The Economist: What space, submarines and polar research teach about extreme teamwork in tight spaces

If you are fed up with the other people on your team, remember this: it could be so much worse.

Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, two American astronauts, returned to Earth on March 18 after a planned days-long mission to the International Space Station turned into a nine-month stay.

At the SANAE IV research station in Antarctica, reports have emerged of assault, death threats and intimidation among a team of South African scientists who arrived there in February; they are due to leave the base only in December.

Submariners on the UK’s nuclear-armed subs can be at sea for six months or more.

Spacecraft, polar-research stations and submarines are among a set of environments classed as isolated, confined and extreme (ICE). They put that two-day off-site retreat you’re dreading into perspective. They also put very specific stresses on teams. Most obviously, there is no real escape from each other. If you storm out of an Antarctic research station, you will storm back in again fairly quickly.

Privacy will always be limited: a British nuclear sub has a crew of 130 or so in a vessel whose length a sprinter would cover in under 20 seconds. Its absence is likely to be particularly obvious to women in male-dominated teams. Family members are a very long way away; any future missions to Mars would involve crews spending years away from home.

These are plainly not typical team environments. You cannot tell a story that no one else knows about you, do a few trust falls — and then blast off. NASA, America’s space agency, simulates the conditions of space at a facility in Houston called the Human Exploration Research Analogue (HERA), a 650-square-foot structure where crews can spend weeks at a time on mock missions.

A paper by Mathias Basner of the University of Pennsylvania and his co-authors reports on a 520-day simulation of a mission to Mars that was conducted in Moscow in 2011.

Of a multinational crew comprising six male volunteers, one reported symptoms of depression almost all the way through. Only two crew members reported no sleep disturbances or psychological distress, which might make them the weirdest of the lot.

Extreme though these situations are, they provide a magnified lens on more everyday team problems. One example is tedium. Missions to ICE environments can be a curious combination of danger and monotony. Antarctic explorers report that it is preferable to follow someone on the ice than to lead, because at least there is something to look at. But there are ways to inject meaning into the mundane, whatever the workplace.

A paper by Madeleine Rauch of Cambridge University looks at the disconnect experienced by UN peacekeepers between the abstract ideals of their work and the humdrum reality of it. She finds that people cope better with boredom if they are able to reframe tedious tasks as steps towards the larger goal.

Another magnified problem is conflict. Small things can lead to great friction among colleagues in every workplace. (“Wow, you want to see crew dynamics,” reads one entry in a journal kept by an astronaut on the International Space Station, about an attempt to take a group photo. “I thought we were going to lose a member of the crew during that one.”) But defusing conflict is much more important if there is nowhere for an angry worker to cool off.

Personality obviously matters here. Some of the traits that seem to predict successful team members in ICE environments include agreeableness, emotional stability and humour. Empathy also matters. In his book Supercommunicators, Charles Duhigg describes research conducted at NASA to test would-be astronauts for their instinctive capacity to match the emotions, energy levels and mood of an interviewer.

Tactics can help mitigate conflict, too. Regular team debriefs are a constructive way to bring simmering issues to the surface, especially if crews have very limited contact with mission control. A paper on long-duration space exploration by Lauren Blackwell Landon of NASA and her co-authors suggests that debriefs can be effective hurtling away from Earth as well as on it.

ICE environments plainly place very unusual demands on people. But they can teach some lessons about boredom, team composition, conflict resolution and more. And knowing that they exist might just make you feel happier about the daily commute.