With all of the buzz around the recent release of the movie adaptation of Andy Weir’s book “The Martian”, its interesting to take a look at the book’s storyline and scenario from the perspective of communications and virtual team functionality.

Setting The Scene For The Martian

Without giving away too much, the basis of the story is that Mark Watney, an astronaut who is part of a mission to Mars, becomes stranded on the planet and has to work out how to survive while NASA tries to find ways to mount a mission to rescue him.  The story follows his successes and failures, highs and lows, as he works to source food, survive the Martian climate and communicate with Earth.

Among the many challenges of life on Mars is the fact that the planet is over a years travel time away from Earth and that communications take around 13 minutes to travel each way between Earth and Mars.  Coupled with this, a Martian day is longer than an Earth day at 24 hours 37 minutes and 22 seconds, so it is not even possible to communicate at the same time each day.

Along the way, Watney loses and regains contact with Earth and NASA several times using a number of different methods and tools, switching him between completely autonomous and controlled from a distance.

All of this combines to make Watney’s time surviving as a Martian a wonderful example of the extremes of some aspects of working in virtual teams.

Time zones

As has been discussed in a number of earlier articles on this website, learning to work across multiple time zones is a skill every member of a virtual team must learn.  Communicating to team members who are in different timezones means you need to learn to be flexible, adjust your schedule and adapt the tools you use to be effective. In the martian, this challenge is made more complex by the continuously shifting time difference between Earth and Mars, such that each Earth day the time on Mars is some 37 minutes later than the day before.

In a conventional, terrestrial, business environment it is also critical to be aware of the time zones of your virtual team colleagues.  You need to tailor your message, communication expectations and technologies to suit the time differences.

Communications Medium

The communications medium can be a critical and highly influential tool in how virtual teams maintain contact. In an environment like the one depicted in the martian, having a method to communicate that is robust and that gives both parties a written record of messages is also important.

With the 13 minute transmission delay each way between Earth and Mars, it is also highly impractical to use verbal communications, the latency in message send and receive is just too long to have a sensible and effective discussion, so regardless of the relative times between the two planets, written text is the best way to proceed. This is a great example of the use of asynchronous communications.

Similarly, it is very important, in a business environment, to choose the right communication platforms and tools for the messages being conveyed. The platform needs to be sensitive to timezone differences, the criticality of the message and its level of complex data and needs to be accessible to all parties. For instance, even with highly effective video conference and telephony, if the communications are around highly complex technical data, it is best to leverage both email and shared server access to convey the data.

Ability To Work Autonomously

Astronauts need to be able to think for themselves and work independently, they also need to be exceptional team players and communicators.