People walking outside of the ESTEC office

The mission? Do more with the same crew.

How ESA improved collaboration to reach the sky (and beyond)

With a record €22 billion committed by its member states and a new mandate to strengthen Europe's resilience and security, the European Space Agency (ESA) is taking on more than ever.

At the heart of it is TEC, the Directorate of Technology, Engineering and Quality. Its 950+ experts support every ESA mission and are responsible for the development of the technology those missions need to fly. Demand for them is growing faster than their numbers.

Boldly, TEC decided to add Friktion to make things run smoother.

Space helmet

The challenge: Shared experts, tight deadlines

To deliver on its ambition, ESA needs to move faster and do more with roughly the same number of people. This requires many actors to collaborate efficiently, both internally and with external partners.

Each TEC engineer works on several missions at once, and every project manager wants them to put their mission, their project first. The only way to make it work is for everyone to agree on what's needed, what's most important, and who does what. When they don't, work stalls and missions risk missing their launch window.

TEC's leadership saw early that a new mindset was needed. But you don't simply walk into ESA and tell some of Europe's brightest engineers how to think.

The solution: Behavior first, mindset second

Here's a fact backed by behavioral science: it is easier to act yourself into a new way of thinking than to think yourself into a new way of acting. Here's another, backed by life: impact doesn't happen until people actually start doing things differently (or doing different things).

So, instead of telling the engineers and project managers at ESA how to think, we started with what they do.

  1. Pinpointing the behaviors that matter

    Before designing anything, we interviewed project managers and TEC experts to find where the friction lived. Out of that came a list of concrete behaviors that, if adopted, would improve collaboration. These include creating a shared context for the team, making decisions under uncertainty, balancing workflow, fostering trust, and getting early and actionable feedback.

  2. Making new behaviors easy to adopt

    Motivation was already high, so we worked on making the new behaviors easy to do within ESA's structure. This included designing a one-day workshop bringing TEC and Project people together in the same room to work on real situations and practice the new behaviors. We also created resource pages packed with useful content people could visit afterward, and recruited TEC ambassadors to help spread the word.

  3. Experimenting to find what works

    What works for one mission doesn't automatically work for another. After the workshop, we coached project managers to run small experiments with their teams, learn from them, and adjust to find the best solution. We also refined the workshop after each session, making it more customized by letting project managers choose which behaviors to focus on and bring their own real-life cases for practice.

Sylvain Bouchart

Friktion helped us define the mindset shift we needed and translate it into concrete behaviors we want to see more of in everyday interactions. They also gave us a structured way to engage our people to co-create and drive the change.

— Sylvain Bouchart, Head of the Electrical Department and driving force behind Project Mindset

Illustration of the Harmony satellites
Example

The Harmony mission

Harmony is ESA's tenth Earth Explorer mission, set to launch in 2029. This unique satellite mission will contribute to both climate research and risk management by measuring motion at or near Earth's surface at the centimeter scale: waves, clouds, volcanoes, glaciers, and much more.

To do this, the mission will fly two identical satellites with different viewpoints, in formation with a third satellite, Sentinel-1, which is already in orbit, ticking down the count. Meaning there is zero flexibility in the schedule.

Add to that the technical challenges: the synchronization of the radar systems, the 13-meter antennas that must fold for launch, the two satellites that must fit inside a single launcher fairing within strict volume and mass constraints, and separate cleanly in orbit.

For all this to come together on time, every TEC engineer on the project team must be aware of how their suggestions affect other parts of the mission and collaborate to find solutions that work at all levels.

When Florence Hélière, Project Manager for Harmony, heard about Project Mindset, she jumped on it immediately. After attending the Project Mindset workshop, Florence and her team experimented to find better ways of working. Here's what they started doing differently:

  • Created a shared context to ensure everyone was working from the same picture.

  • Improved their ability to make decisions despite not having all the answers.

  • Made sure everyone felt safe speaking up and raising concerns.

Altogether, this is helping the team handle the challenges of a complex mission at the speed needed to make their rendezvous in space.

Example photo

What's changed is how the team engages. People ask more questions, they understand each other's constraints better, and when something isn't right, they say so faster than before. Decisions get made and they stick. And when we sit down with industry, we sit down as one team, with one voice. On a mission like Harmony, that's what keeps you on schedule.

— Florence Hélière, Project Manager for the Harmony mission

The impact: Out-of-this-world collaboration

By turning a new mindset into a set of concrete behaviors, TEC now have a shared understanding of how to act when supporting a mission.

It's becoming part of how they work—and it's spreading.

  1. It stuck

    Since the 2024 pilot, almost 1/3 of TEC experts have completed the Project Mindset workshop. It is now part of the mandatory induction for every new TEC engineer. With up to 200 newcomers a year and a quarter of TEC retiring within four years, a new generation of experts will start with the same standards.

  2. It spread

    TEC ran as many sessions in the first half of 2026 as in all of 2025. With success stories like Project Harmony and Project Managers spreading the word, demand for the Project Mindset workshop and coaching is growing. Project managers are increasingly reaching out to ask for their team to join a session.

  3. It's scaling

    The behavior-first approach to creating real change has worked so well that TEC is using it to improve its technology development, too. For the R&D Mindset initiative, ESA's own people are taking the lead, with Friktion in the background. Just as it should be.

Sylvain Bouchart

Friktion really took on the challenge of creating a change program that is both effective and works within the structure of ESA. And when we needed to scale up, they were ready. What we have today goes beyond what we expected to achieve in the first couple of years.

— Sylvain Bouchart, Head of the Electrical Department and driving force behind Project Mindset

The Friktion way

At Friktion, we know you can't achieve a new mindset by simply announcing it. We help brave organizations change what actually matters—what people do day to day—and let the mindset follow naturally.

ESA didn't just run a few workshops and leave it at that. They gave people the tools they needed and encouraged them to find new ways to collaborate better.

Ready to do the same? Let’s talk.