People walking outside of the ESTEC office

European Space Agency:
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 juggles multiple missions at once, and every project manager wants them to prioritize their mission. Success depends on everyone aligning on 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 focused on what they actually do.

  1. Pinpointing the behaviors that matter

    Before designing solutions, we interviewed project managers and TEC experts to uncover where the friction lived. Out of that came a list of concrete behaviors that, if adopted, would improve collaboration: building a shared context for the team, making decisions amid uncertainty, balancing workflow, nurturing trust, and seeking early, actionable feedback.

  2. Making new behaviors easy to adopt

    With motivation already high, we focused on making these new behaviors easy to do within ESA's structure. This included designing a one-day workshop bringing TEC and Project people together to tackle real scenarios and practice the behaviors. We also built resource pages packed with practical content and enlisted TEC ambassadors to champion the change.

  3. Experimenting to find what works

    No two missions are the same. After the workshop, we coached project managers to run small experiments with their teams, learn from them, and adjust to find what truly worked. We also refined the workshops after each session, tailoring them more by letting project managers bring their own real-life challenges and choose which behaviors to focus on.

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, ESA's tenth Earth Explorer mission, is set for launch in 2029. This unique mission will advance climate research and risk management by capturing motion at or near Earth's surface down to the centimeter: from waves and clouds to volcanoes and glaciers

To do this, the mission will fly two identical satellites with different viewpoints, in formation with a third satellite, Sentinel-1, which is already waiting in orbit. The schedule leaves no room for delay.

Add to that the technical challenges: synchronizing the radar systems, folding the 13-meter antennas for launch, squeezing both satellites into a single launcher fairing with strict volume and mass constraints, and ensuring they separate cleanly in orbit.

For all this to come together on time, every TEC engineer on the team must understand how their choices affect other parts of the mission and collaborate to craft solutions that work at every level.

When Florence Hélière, Project Manager for Harmony, heard about Project Mindset, she immediately jumped on it. After the workshop, Florence and her team began experimenting with new ways of working.

Here's what they did 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.

Together, these changes are helping the team tackle the complexities of the mission at the pace required to make their space rendezvous.

Florence Hélière

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 transforming mindset into tangible behaviors, TEC now shares a clear understanding of how to support every ESA mission.

This is becoming part of how TEC 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 is starting out with the same standards.

  2. It spread

    In just the first half of 2026, TEC ran as many Project Mindset sessions as in all of 2025. With success stories like Harmony and enthusiastic project managers sharing their experiences, the demand for workshops and coaching is growing. Project managers are increasingly requesting sessions for their team.

  3. It's scaling

    The behavior-first approach to change has proven so effective that TEC is using it to improve technology development as well. For the R&D Mindset initiative, ESA's own people are taking the lead, with Friktion quietly supporting 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 better ways to collaborate.

Ready to do the same? Let’s talk.
Vadim Feldman

Vadim Feldman

Founder and Management Consultant

+46760311060vadim@friktion.sevadim-feldman
Emelie Rydén

Emelie Rydén

Brand & Communication Strategist

+46733367987emelie@friktion.seemelieryden