Laura Winterling

Why organisations work with Laura Winterling

• Her reference point for high-stakes team performance is not a business school case study. She trained more than 80 international astronauts at ESA’s European Astronaut Centre in conditions where errors carry mission-critical consequences.
• A master’s in Physics and a second in Organisational Psychology (UCL) let her diagnose both the structural and human causes of team failure simultaneously. Most leadership consultants address one or the other.
• She is a certified Crew Resource Management instructor. CRM is the human-factors methodology aviation uses to systematically reduce error in complex operations, and it is mandatory recurrent training for working pilots. Organisations working with her receive a framework tested in environments far more demanding than their own.
• She authored the on-console handbook for Mission Control Europe: her understanding of how multinational teams coordinate under live operational pressure comes from having written the procedures that govern it.
• She is an active commercial helicopter pilot and helicopter flight instructor. The CRM principles she teaches in leadership rooms are her own working discipline in the air.

Biography highlights

• Astronaut Instructor, European Space Agency (European Astronaut Centre, Cologne); trained more than 80 international astronauts – including crews from NASA, ESA, and Roscosmos – on spacecraft systems for ISS modules
• Authored the on-console handbook for Mission Control Europe
• Commercial helicopter pilot and helicopter flight instructor
• Certified Crew Resource Management (CRM) instructor and licensed MBTI practitioner
• MSc in Physics, University of Bayreuth; MSc in Organisational Psychology, University College London
• Three TEDx talks, including “From Perfection to Excellence” (TEDxUniMannheim), published on TED.com
• Founder and CEO, Space Time Concepts GmbH; clients include Mercedes-Benz, SAP, and Boston Consulting Group

Biography

Laura Winterling spent nearly a decade as an Astronaut Instructor at the European Space Agency’s European Astronaut Centre in Cologne. She trained more than 80 international astronauts from NASA, ESA, and Roscosmos on the spacecraft systems they would rely on during missions to the International Space Station. In that environment, how a team communicates, decides, and recovers from error determines whether a mission succeeds.

Her responsibilities extended beyond the classroom at EAC. She worked across mission control centres in Toulouse, Houston, and Moscow, sat console during live ISS operations, and observed three Soyuz launch campaigns in Kazakhstan. She also authored the on-console handbook for Mission Control Europe, which specifies how multinational teams coordinate under live operational pressure.

She holds master’s degrees in Physics (University of Bayreuth) and Organisational Psychology (University College London), and is also a commercial helicopter pilot, helicopter flight instructor, and certified Crew Resource Management instructor. CRM is the human-factors methodology aviation uses to systematically reduce error in complex operations, and it is mandatory training for working pilots. Her teaching of these principles in leadership rooms is grounded in her own active practice of them in flight.

Since founding Space Time Concepts GmbH in 2016, she has taken these frameworks into leadership sessions at organisations including Mercedes-Benz, SAP, and Boston Consulting Group. Three TEDx talks make her central argument publicly available – that excellence under pressure can be designed and trained. “From Perfection to Excellence” (TEDxUniMannheim) and “Why Astronauts Don’t Need Telepathy” (TEDxHHL) are available on TED.com and YouTube.

Key speaking topics

• Leadership and decision-making under operational pressure
• Crew Resource Management and human factors in organisations
• Team communication and structured debriefing
• High-reliability operations and organisational resilience
• Cross-cultural team performance in international programmes
• Excellence vs. perfection in professional and team development
• Leadership and followership as interdependent disciplines

Ideal for

• Senior leadership teams and C-suite executives building capability for decision-making under uncertainty
• CHROs and people development leads designing resilience and high-performance team programmes
• Engineering, operations, and technology organisations where system failure carries real consequences
• Organisations managing international, cross-cultural, or mission-critical teams

Audience outcomes

• A clear framework for distinguishing team performance in stable conditions from performance under genuine pressure
• Practical understanding of Crew Resource Management principles and how they apply in non-aviation organisational settings
• Specific protocols for communication clarity, structured debriefing, and error recovery drawn from ISS mission operations
• A reframe of mistakes as diagnosable, recoverable data – not indicators of individual inadequacy
• Concrete tools for moving teams from competent to reliably high-performing in complex, multinational environments