Speaking about teams and leadership and science and space and learning is a pleasure, whether the audience is from a company, the public, or a school. And I love working with teams, especially tech teams, on developing communications and culture. Be in touch and we’ll schedule.
I give dozens of talks, panel discussions, and workshops per year, ranging from a small elementary school classroom to hundreds or thousands of people at a big public event. You can get a sense of some of my speaking styles on my Youtube channel.
Over the many years that I have worked on teams at junior and senior levels and in leadership, I have seen teams succeed, and I have seen them fail. I’ve found that the human is both the most miraculous and the most devastating part of every story. Science and engineering are the structure of what I am doing, but people are the way it gets done.
I’ve had career-long intersectional experience with teams across the private sector, in government, in academia—I have worked as a management consultant and then as an independent business plan writer for tech startups, as the co-founder of an education tech startup, as an advisor to tech companies and venture capital firms, and as the originator and leader of the NASA Psyche mission.
These projects have been at all stages—in development, in production, and with teams that needed change and those that were purring along. I focus on developing and supporting teams when the pressure is on and the stakes are high.
I’ve been asked to speak about team culture at organizations as varied as Apple, Unilever, Honeybee Robotics, Amazon, and Stanford University. Let me know if you’d like me to speak for your group or facilitate a workshop on communication or culture (I’m represented by APB Speakers Bureau).
Today I am the lead of the NASA Psyche mission, a $1B robotic probe going to a metallic asteroid, and VP of the Interplanetary Initiative at Arizona State University. I’m also co-founder of Beagle Learning, where we design learning experiences for the information age and work with schools and communities. I earned my BS, MS, and PhD at MIT, and have worked at Brown University, MIT, and the Carnegie Institution for Science. My CV is available at the bottom of this ASU page if you’re into CVs!
My most requested topics are:
Human by Human: The Art & Science of Exceptional Teams & How to Get Them to Look Up & Out
In our increasingly technical and complex world, we need the best thinkers, makers and problem-solvers. We also want people who can deal with the challenges facing our organizations, a structure that can focus us on the most critical questions and enable faster adoption of innovations. All are possible. Employees can be taught these skills that help them innovate, lead and create change, and processes can be created that set you up for the future. In this talk or workshop, Lindy Elkins-Tanton draws from 30 years of experience leading diverse, interdisciplinary research and technical teams and her process that started 40 pilot projects over the past six years and yielded an 8x return on her investment to date, to show you how to build exceptional teams and how you get them to look up and out.
Hearing Every Voice: Setting Culture in Diverse Teams
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.
What’s the Most Important Question? Jumpstarting Critical Research & Building Interdisciplinary 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 6x 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.
The NASA Psyche Mission: An Electric Journey to a Metal World
“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 launched in October 2023 and is well on its journey through space to this metal world. In this talk, Lindy Elkins-Tanton discusses 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.
The Gifts of a Curving Career Path: From Single Mother to Scientific Leader
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.