Lindy Elkins-Tanton Shares Lessons from NASA on Solving Problems Under Pressure
02 Jun 2026
How do you know if your team is ready for a high-stakes challenge? For Lindy Elkins-Tanton, the answer starts long before the problem shows up.
Elkins-Tanton, leader of NASA’s Psyche mission, was recently featured in Next Big Idea Club Magazine in the article “How NASA Teams Solve Problems Before It’s Too Late.” The piece highlights ideas from her book, Mission Ready: How to Build Teams That Perform Under Pressure, and explores how strong teams prepare for uncertainty, surface problems early, and make better decisions when the stakes are high.
Her perspective comes from leading one of NASA’s most ambitious missions: sending a spacecraft to study Psyche, a metal-rich asteroid orbiting the Sun between Mars and Jupiter. But the lessons go far beyond space exploration. In business, healthcare, education, and nearly every other field, teams are constantly being asked to adapt, communicate clearly, and solve problems before they become bigger ones.
What makes Elkins-Tanton’s message so useful is that she does not treat team performance as something mysterious. Strong teams are built through habits: sharing information, preserving knowledge, creating space for honest feedback, and making it safe to raise concerns early.
For leaders, that is a practical reminder. Culture is not separate from performance. It is the foundation that allows people to speak up, learn together, and keep moving forward when the pressure rises.