Team-building tips from Nasa
Opinion: Organisational psychologist David Winsborough looks at what an expedition to the red planet could teach businesses about recruitment.
Elon Musk has been energetically pursuing his dream of establishing a colony on Mars. Musk has said he wants to land a crewed flight on Mars by 2025 and to establish a colony there during his lifetime (he’s currently 49).
There is no shortage of people who are volunteering to go. MarsOne, a group also aiming to send people to the red planet, have had over 200,000 volunteer.
It’s a three-year mission, minimum. For that period four people will be cooped up together in a space the size of a very modest two-bedroom apartment.
How would you select the crew to make sure they got along and didn’t drive each other crazy?
‘‘Are you prepared to die? If that’s okay, then you’re a candidate for going,’’ was Musk’s verdict.
But in the background, SpaceX and Nasa have been accumulating and developing technologies to make the trip possible. Along with bacteria-powered electricity generation and self-growing habitats, they are developing algorithms to compose teams that will thrive in the conditions.
I spoke recently to my colleague Suzanne Bell, a DePaul University psychology professor currently contracted to Nasa to develop those algorithms.
‘‘The idea of choosing people purely on their technical abilities just won’t work for missions like these. Choosing crew will rely on deep-level characteristics, like values and personality, just as much as medical, engineering and flight skills,’’ Suzanne told me.
And those characteristics aren’t going to be the old gungho, masculine overachiever super-hero types.
That fits with what we know already about designing effective teams. Research from Earthbound workplaces has shown that personality is one of the most powerful drivers of team effectiveness.
The reasons personality matters is because people play two roles on a team. One relates to technical skill, whether you are an accountant, fitter, crane driver or policy adviser. The second is the psychological function you fill on the team.
All effective teams pay attention to the social relations of the group. Too many similar personalities will exacerbate negative traits. For example, two people inclined to be sceptical can start a spiral where each looks for signals the other is not to be trusted.
Suzanne did point out a personality characteristic you probably don’t want on the team – neuroticism (worrying, anxious, moody and tense). That fits with studies showing that moody and volatile people negatively affect the mood and dynamics of the whole team.
Being down the neurotic end of the spectrum myself, I asked Suzanne if I would ever make the crew.
‘‘Sorry, Dave. Neuroticism in our data from people in isolated and confined environments is not particularly a great characteristic to have. Maybe wait for commercial flights?’’
Luckily for me, though, it’s not all bad news. Our own work, and beautifully confirmed by the Nasa research Suzanne is conducting, shows that a mix of personalities can balance out negative tendencies. In astronaut crews Suzanne has observed, people who are good at regulating their emotions can calm and soothe others.
There are two other characteristics that have been shown to enhance teamwork in nearly every context. The first is agreeableness – that is, people who are warm, who listen well and want to cooperate rather than compete. The second is conscientiousness – people who are precise, careful and good at following rules.
Suzanne’s more recent research is trying to account for the fact that people vary their behaviour depending on the situation and who they are interacting with.
Of course, what really drives who should go is the nature of the mission. It’s a three-year trip in an aluminium can. That means every crew member will be screened to ensure they prefer working with others, rather than autonomously.
The uber-rational Elon Musk gets it: ‘‘My biggest mistake is probably weighing too much on someone’s talent and not someone’s personality. I think it matters whether someone has a good heart’’.
David Winsborough is the founder of Winsborough Ltd, an organisational psychology company based in New Zealand, and Deeper Signals, a New York firm that aims to democratise selfawareness. He does a lot of work coaching executive teams to act more like astronauts.