In the early part of the 21st century, a team of brilliant engineers working for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory was given the assignment of designing a way to deliver a 5,400 pound entry vehicle carrying a 2,000 pound rover (Curiosity) onto a precise spot on the surface of Mars, a planet that was 140 million miles away from earth. In his profound book The Right Kind of Crazy – A True Story of Teamwork, Leadership and High-Stakes Innovation, team leader Adam Steltzner describes how this was done. The book tells a story of molding a team out of a group of lone wolf geniuses and teaching them how to collaborate and access the intuitive sides of their brains. It’s a remarkable story and must reading for managers in charge of left brain teams.

Perhaps the main lesson from the book is that people are naturally curious and it is essential that we tap into this innate sense. Too many work environments stifle this ingrained sense of curiosity – resulting in disengaged workers and a lack of innovation. Steltzner believes that we are hard-wired with one paramount piece of code that is “Be curious” and sums it up eloquently when he writes, ‘We all share the instinct, and we can all relate to it, which gives our curiosity-driven need to explore the added beauty that no one has to be forced to do it. People don’t necessarily have to be incentivized with stock options and mega-salaries for curiosity-driven creativity to occur. The only essential ingredient is a work environment that’s structured to encourage our innate drive to wonder, question and explore. Just as each of us built our understanding of our world during childhood, given the chance, everyone will follow the lure of their own curiosity and their own desire for mastery throughout their working lives. Work that contains that kind of inherent incentive is one of the most powerful drivers we have, for innovation and decision-making founded on curiosity outperform the same based on fear”.

As business leaders, we have much to learn from this amazing NASA story. Landing the rover on Mars was one of the greatest accomplishments in the history of mankind and Steltzner attributes it to “nurturing and supporting innate curiosity that is still one of the most valuable survival tools we have”. The last paragraph of the book summarizes how Steltzner led his team to achieve the impossible. “We carried out this exploration and expansion in teams and in bands, but we didn’t do it in lockstep. Loyalty and cooperation were essential, but so were individualism and creative conflict. But keeping the conflict creative, rather than combustible, was the search for the truth that lets ideas win, not people. When we were most successful, it was because we were trying to find what was right, not to be right. Our curious search for truth and understanding makes us unique compared with other creatures on this planet. Our search drives strange behaviors, creates strange inventions, and appears crazy at times, but it just might be the right kind of crazy”.

This book is an important read for those leaders who want to understand how to achieve incredible results by tapping into the innate motivational drives of their team members.