"Well, they're never going to be at the level we want," Braun responds. "In the end, it's a decision that we'll have to make on gut feel. If we wait for all of the information, it will be too late."

Braun isn't calling for a hasty decision. He knows that NASA's planetary-protection officer wants the chance of contamination to be less than one in a million. But there's a difference between having enough information to make a decision and having perfect knowledge -- which is what engineers on the team often want, says Bob Mitcheltree, lead engineer for the team.

"Braun has an uncanny ability to make decisions without perfect knowledge," Mitcheltree says. "Sometimes, I get so bogged down in details that I can't convince myself one way or another. But he has this higher view. He looks out across the whole mission."

The team also performs risk analyses in order to find potential problem spots. "There are times when you have to go with a gut feel," says Lisa Simonson, assistant project manager. "But those decisions are based on the technical respect that we have for each other and on the work that we've put into researching the questions. We have confidence in each other and in the process."

Because of that confidence, the team is able to make decisions efficiently, without squabbling or political maneuvering, and to focus on the work itself. "How we all get things done -- that's not the rocket-science part," Braun explains with a grin. "The rocket science is the rocket science."

Senior Writer Cheryl Dahle (cdahle@fastcompany.com) is an extremely valuable member of the Fast Company team. Contact Jacqui Lopez (stephenk@lucasdigital.com), Robert Nagle (rn@intersys.com), or Bobby Braun (r.d.braun@larc.nasa.gov) by email.

Sidebar: Xtreme Experts

What makes a team extreme? Harold J. Leavitt and Jean Lipman-Blumen, coauthors of the recent book "Hot Groups," have spent more than 20 years exploring why some teams fly while others crash and burn. "You don't go out and create hot groups," Lipman-Blumen explains. "They grow themselves. Look at organizations, and you'll see the beginnings of hot groups almost everywhere. They're like weeds. But organizations that are bureaucratic and orderly don't like the idea of hot groups, so they go around and spray weed killer on those groups. The issue is not how you create hot groups but how you keep them from being stamped out."

In an interview with Fast Company, these two extremely well-informed professors offered their perspectives on extreme teams.

Work matters.

"People who are part of these teams are searching for meaning in their work. They don't want to go to work and spend eight or nine hours working on trivia," Leavitt says. "They want to feel that what they do will make a difference -- not just in their paycheck, but in the world. For a long time, hr people have been pushing the notion that they're trying to develop a satisfied workforce, a happy workforce. But happiness alone isn't the Holy Grail here. People are also looking for an opportunity to do something worthwhile. Those two kinds of motivation are very different."

Titles don't matter.

"Hot groups don't care about people's status within an organization," Leavitt says. "It doesn't matter if somebody is a senior VP and somebody else is a new recruit. Hot groups are very democratic and very informal. They are quite antibureaucratic, and that's both a strength and a weakness. It helps them to jump over the walls that sometimes imprison teams. But, on the other hand, it creates a lot of resentment and animosity in the rest of the organization, and you have to deal with that."

People bond in the heat of battle.

"These groups tend to grow around their task, rather than around relationships," Lipman- Blumen says. "That's the opposite of the way most groups get started. When people launch project teams, they usually call in consultants and take everyone on a retreat to do the wilderness team-bonding thing. But it's the contributions that people make to a task that lead other people to respect them, to like them, to want to be around them. When people see someone bring something important to a task, they get excited about that. Long-lasting relationships grow out of that kind of respect for other people's ability to make a task happen."

Teams take care of their own.

"Within hot groups, people can be very individualistic," Lipman-Blumen says. "They can express their creativity, and they feel protected while doing so. They are shielded by the group. In the past, individuals were isolated, and they had to do things on their own: If they succeeded, great; if they didn't, they were cut off at the knees. The hot-group mentality makes it safer for people to experiment."

Contact Harold J. Leavitt (hjleavitt@earthlink.net) and Jean Lipman-Blumen (jeanlipman@earthlink.net) by email.