There's one crucial first step in a team that at a single stroke increases innovation, minimizes risk, reduces implicit bias and creates a communicative, positive culture: Letting every voice be heard. Drawing on 30 years of experience leading diverse, interdisciplinary science and technology teams, Lindy Elkins-Tanton will share the biggest lessons learned for setting culture and surviving crises in teams.

To deal with the challenges facing our organizations and our society, we need a structure that can create knowledge where we need it and enable faster adoption of innovations. This structure must enable broader participation on every axis, including gender, socioeconomic background, race, nationality and across disciplines. This is the moment to reimagine research—for the greatest use of resources, the greatest use of all human minds and the greatest progress into the most positive possible future. Using her process, Lindy Elkins-Tanton has started 40 pilot projects over the past six years, and these teams yielded an 8x return on our investment to date. No more incremental progress. No more focusing on unimportant goals. In this workshop, she'll identify the most important questions in your area, and set up teams for pilot projects.

“Psyche” is both the name of an asteroid in the main belt, orbiting out past Mars, and the name of our NASA mission to visit that asteroid. Psyche’s density, radar and reflected light properties indicate that it is largely made of metal. Humans have never visited a world made of metal. So if Psyche turns out to be what we think, we’ll be visiting a new kind of world. Our spacecraft will launch in October 2023 and start its journey through space to this metal world. In this talk, Lindy Elkins-Tanton and her team discuss how a NASA mission is planned and built, the key aspects of a successful team culture and the huge crisis they faced and how they overcame it. Psyche will surprise us. The universe always outsteps even our best imaginations. And the whole Psyche team looks forward to sharing all they discover with everyone here on Earth.

Here is a controversial idea: Content is no longer the differentiator in education. In this information age, we need to be teaching the key skills for work and life right in the classroom. Identifying unsolved problems, asking good questions, assessing the quality of information and communicating in teams. At Arizona State University and in Beagle Learning, Lindy Elkins-Tanton and her team have produced a process and a new undergraduate major that trains these durable skills—moving us toward our vision of a society where every person is a problem-solver with a sense of personal agency. In this session, you’ll learn practical ways to change your education culture.

Sometimes people think scientists always knew what they wanted to do and went straight at it from the age of five. Lindy Elkins-Tanton’s path was far curvier, and had as many downs as ups, on her way to leading a $1B robotic NASA mission to a metal asteroid. Maybe it's clearer in hindsight than it was moving forward, but Elkins-Tanton sees now how her wish to work in teams where every person can succeed has driven most of her career choices. In this talk, she’ll share her story and path from single mother to scientific leader.