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“Houston We Have a Podcast” is the official podcast of the NASA Johnson Space Center from Houston, Texas, home for NASA’s astronauts and Mission Control Center. Listen to the brightest minds of America’s space agency – astronauts, engineers, scientists and program leaders – discuss exciting topics in engineering, science and technology, sharing their personal stories and expertise on every aspect of human spaceflight. Learn more about how the work being done will help send humans forward to the Moon and on to Mars in the Artemis program.

On Episode 175, team science experts Noshir Contractor, Suzanne Bell, and Leslie DeChurch discuss team composition research at NASA and the role teams play in human spaceflight and space exploration. This episode was recorded on October 28, 2020.

Transcript

Gary Jordan (Host): Houston, we have a podcast. Welcome to the official podcast of the NASA Johnson Space Center, Episode 175, “The Science of Teams.” I’m Gary Jordan, and I’ll be your host today. On this podcast, we bring in the experts, scientists, engineers, astronauts, all to let you know what’s going on in the world of human spaceflight. It takes a broad range of skills to become an astronaut. Many of us think of astronauts as super-smart, steely-eyed, super-fit individuals that can solve complex problems and handle the stresses of launching on rockets, conducting spacewalks, and being alone, separated from society. But we know that astronauts today don’t really fly alone, do they? They’re with a small team for months at a time, and astronauts today are selected in part due to their ability to work well with others. A few times on this podcast, we’ve brought up the idea of expeditionary skills, or the skills required to be a team player when you’re stuck on a space station with the same people for months, and sometimes years. On today’s podcast, we’re going to explore the traits of a successful high-performing team, and the skills that astronauts need to be successful in those teams. Our guests today are astoundingly accomplished in the area of team science and have worked together conducting NASA-sponsored team composition research. First is Dr. Noshir Contractor, professor of behavioral sciences at Northwestern University, where he directs the SONIC research group, SONIC standing for the Science of Networks in Communities. Noshir is investigating how social and knowledge networks form and perform in contexts including businesses, scientific communities, healthcare, and space travel. His research is also at the forefront of three emerging disciplines, network science, computational social science, and web science. Next is Dr. Suzanne Bell. Suzanne’s research focuses on the predictors of performance, with a special interest in high-performance populations, strategic staffing of organizations, training and development, and team effectiveness. She is particularly noted for her expertise in team composition. Our third guest is Dr. Leslie DeChurch. Leslie’s research seeks to build high-functioning teams that work in scientific innovation, space exploration, healthcare, and the military. She leads the ATLAS Lab, ATLAS standing for Advancing Teams, Leaders, and Systems. ATLAS explores the dynamics through which teams form, and how these dynamics affect their performance as teams, and their ability to work as larger organizational systems or multi-team systems. So here we go, the science of teams with Dr. Noshir Contractor, Dr. Suzanne Bell, and Dr. Leslie DeChurch. Enjoy.

[ Music]

Host: Noshir, Suzanne, and Leslie, thank you so much for coming on Houston We Have a Podcast today. I am very excited to get into a topic about teams, and we have quite the team of guests to do so. And I want to start by having everybody go through and introduce themselves, and talk about your expertise with this topic, mainly so we can get familiar with your voices, since there are three of you. Dr. Suzanne Bell, we’ll start with you.

Suzanne Bell: Hi, Gary. Thanks for having us. I’ve been a professor of industrial and organizational psychology at DePaul University for about 16 years, researching areas related to selection, training, and maximizing team effectiveness across different populations, ranging from top management teams to deployed military teams to astronaut crews. And then, as a professor, I started working on NASA-funded team composition research in 2013, and it was such an exciting opportunity to combine one of my areas of expertise, team composition, with my love of space exploration. So, I’ve been working on NASA-funded research ever since, and this last year, I started in a full-time role working with KBR, and working as a senior scientist at Johnson Space Center, splitting my time between behavioral health performance operations and laboratory. So, as part of my role, I continue to research projects I have with Noshir and Leslie, as well as other projects. Working with Noshir and Leslie is great because even with a topic like team composition, we bring different perspectives to how we approach and think about teams. My perspective is heavily focused on the individual and attributes of the individual that combine with attributes of the other individuals to help make a team successful. So, we know that certain combinations of people work together better than others. So, when I think about teams, I see the people and characteristics of individuals. I see, like, interpersonal compatibility, and thinking about how to best support a team, given the team’s DNA, and those are the types of things I see when I approach a project like this.

Host: Perfect. Now, Noshir, a little bit about yourself, and your background, and what you deal with when it comes to teams.

Noshir Contractor: Hi, Gary. Thank you again for hosting this podcast with us. So, my background started out as an electrical engineer. My undergraduate degree is in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology back in India, and then I took a sharp left turn and did my graduate work in the field of communication, and — from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California. Then I became a professor for 20 years for communication at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and have now been here for the last 13 years at Northwestern, where my primary appointment is in industrial engineering and management science. And then, I also have appointments in communications and in management and organizations at the Kellogg School of Management. And my interest, which — with the space began as a kid, because I can still vividly recall — I’m old enough to vividly recall the Apollo 11 landing, which I saw out at a street-side television display in Calcutta, in India, and was inspired by that. And one of my fondest memories as a kid was actually an assembly model that my uncle had brought me to assemble a small, miniature version of the Apollo 11 spacecraft. And so, when I had this opportunity to talk to Leslie and to Suzanne about work that they had already begun to do with NASA, I was just delighted and ecstatic that I still had a chance of realizing one of my dreams, and that is getting close to doing something, making some contribution in the area of space and space travel. My view — as Suzanne said, one of the interesting things about working with Leslie and Suzanne is that even though we all look at the same object, nominally called teams, we come at it from somewhat different, complementary ways of looking at it. And in my case, I see teams as networks of individuals, and I see teams of teams as networks of teams. And to me, some of the most important questions is how network relationships shape how people work on a team, and how these teams, and working on teams, shape the evolution of their networks? And by networks, I don’t mean just sort of Facebook, social networking kinds of things. By networks, I mean who trusts who, who looks to whom for leadership, who seeks advice from who, and also, very importantly, who sees who as a hindrance in the course of working.

Host: And I think that’s something, you know, we all really think about, you know, how we get along with others. It’s very interesting to have, Suzanne, your view on the — and your work, thinking about the individual. You said you think about the individual when it comes to teams, Noshir with the networks. Leslie, I’m curious to hear your background, and your work with teams.

Leslie DeChurch: Wonderful. Thanks again, Gary, for having us today. I’m an industrial organizational psychologist by training, and I am a professor of communication studies and psychology at Northwestern. My expertise and background are in the area of teams and leadership, and most of my research has been on building high-performance teams in lots of interesting places, the military, healthcare, disaster response, creative enterprises, and of course, space exploration. And I like to share the story — I was not alive when Apollo landed. However, I was very profoundly affected by the space program, because I grew up on the space coast of Florida, and my sixth-grade class was doing a project on Christa McAuliffe and the Challenger Expedition. And so, I was one of the kids that was out on the beach watching when Challenger was lost, and I had this kind of dream of going to space camp. My physical characteristics did not set me up well for that, but I was delighted about ten years ago when I got a call from NASA to work on long-distance space exploration. And so, to build on Noshir and Suzanne’s perspectives, when I see teams, I see organisms. I see entities. I see things that take on a life of their own, and my work has really focused on the unique and emergent characteristics that come about, that are somewhat unpredictable — of course, we try to predict them nonetheless — when you put people together in interesting ways.

Host: I love that we have three guests that are a team of people that are working on teams and have different perspectives and expertise. This is going to be really fascinating to dive into. And so, let’s start with backing up, and talking about what is a team? Suzanne, we’ll start with you, and then we can go to Leslie. Your opening thoughts about teams — when you’re looking at teams, how do you view them? What works well? What’s challenging when dealing with teams? Suzanne, your opening thoughts?

Suzanne Bell: What is great about working in teams is also what’s challenging about working in teams. And so, what’s great about working in teams is that a team has the potential to achieve an objective that is far beyond the capabilities of a lone person. So, if you think of many of our greatest achievements, whether in space or otherwise, they’re products of a team. And so, the beauty of a team is that a team member doesn’t need to be able to do everything on his or her own. A team allows for an access to a broader pool of perspectives, capabilities, and efforts, but when you have that broader pool of perspectives, capabilities, and efforts, it’s also really hard to capitalize on those different talents of team members. And when we have a reliance on others, it can lead to frustrations when work isn’t going quite as we planned, or we are not hitting deadlines that we had laid out for ourselves. And so, when we integrate and work together as a team, that’s also the biggest challenge of teams. So, we have to learn how to do that well. Some of my work, like I was talking about earlier, is just this idea on team composition, where one thing we can do is compose the team well. So, we have the right people in place in order to be — in order for the teams to be able to perform well. However, even when the right people, broadly speaking, need the other supports in place to be able to work effectively as a team, and be able to capitalize on the talents and efforts of others.

Host: Now, Leslie, your thoughts about teams? What’s good, and what’s challenging? Because you talked about seeing teams as organisms, so I’m curious to hear your perspective on this.

Leslie DeChurch: So, I love this question, because it really gets at the heart, at why we kind of do what we do. And when most people think back in their life about some really special moment, or some crowning achievement, more likely than not, it’s something that they didn’t do by themselves that involves a team. And so, a lot of these moments in life that stand out come about because not something we did by ourselves, but something where we were able to partner with other people and develop this chemistry. And I think the same could be said about our greatest disappointments. They’re rarely things — you know, we tend to focus on our own failures, but we’re very social beings. And a lot of these great achievements or great failures come about from collaboration of one kind or another, and I think when I — when you think about this question also, teams introduce a lot of uncertainty and vulnerability in people. And so, there’s an irony that you’re taking people who are extremely successful and specialized, and have lots of expertise at what they’re doing, and ambitious, and making them vulnerable in a way that maybe their preparation hasn’t led them to think about. And so, it’s this really interesting mix between creating stars who can then also work together well.

Host: I love that perspective, and, you know, I’m actually in the middle of taking a leadership course at Rice, and our last class, just seriously a week and a half ago, was on teams. And so, I thought — I’m so excited to be doing this right now, because, like, all of this is very fresh. We explored in the class something about myths and facts about teams, and I think a lot of us kind of over — you know, we don’t look over teams as deeply, I think, as you three, because I think it’s just something that you’re always used to. Even in school, I remember when it was time to break out into groups, just dreading that, just rolling my eyes and thinking, ugh, I’d rather just do this myself. But it’s a very fascinating field. So, going into myths and facts, I’m going to send out a statement, and I’ll direct it to you three to talk about the myths — whether this is a myth, whether this is a fact, and to go deeper into it. So, Suzanne, I’ll start with you. “Most organizations use teams, and they put smart people together, and the rest will fall into place. And that chemistry is a matter of luck.”

Suzanne Bell: Well, I’m going to call that a myth, Gary. Having teams [laughter] — having team members that are smart, or at least have the right skills and expertise for the task, is a great start, but it’s not enough. In other words — and you might have heard this, depending on who you had at Rice already. Dr. Ed Salas uses this a lot as well, but a team of experts does not always make for an expert team. They have to be able to effectively coordinate their efforts, as we’ve talked about, and there’s a science behind team chemistry, called team composition, as we’ve been discussing. And we have empirical evidence that things like personality traits, values, and other characteristics fundamentally shape the way team members relate to one another, the way they think and feel about what they’re doing, and ultimately shape team performance. So, team chemistry doesn’t have to be a matter of luck. Team composition information beyond intelligence or expertise can be used in the design of teams. There are also other conditions, such as role clarity or an understanding of who is doing what, that help a team of experts become an expert team.

Host: Now, here’s another statement. Leslie, this one’s for you. “A happy team is a productive team.”

Leslie DeChurch: And, Gary, I’m going to call that a half-truth, or a half-myth, depending on which side you look at it. This is actually one that I love, because when we talk about a lot of the properties that make effective teams, things like psychological safety, trust, believing in one another, there is this — you know, psychologists certainly recognize the importance of these kind of hot emotional properties in wanting to contribute to teams. But actually, the research shows that if we’re going to draw an arrow of causality, it’s stronger to reword the statement as “A productive team is a happy team,” and of course, it’s reciprocal. So, you know, nothing builds cohesion in a team like excellence, and by the same token, no expert specialist wants to be part of a losing team for a long period of time. And so, I think that the way to think about this is, there is a relationship between being a happy team and a productive team, but it’s maybe not — you maybe should start with performance first.

Host: Now, Noshir, a statement for you. “Team conflict is bad.”

Noshir Contractor: I would say that that is also a half-truth, and the reason is that it — people would generally assume, of course, conflict has a negative connotation, et cetera. And so, the idea is that all conflict is bad, when in fact, it turns out that a happy team may not be a very productive team, exactly because they don’t engage in the kind of creative conflict, and what some people call creative friction, which allows you to challenge one another. And so, in the literature on teams, for example, there is a distinction that is made between conflict that is associated with personalities and conflict that is associated with the process, the actual work being done. And most of the literature shows that, in fact, having conflict associated with coming up with ideas, and challenging one another’s ideas is actually helpful to the team. It’s when the conflict gets personal that things get really ugly, and it is — and as Tom Williams, who’s an element scientist at the human factors behavioral performance, and a three-time member on your podcast here, has said to you on an interview, “that the goal is not to reduce conflict. The goal is to manage conflict.” So, the question is not that you eliminate it. You recognize it. You nurture the kind of conflict that is going to lead to constructive criticism, and then you work towards minimizing the conflict that is going to create interpersonal issues amongst people.

Host: So, Noshir, we talked about what is a team, and we’ve gone through some of these myths. And the next question I have is a simple one, but at the same time, I think it really is sort of the ultimate question here. “What makes a good team?”

Noshir Contractor: That’s an excellent question, and it is a very multifaceted question. And I’ll be eager to hear what Suzanne and Leslie would have to say to it. It may come as no surprise to you that a lot of my own thinking about teams — and I’ve studied networks and teams in a wide variety of contexts. I’ll give you an example of a recent study that we did, that gives you a pretty good idea of where I come in terms of what makes a good team. So, some colleagues and I looked at sports teams, and we looked at teams that play cricket from India. I’m originally from there, so I was interested in that, but also football, the European kind, from the English Premiere League, and then we came stateside and did the same thing, looking at NBA, and Major League Baseball, and the NFL. And in all of these instances, we wanted to see if we could predict which team would beat the other team, based on looking at the individual statistics of the players. And lo and behold, we even started this with cricket, and then continued to do the studies, and expand it to the English Premiere League, and then the American sports. In every single sport, we found that trying to predict which team would beat the other team based on individual stats was not doing very well. In other words, the team that had the better players in terms of individual stats, were not particularly likely to beat the teams that didn’t have members who were as good, in terms of their statistics. Now, mind you, these are all pretty good teams, so the difference in stat is not huge, but given that they are generally in parity, the small differences in individual metrics between team players was not really explaining very much. But what did explain things considerably more, was the relationships that existed amongst the players. So, teams that had players who had previously played together in winning situations, for instance, were — whichever team had more of those, that team was much more likely to beat the other team. All that goes to show is that what makes a good team has to do with the relationships that are there amongst the team players. We also found that these relationship works in a different direction. So, we also calculated separately, in a study that is still waiting to be published, what kinds of relationships were there between a player on one team who might have previously played with a member on the opposite team. And that actually provides a very interesting insight, because the team that had more of their players play with — previously play with people on the opposing team — they got really good intel on the strengths and weaknesses of those players. And so, once again, we were able to show that if you had better ties with the opposite team because you knew them from previous occasions, you were in a much better position to beat them now. So, all of this to say that networks have been shown to provide a much better prediction, and it goes along with what Suzanne said, that just putting smart people together is not enough. And we think that networks is a good way of being able to differentiate what happens between good teams and not-so-good teams.

Host: Now, I love that perspective, Noshir, because you’re talking about what makes a good team, and you’re talking about the research that you’ve done, in terms of networks. So, Suzanne, I’ll ask a very similar question, but I’ll go a layer down. Because your background with the individual and team composition, I think, would be perfect to answer this. “What makes a good team member?”

Suzanne Bell: So, a good team member is someone who has a good network. No. [laughter] Just kidding. [laughter] That is true. That is true. However — so what makes a good team member? Some of the things that make for a good team member are team specific. However, there are also some fundamentals that are true across most types of teams. There are some very basic teamwork skills that any team member should have. So, these are things like communication skills, including active listening skills, situational awareness, team problem-solving skills, to name a few. So, they have — a team member needs to have the basic skills of how to function in a team. There are also some very helpful personality traits or values. One of the individual differences that’s a big predictor in teamwork and team performance is that individuals who are high on preference for teamwork tend to do better in most teams. So, Gary, you mentioned that, you know, you would have a student project — you’d have a student project and cringe, you know, that you had to do this, and you’d just as soon tackle the problem on your own. I don’t know if that’s a generalizable thing with you or not, but the idea is that some people really just prefer to work individually. And, you know, when it comes down to our busy jobs, and we have the choice to work on our own stuff, versus something that we owe to the team, or to some sort of collaborative relationship that we’re in, you know, what are you going to choose? Because we’re always busy all the time, and people with a high preference for teamwork, and people who value for teamwork, tend to put their efforts towards the team more often. And so, from a team performance perspective, individuals high on preference for teamwork tend to be good team players, and then, I’ll just add in one more thing. Individuals who are low on the personality trait of agreeableness can be detrimental to team performance. So, building on some of the things we’ve talked about with conflict — high agreeableness doesn’t necessarily mean you agree with everything that is said. A highly agreeable individual can still be assertive. Highly agreeable individuals are motivated to maintain positive social relations. So, what this means is, they have, you know, as a personality trait, warmth, friendliness, and tact, so that they can do things like disagree, and keep it from spiraling into a conflict that’s about personality. And they can actually have their viewpoints heard by the other person. So, I would say agreeableness, preference for teamwork, and basic teamwork skills are what makes for a good team member that’s pretty generalizable across all —

Host: I love that, those characteristics. Very, very important. Now, Leslie, on this same layer, right — we’re talking about what makes a good team, what makes a good team member. I’ll pass this one to you. “What makes a good team leader?”

Leslie DeChurch: So, that’s a great question, and it turns out that a lot of the qualities of great leaders are actually a lot like the qualities of great team members. So, some of the things Suzanne was talking about, being open to other people, committed to the team, but, you know, really, with a team leader, you want somebody who’s a little bit of a social architect. And so, a lot of the research on teams really points to this big three, that to be successful time after time, teams have to have, first, a level of emotional connection to the team, which gets people motivated and confident in their abilities to work together. They have to have certain mental properties. They have to think in ways that are compatible with each other and be able to anticipate. And they also have to act as one. So, they need to engage in processes like coordination, and information-sharing, and monitoring each other, backing each other up. And so, great team leaders are able to build those states, and they’re able to continuously monitor, and diagnose, and anticipate what’s going well, or perhaps needs a little bit of work in the team, and really think through the way that they design the social interactions — who’s talking to who? Does this go before a vote, or do we have a consensus judgment on this? You know, a lot of those little process rules actually turn out to have quite large effects on how people get along in teams.

Host: Is this the idea of identifying, when you’re leading a team, to establish norms of how that team would run? And building onto that as well, you mentioned compatibility among the team members, balancing that, and sort of an agreeableness with a diversity of thought.

Leslie DeChurch: Absolutely. And I think, you know, the important thing — everyone talks about building norms in teams, but it’s important to recognize that the norms that get a team started correctly in its launch are not necessarily the ones that you need all the way through the life cycle. And so, great team leaders really have an eye for that, and they’re able to be the first one to recognize when things are going in a different direction, and there’s some adjustment that needs to be made to the norms, or how the group’s getting along, or, you know, if any one of these properties is kind of falling behind.

Host: I love that. That’s actually one of the things that was part of my class, actually, was norms. So, I’m going to write — have that one about adapting norms over time as my next input for the next class. Suzanne, I —

Leslie DeChurch: Transfer [laughter].

Host: — yeah, I’m learning so much. I didn’t know I would have so many professors to teach me about teams. This is amazing. Suzanne, I know — and correct me if I’m wrong, but I think a little bit of your background is on consulting teams, and consulting businesses to develop effective teams. I’m sure you’ve dealt with a variety of ineffective teams, and low-performing teams. “What are some of the ways that, if you do encounter a low-performing team, that you implement to improve that team’s effectiveness?”

Suzanne Bell: That’s a great question, and in fact, yes, I have seen some low-performing teams. In fact, usually when you bring in, you know, quote unquote, “expert” like me, it’s because you really, really have a bad team that needs to be fixed [laughter]. So sometimes, when I get that phone call, it’s because they’re at their end of their rope with what to do with this very important team in their organization, and, you know, what I do is, I might have — so what can you do to improve effectiveness? It’s really going to depend on what’s going on with — within a particular team. But I can give you some examples. And sometimes it’s really interesting because to come in as the outside expert, it can be very revealing. And then you — you give the people the advice, or, you know, the deliverable after you’ve collected data. And they’re like, yes, that’s exactly it. I just didn’t know what to call it. But this is exactly what’s happening in our team. One of the big things that I’ve seen in low performing teams is when there’s a lot of rule ambiguity, particularly conflict around who is the leader. So, in some teams I’ve worked with, they’ve had a designated leader. So, for example, one member is chosen as leader because — and — because of their administrative role, so their title in the organization makes them the leader of the team. However, the team charged is focused on a very specialized project or requires very specialized expertise, and that star performer or that expert can view themselves as the informal leader, because of their technical expertise in the primary objective of the team. This can create a situation where there’s a disaster, because you’ve got two people who are using different power bases that think that they’re the leader. And so, in that case, in one team in particular, I’m thinking of that had a — quite a bit of drama associated with that. It was as simple as increasing role clarity. And what — clarifying who is the leader in terms of what, who is the leader in terms of technical decisions? In some of our research that we do on — our NASA funded research, we include this idea of shared leadership, and that can be another path for teams, but, in this case, there was a reason, a hierarchical kind of organizational reason that there had to be a designated team leader. And so, just some work around reducing role ambiguity was very helpful for this team. I have more examples of bad teams, sadly. But I’m not sure if we have time for all of those. Did you want another one?

Host: No, that’s — perfect. I think — I think just an example of a low performing team. And that’s — perfect. That’s exactly what — I think I was looking for. And actually, that’s — I actually wanted to circle back around, take this opportunity to circle back around to Noshir. You answer the question on what makes a good team and I love your perspective on networks and what that means for teams. I think that’s something that — that a lot of people may be quite unfamiliar with, networks and what that means for forming and come — I guess, making a good team. So, can you tell me a little bit about your work with networks and how that’s related to teams?

Noshir Contractor: Sure, I’ve been passionate about studying networks from the time I took my first class on that topic back in 1985. So, I never miss an opportunity to evangelize how much we can learn about the world today, by looking at the networks in which we are embedded. We all know, we all talk about the fact that we make network — some of us feel a little icky about going to networking events, et cetera. But the real reason we make networks at the end of the day, Gary, is because networks make us, and a lot of my research has focused on exactly that issue. We need to understand better how networks form. Because that helps us understand how networks perform. And not all networks are created equally. We tend to have certain tendencies, we tend to create ties with people like ourselves, you know, the birds of a feather flock together. We try to create ties with people who are friends of friends, there’s lots of good reasons for doing it. But those things don’t necessarily lead to good outcomes. Because friends of our friends are not going to bring us new ideas. People who are similar to us are not going to challenge us. And so, it reduces our ability to be creative. And so, you know, the idea that we live in this really intricate network. In fact, I was just reading recently and reminded myself that Martin Luther King, decades ago, in a letter from a Birmingham jail said, “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied into a single garment of destiny.” And that really captures the essence of why it’s so important for us to study how these networks are woven, to use the metaphor of a garment of destiny. One of the myths that we have about networks is that having a large network is good. Turns out that research that has been done by others and myself show that large networks are not as important as diverse networks, that you’re much better off having a smaller network but reaching out to a very diverse set of individuals, because that’s where good ideas come from. Another myth is that networks need to have strong connections, that strong network connections are really what you go for. It turns out that weak ties have more strength than strong ties, because you learn more from acquaintances than you may learn from really strong ties. Why? Because the people who are your acquaintances have access and have strong ties with other people that you don’t know. And they therefore can bring you new information that you wouldn’t have gotten. Research in our field has shown, you’re much more likely to find out about new job opportunity from an acquaintance or a weak tie than from a strong tie. And then two more comments about this issue based on our research. Today, we live in a world where things are so specialized, not just in rocket science or spacecraft, but in any facet of our life. You know, we need — we are now knowing more and more about less and less, we are so specialized. Unfortunately, the problems we face in society today, don’t map onto that specialty, they require multiple specialties for us to address the really grand societal challenges. And so, the only way we can do it is create teams, create networks, where each of us who knows more and more about less and less, is able to partner with, collaborate with other people who know more and more about a different less and less. And so, this idea of saying that it’s not enough for us to have knowledge capital, what we really need to have is social capital, meaning we need to capitalize on the knowledge and resources that exist within our social network. And then one last reminder about why networks are so important in today’s society, is that networks is the way ideas spread. But not just ideas, everything diffuses, all good practices. In my own research I’ve done work on, you know, why is it that you can get an individual health worker to start engaging in healthier practices to reduce neonatal mortality in India, or get villagers in Kenya to adopt modern contraceptive methods? But the same networks that can be used to diffuse good ideas, as we are only too familiar with right now, is also what explains the spread of the pandemic. And that the pandemic has really sort of made salient for all of us, the worst and the best of networks and the power of networks.

Host: This — is a perfect lead in Noshir to some of Leslie’s work. You talk about networks and these connections. Leslie, some of your work deals with teams of teams. Can you explain what those are? Teams of teams, and then — even expand to how these teams of teams apply to spaceflight.

Leslie DeChurch: You know, I love talking about teams of teams. Because this has been a passion of mine for the last 20 years, we’ve been talking about space exploration and the importance of teams and what makes a great team. But one of the challenges of teams is that as they get larger and larger, what we end up doing is creating these specialized pockets of people who have different expertise, they talk more closely to some people than people who are on other specialized teams. And the work of space exploration certainly fits this. And so, sometimes we call them team of teams, we also use the term “multi-team system.” And the challenge that we run into is a lot of the things that we do to make a team successful. We give it an identity, we build motivation, we build norms, and operating procedures, rules of engagement, how we do things here. Those things can also make it very difficult and challenging when you have a team of team. And so, things are done a little bit differently in this team than that team or they’re not understood in the same way, or with the same sense of urgency, a former astronaut on the ISS put it beautifully. He said, “you know, the ground is responding to certain pressures and realities, and you’re responding to certain pressures and realities, and they don’t always co align.” And so here, it’s not a matter of really kind of like goal conflict, because everybody’s part of one mission. But it’s a matter of, you know, once you create these larger and larger systems of teams, there’s inherently some separation. And so, things that are going on in your team are more visible to you. Things that are going on in another team are less visible, you don’t understand the rationale or the need for them. And so, this is really one of the grand challenges that team scientists are facing is how to not only get people to work effectively in teams, but have them have this dual awareness, where they’re building successful teams that bridge well with other teams. And we see this all over, we — space exploration gives us an awesome case. But it’s cost versus quality. It’s safety versus PR. And so, you know, I think, this essence of multi-team systems where you have teams that are distributed in time and space, they’re made up of people with different specializations. And they’re often international with meaningful cultural differences and often language barriers. That’s one of the things you know, we can’t ignore. It’s part of the team puzzle.

Host: Now, Leslie, I think this is a great segue into something related directly to human spaceflight. I’m lucky to have three guests today that have done extensive research on teams and even luckier that all three of you have worked together on something related to human — spaceflight, it’s called [Human Exploration Research Analog] HERA. It’s a facility we have here at the Johnson Space Center, sort of like a space habitat, but less for the sake of understanding, you know, how to build a habitat and more about the human. We put humans in this space habitat, and I guess, lock them in for a certain amount of time and study the, I guess, effects of how they work together. And you’ve all done work in this area. Noshir, I’ll pass it over to you. Can you describe a little bit about the work that you’ve done with Leslie and Suzanne, in HERA?

Noshir Contractor: Sure, absolutely. HERAs just been a wonderful opportunity for us to explore ideas that were very difficult for us to explore in other contexts, and I’ll come to that in a minute. But the basic idea about our work in HERA is to try to see if we can predict what it takes to get the right stuff, the right team to go on a long duration space exploration mission, where there is no voluntary exit strategy. Unlike other teams that we study, once you go on a space mission, you can’t just one day get up and say I quit, you’re stuck with this group for the entire duration of the mission. So, it becomes really important to make sure that you have that right team chemistry that Suzanne referred to. And we know that the team chemistry today is going to be very different from the kinds of attributes of teamwork that was required during the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo missions. At that time, Tom Wolfe wrote a book called “The Right Stuff” and in it you basically got the sense that the right stuff was having people who had bravado, aggressiveness and virility. And as Patricia Santy, NASA’s first staff psychiatrists put it in choosing the right stuff, who would want to work with a person like that? So, the question now is, how do we decide who we should be putting and sending on this mission? And here, we follow something that NASA does very well in other contexts and in other areas outside of the social sciences. When NASA designs rockets and spacecrafts, they build computer models, they build the entire design into a computer model. And that allows them to see what technology they’re going to send to the Moon, and other parts of our solar system and beyond. Unfortunately, the one aspect of space travel that NASA or any other space agency doesn’t get to design is the human body. It has to work with what we have. So, in our case, when we use computer models, we’re not generating a new human. But what we can do with computer models, is use it like people do with weather forecasting. We can’t create the weather, but we can predict the weather. And so part of what we have been doing in HERA is using it as an opportunity for us to study at great resolution, human interaction, and then see if we can build computer models, just like weather forecasting models that would allow us to say based on what these individuals are, based on their personality, based on their prior connections with one another, how can we predict what’s going to happen amongst these crew members and their networks on day ten, on day 20, all the way up to day 45 because in HERA we have missions that go that long. What is really exciting Gary about working in HERA is that we are able to physiologically and psychologically poke and prod the crew members in HERA 24/7 for 45 days. No research body would allow us to do that outside of space habitat. We can’t go into any research context in the world today and say, “hey, can I take four of you and put you in a — in an isolated, confined environment for 45 days and keep asking you all of these questions?” So, HERA is the ultimate human petri dish for us to be able to get really important insights of human dynamics et cetera. And so, what we’ve been finding, in fact, is that we can do a pretty good job of being able to predict crew relations based upon running computer models over now almost a dozen of these sessions that lasts for between 30 and 45 days. Once we did that, the next thing that they asked us, when we went — when we presented these results to our colleagues at NASA, they said, “this is really impressive,” telling us that so and so and two people are not going to get along on day 25 is helpful, but what do we do about it? And so, in the last year and a half, we have pivoted now not just to predicting, but to prescribing ways of being able to reduce it, so that if we see two people likely to have a lot of friction, and have a dysfunctional relationship, we try to see if our models can tell us how we can reassign tasks, so that they will be able to get paired in new ways. So, we call this as repairing crew members working on certain tasks. And of course, that’s a nice pun, because we are repairing crew members in order to repair their relationships. And we are using these approaches and our models, again, are very successful at that point. So, with a bunch of really smart students, here at Northwestern, we’ve been building these models and testing them out in a way that allows us to make some really important insights about which personality variables might be associated with certain kinds of behaviors for example.

Host: Now, Noshir, you mentioned some of Suzanne’s work on team chemistry. And so, Suzanne, sort of building off of this in your experience with HERA, I got a — I got a doozy for you. And I think this is one of the ultimate questions when it comes to human spaceflight. And I think a lot of people are curious about thinking about teams in human spaceflight, is the ultimate Mars crew, right. And I’m not going to ask you to sort of build, you know, the crew that will go to Mars, but just thinking about what you’ve seen and learned from in HERA, those qualities and the — qualities needed in individuals that would comprise a successful Mars crew.

Suzanne Bell: So, Gary, one of the things that’s great about the HERA research is the context. Noshir told us some about that, but we’re talking about putting people into isolation and confinement for 45 days, and they don’t leave. So, a lot of times we work on teams, and we get to leave at the end of the day and complain about something or something, you know, have — have the ability to rely on social support from our family about something that’s tough. When people are in HERA, along with something like a mission to Mars, they’re going to be performing together as a team, but they’re also going to be living together as roommates, you know, eating together and creative problem solving, a range of tasks. And so, what are the most fundamental, important things that team members will need for something like a mission to Mars, is this idea of flexibility in their behavior. In our modeling, in HERA, one of the things that stands out is this idea of people who can be good self-monitors. So, these are people who are able to monitor or think about the way they’re presenting themselves to other people. And it’s not suggesting that someone be disingenuous in their behavior with others, but rather have a range of behaviors that they can pull on, you know, that I can be task oriented and focused and get the job done when we have to come up with — when we have to problem solve on the task. But you know, if you’ve been in isolation for 60 days, and you need a friend, because your family members, are, you know, on a communication delay and not available for real time support, can you rely on me as a friend appropriately? And so, we model all those things in our HERA research. But one of those things that is important in terms of individual attributes would be someone who is able to self-monitor. A second one that kind of deviates from the previous literature, the broader literature on team composition, is extraversion. So, extraversion can be beneficial for things like being a leader on a team. At the same token in something like an isolated and confined environment, you’re not getting a lot of stimulus, you know, you’re with the same three people. And so, one of the great things that we’ve done in our research is break it down to what we call the facet level, where we’re not looking at extraversion as a whole, but we’re looking at different aspects of that. So, whether or not you’re gregarious, that might not be beneficial to long term isolation. At the same time, maybe some other aspects might be more beneficial, such as assertiveness, or if they can redirect their excitement seeking you know, towards things that are available in mission, that could be a benefit too. And so, those are some of the types of unique findings that we’re finding in our HERA research, as well as some of the more traditional findings, such as agreeableness and those types of traits that are typically important for teamwork.

Host: Very interesting. And I — love that you all have participated in research dealing with human spaceflight. And so, Leslie, I’ll pass it to you for one last question. Just to sort of bring it home here is you’ve also participated in this. And I’m curious to hear your thoughts on what have we learned or what are we learning about a team’s performance, perhaps from some of the research done from human spaceflight, that can be applied to our own lives?

Leslie DeChurch: Wonderful. So, one of the things that we’re finding out in HERA is that team performance is not something that you build one time, and it sticks. And so, one of the things we did, an operational assessment before we designed our research to be implemented in HERA. And we discovered that a lot of the research was on what we would call psychomotor tasks, tasks where people are doing physical things. They’re building stuff, they’re repairing it, they’re doing spacewalks. And that, actually, when we did the ops assessment for a long distance space mission, teams are going to need those skills and many more, the degree of autonomy that will be involved will require them to think creatively to solve problems we can’t anticipate this far in advance, they’ll need to problem solve, make decisions, resolve conflict. And so, we implemented what we call a team tasks battery to assess all of these facets of performance over time in isolation. And two interesting factoids. One of them is that creative thinking and problem-solving show important declines after mid mission. And so, whereas the team is getting more familiar, and we might think if they’ve undergone the training that would be necessary to engage in high quality problem solving, that that would endure throughout the mission, we actually see important fluctuations and being in this low stimuli environment, eating the same foods, looking at the same people and the dark, dark sky, it affects your ability to think creatively. And the second one is just that there’s really a lot more performance fluctuation than you might think. So, one of the challenges when it comes to as Noshir said, predicting the weather, so to speak in a spacecraft, is understanding that it’s really dynamic. And a team that is performing well on one day may not carry through the same level of performance. And so, we’re especially finding that there’s a big performance bump in the mid mission when they’re maximally isolated. But after the middle of the mission, we’re noticing consistent and — notable declines in things like problem solving, creative thinking and decision making, that are going to be really important in long distance missions. So, I think that’s one of the takeaways we can bring back to our own team. That — just because you built it, you can’t necessarily just assume it’s going to be in autopilot. And teams really do take some care and feeding along the way to ensure that they’re consistently able to perform at high levels.

Host: What an absolutely fascinating conversation we had today. Noshir, Suzanne and Leslie, thank you so much for coming on Houston We Have a Podcast, the ultimate team to talk about teams. I very much appreciate the time of all three of you today. Thanks, again.

Noshir Contractor: Thank you, Gary.

Suzanne Bell: Thank you, Gary.

Leslie DeChurch: Thank you, Gary.

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Host: Hey, thanks for sticking around. I hope you learned something about team science with our incredible guests today. We’ve referenced a number of other podcasts that we’ve done on Houston We Have a Podcast, you can check them out at no particular order at NASA.gov/podcasts as well as a variety of other NASA podcasts that we have throughout the whole agency. If you want to chat with us, we’re on the NASA Johnson Space Center pages of Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Use the hashtag #AskNASA on your favorite platform to submit an idea for the show and make sure to mention it’s for Houston We Have a Podcast. This episode was recorded on October 28, 2020. Thanks to Alex Perryman, Pat Ryan, Norah Moran, Belinda Pulido, Jennifer Hernandez and Jenny Turner. Thanks, again to Dr. Noshir Contractor, Dr. Suzanne Bell and Dr. Leslie DeChurch for taking the time to come on the show. Give us a rating and feedback on whatever platform you are listening to us on and tell us what you think of the show. We’ll be back next week.