Every endeavor — from research to writing the next great novel, from problem solving with remote work colleagues to building an exploratory spacecraft to visit an asteroid belt — involves people interacting, sometimes competing, and in the best of worlds collaborating. No matter our field, connecting with and convincing others is “a big part of driving knowledge forward.”

Unfortunately, many of our myths suggest — and our systems support — exactly the opposite. We tell ourselves we are a country of heroes, of “rugged individualists.”

Those myths need to be tossed on the trash heap of history. Changing them can begin with a question.

Late in 2022 I asked LinkedIn friends and colleagues to suggest books that resonated with them. Forty suggestions quickly filled my comment feed with Terrian Barnes — a diversity, accessibility and belonging strategist; the founder of Fe-smart LLC; and a long-time friend and colleague — jumping right into the discussion with her recommendation for a beautifully constructed memoir by one of the world’s leading planetary scientists.

Lindy Elkins-Tanton is the principal investigator of the NASA mission that will send a rocket to explore the massive asteroid Psyche. Ultimately, she’s created a matrix leveraging every voice to advance human knowledge. Elkins-Tanton teaches us how to approach complex problems by asking the right questions and then actually listening in return.

It took me a year to dig this book out of my TBR pile and realize the depths of its insights. I’m so glad I did.

A Portrait of the Scientist as a Young Woman (2022) by Lindy Elkins-Tanton is a memoir and so much more. Elkins-Tanton is a highly accomplished planetary scientist who uses her own life story to “reconfigure the way science is presented and framed,” as Philip Ball suggests in an insightful review. That updated framing is “not as a triumphant march of discovery but as an intimate journey in which researchers navigate their own dilemmas, struggles and traumas at the same time as they try to expand our knowledge of the physical world.”

As with all human endeavors, there are professional and personal vulnerabilities, doubts and setbacks, and difficult rivalries. These works “are acutely human, challenging the heroic image that has dominated scientific autobiography for so long.”

It’s probably no surprise that these memoirs have come from female scientists.

Elkins-Tanton tells a story that is unvarnished, raw, sadly unsurprising in its ubiquity beyond the scientific and academic worlds, and ultimately inspiring. Despite living what outside observers might describe as an idyllic childhood, she was sexually abused as a child and received no support in response from her parents. As she grew into her love of geology and science, her obvious skills and growing prowess in the field were dismissed, even by family members and colleagues she saw as mentors. The level of sexism and misogyny could be overbearing to someone without her determination.

A significant obstacle for women in science, observes Ball, is the constant stream of microaggressions and undermining comments or actions. 

That is a ubiquitous problem, and not just in American professional culture. But in science the problem is made more acute by several factors. The idea that science is meritocratic and “value-free” can be used as a smokescreen to avoid confronting the issue; but perhaps worse, a blind eye is repeatedly turned to individuals who are perceived as high achievers or geniuses, and whose abuses are excused as eccentricity or outspokenness.

What makes the book so important is Elkins-Tanton’s ability to describe the debilitating impact of these aggressions, to showcase what we lose when we dismiss the contributions of women or even the 95% of the population who are not among the highest achievers, and to suggest different and innovative ways that she has built collaborative working groups. Her description of pulling together a multi-disciplinary team to study lava flows in Siberia, with members more senior than the leader, draws on a period in life when she left academia and worked in business consulting. This highly engaging segment finds the author discussing real-life challenges and all-too-recognizable ego battles that require thoughtful analysis to overcome.

“Picking the team in science as in dodgeball, is everything.”

The best, most successful CEO from my career knew how to ask questions to drive deeper analysis and change. Out of her years in business analysis and academic leadership, Elkins-Tanton is always asking her readers important questions. While in the field doing geological research in Siberia, men were expressing their displeasure at the pace of her work. She asks, “who decided that faster hammering with fewer blows” was the important metric for success?

Learning from Quakers, Elkins-Tanton began to build a set of concepts to guide team building. I recognize many of these from my CEO who knew how to build successful teams.

• Leaders, speak often about the culture you want.
• Invite everyone to speak . . . listen to every voice.
• Believe everyone comes with good intentions.
• Learn to be truly happy for others’ successes.
• Don’t create boundaries — keep everyone on one team.
• Bring problems and challenges to the whole team and invite people to solve them with you.
• Treat everything as an experiment — failures are okay.

Elkins-Tanton writes of how so much we have built comes down to being part of the ego economy. Yet fame, applause, and charisma “are not qualities that necessarily align with correctness or expertise.” When making tough leadership decisions, one of the key questions she asks is which of the alternative actions will “make you proud of yourself when you look back at this problem ten years from now?” Always take the high road. Good and bad cultures exist everywhere. Building a good culture is critical to success, as it is culture that supports or destroys ethics.

This is an important book that forces the reader to think beyond science and consider all the ways we contribute, for better or worse, to the culture in our organizations. We can address complex problems if we learn to ask the right questions . . . and then actually listen to the responses.

More to come . . .

DJB

Psyche spacecraft illustration: Peter Rubin NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU