How NASA Builds Teams

Every successful organisation needs high-performance teams to compete and succeed. Yet, technical people are often resistant to traditional "touchy-feely" team-building.

To improve communication, performance, and morale among NASA’s technical teams, former NASA Astrophysicist Dr. Charlie Pellerin developed the team-building process described in How NASA Builds Teams — an approach that is proven, quantitative, and requires only a fraction of the time and resources of traditional training methods. This "4-D" process has boosted team performance in hundreds of NASA project teams, engineering teams, and management teams, including the people responsible for NASA’s most complex systems — the Space Shuttle, space telescopes, robots on Mars, and the mission back to the moon. How NASA Builds Teams explains how the 4-D team-building process can be applied in any organisation, and includes a fast, free online behavioural assessment to help your team and the individual members understand each other and measure the key driver of team performance, the social context.

Moreover, these simple, logical processes appeal strongly to technical teams who eschew "touchy-feely" training. Pellerin applies simple, elegant principles from his physics background to the art of team-building, such as the use of a coordinate system to analyse the characteristics of team performance into actionable elements.

The author illustrates the team-building process with entertaining stories from his decade as NASA’s Director for Astrophysics and subsequent 15 years of working closely with NASA and outside business teams. For example, he tells how the processes in the book enabled him to initiate the space mission to fix the Hubble Space Telescope’s flawed mirror.

Free downloadable resources will help you:

• Identify your teammates’ innate personalities
• Diagram your culture (and compare it to your customer’s)
• Measure the coherency of your project’s paradigm (get this wrong and you will be fired!)
• Learn to meet people’s need to feel valued by you

Further, you can download and use Pellerin’s most powerful tool for influencing the outcome of any difficult situation: the Context Shifting Worksheet.