be done? Sometimes this is a power play: The person wants to be the one who came up with the solution. Sometimes it’s just a normal leap to a solution. No matter the person’s motivation, though, the effect is both to create risk and to waste time.
Risk arises from the meeting’s sudden momentum toward this first possible solution, without having worked through the full range of possible solutions and considered which is best. The time wasted is the time needed to walk the group back to considering the full range of possible solutions while still maintaining a sense of energy and momentum.
Instead of asserting knowledge prematurely, pose problems as questions and begin gathering candidate solutions.
This is the heart of the most important work a project team does: Collecting and analyzing the possible solutions to a problem. And you want to collect the maximum number of possible solutions.
“Pose problems as questions and begin gathering candidate solutions.”
First, you and your team have to be comfortable living with uncertainty and incomplete information for a while as you analyze the collection of solutions.
Right there is the key: Solutions need to be evaluated on their merits, completely disconnected from the people who suggested them. It’s not about the individual (they have already proven their worth by suggesting something); it’s about the best solution to your common problem.
Conflict over the work itself should bring a team closer together: the discussion of facts and assumptions, the shared striving for something that works. But if the discussion turns to culture or process, that is, if it gets personal in a negative way (Sean’s idea, rather than Solution option #1), the damage to the team dynamic can be permanent and irreparable.
The best kind of conflict is the wrangling over finding the very best of many solutions, so the team can win as a team.
4. Don’t let your team lose the recipe: Learn together in person.
The email explained unemotionally that a part of the Psyche spacecraft’s communications system would arrive a few weeks later than planned. No explanation. Maybe not a huge problem, except this was not the subcontractor’s first slip. We’d already implemented regular virtual meetings with some of their leadership, but the issues causing problems were neither being resolved nor becoming clearer to us through those virtual conversations.
We learned that they had not been successful in “tuning” the part we needed for our communications system— so it wasn’t usable. But why? All our videocon meetings had yielded nothing other than we’re starting over with this unit and we’re going to be submitting a new invoice to you for our additional costs. So, we increased the pressure by making a personal visit to create real human connections and find out what was really going on.
When we visited, we learned what was really happening. The company’s one tuning expert, a woman named Helen, had retired. To get the part made, they’d had to entice Helen back from retirement. We worried all the while that she was going to say “No, I’ve had enough” or, awfully, that she would get COVID as a result—this was in the midst of the pandemic—but thankfully she carried through, and the working part was delivered.
A year later, across the country, a different company’s delivery schedule was slipping. This problem was even more serious because the company was not sure why the parts were not working. It wasn’t a missing process, like tuning; it was something more complex. We put together an expert team, and they CAT-scanned one of the complex parts and performed a destructive analysis on it. They found multiple issues, including the wrong bolts, epoxy blobs where they should not be, and some shaving-like foreign matter in areas with moving parts. To my astonishment, we learned that this company also had to bring an expert back from retirement to make a proper part, and again, her name was Helen! Different company, different part, same story. Why were these companies forgetting the recipe?
“Human progress is like a sieve, knowledge constantly dropping through to be left behind forever.”
Suddenly, this problem, the problem of humans learning how to do or make something important and precious and then forgetting that knowledge, both obsessed me and appeared everywhere I looked. Why hadn’t I wondered about this before? Looking around me, I thought, human progress is like a sieve, knowledge constantly dropping through to be left behind forever.
Keeping your team’s recipe, it turns out, means working in person, shoulder to shoulder, learning from each other. More than writing down processes (seriously, procedure manuals are often not even helpful), it’s learning in person, transferring that tacit knowledge, the unspoken expertise, that can only happen in person. Too much remote work breaks a team. You need to create islands of collaboration in this sea of remoteness, and you need to prioritize the personal transmission of knowledge.
5. Never give up.
Here are a few of the many moments in life and work when a person might give up.
You found a problem at work, suggested a solution, and your boss responded dismissively. You’ve heard nothing since.
You’ve been working toward an advanced degree for a few years, but the thesis step feels impossible, the timeline is lengthening, and your money is tight.
You’ve been leading a big project at work for some years, and it hit a huge problem that will delay the conclusion of the project for ten more months at significant cost; you are being blamed.
Now let’s vote. In which of these cases should you give up?
I vote: none of them.
When should you give up on what you are working on? Almost never. Instead, own the responsibility, find a path forward you can see as progress, and dismiss the concept of failure. Acknowledge your mistakes, but hold your head up and move forward. Persisting means you are responsible, determined, reliable, and undaunted— all of which are critical to your own success and the team’s.
Never give up.
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