PhysOrg reports on a discovery from NASA researchers looking not at astronomy nor engineering, but on key factors that let teams communicate with a gap as large as the distance between Earth and Mars — especially a concept they’ve called “collective attention”:
“NASA realized the collaboration that a long-duration mission, like sending a team of humans to Mars, goes far beyond just the members of the crew on the spacecraft. The astronauts have to continue to collaborate with many people on Earth,” Carter said. “To do that effectively requires a large, collaborative—or ‘multiteam’—system.”
To conduct this study, [Michigan State management professor Dorothy R.] Carter and her team collaborated with research volunteers living and working inside NASA’s human exploration space analog, or HERA, capsule at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. Participants in the Kesseler Team Leadership Laboratory at Michigan State University acted as Mission Control for the HERA ‘astronauts’ in real-time simulations with different degrees of communication delays. The team then ran the data collected through the simulations through a computer model to mimic a larger sample.
The Project FUSION research team identified “collective attention”—when multiple people from different disciplines focus their attention on the same issue at the same time—as the key mechanism for large, complex, multi-team organizations to solve problems effectively. Carter’s research, recently published in the journal Personnel Psychology, is the first study to directly position collective attention as the central link between communication delays and team performance.
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Carter and her team are producing a set of countermeasure recommendations to help large, complex organizations such as NASA deal with disruptions in collective attention more effectively. They found that interventions that target someone’s experience level with a task (capacity), address message simplicity (clarity) and create a sense of shared leadership among team members (connectivity) can help preserve collective attention in situations with delayed communication.