Whether it’s to the moon or Mars, a NASA mission requires some essential preparations: designing and developing the spacecraft, astronaut training and safety checks, clear goals and strategies and procedures for maintaining communication between crews on Earth and in space.

Dorothy R. Carter, associate professor of management in the Michigan State University Eli Broad College of Business, studies leadership and teamwork within organizations. She received funding from NASA for a collaborative project called Project FUSION, or Facilitating Unified Systems of Interdependent Organizational Networks, analyzing how to understand and mitigate communication delays between Mission Control on Earth and a crew of astronauts on a mission to Mars.

“NASA realized the collaboration for 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, 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 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 problem-solve 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.

“Communication delays disrupt collective attention dramatically. It’s just more difficult for us to focus on the same thing at the same time when we can’t communicate with one another in real time,” said Carter.

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.

“Based on our research, there are many different interventions that we think could help support collective attention, even during periods of communication delay,” said Carter. “Some examples include developing trust between members of Mission Control and the crew in space before the mission takes off, trainings on how to speak simply and clearly, engaging in structured debriefing processes and communication protocols, and getting a sense of everyone’s strengths and weaknesses to know who is best positioned to take charge in certain scenarios.”

Ultimately, Carter’s findings suggest that sustaining collective attention in high-stakes, distributed environments requires intentional design, both in how teams are trained and how they interact.

“Teams should be prepared to think clearly, communicate in simple ways and build strong connections with each other. These steps help everyone stay focused on the same goals, even when communication is broken up or delayed,” Carter said. “These ideas also help us better understand how teams work across time and distance and provide a starting point for helping them succeed in challenging, high-pressure environments.”