Smartcuts: The Breakthrough Power of Lateral Thinking

by Shane Snow

amount of resources, as making the 10-percen...

trying to reframe the problem . . . is really about bravery, about creativity.”

We knew this was going to be hard, he said. It’s rocket science. Few countries had even made it this far—and many had tried.

Then the surprise: this third launch would not be SpaceX’s last.

“Generally speaking, if you’re gonna make something ten percent better than the way things currently are, you better be great in sales and marketing, because you’re gonna have to talk people into changing their behavior for a very marginal increase in value,”

on the other hand, you make something

ten times better for a large number of people—you really produce huge amounts of new value—the money’s gonna come find you. Because it would be hard not to make mo...

What stops us from applying the principles of Smartcuts to macro problems?

Most large businesses stop growing: Eighty-seven percent of large businesses stop growing, according to researchers

This gets at the principle of rapid: Research

People react in different ways to negative feedback,

little change is likely to occur unless a person is willing to acknowledge

deficiencies indicated by th...

Negative feedback is more likely to be accepted and applied by someone with strong self confid...

when feedback recipients have good intentions about improving their behavior, little actual improvement is likely unless they remain focused on implementing

Feedback notes for good intention

an interesting counterweight to Weick’s “small wins,” Sim B. Sitkin, “Learning through Failure: The Strategy of Small Losses,” Research in Organizational Behavior 14 (1992): 231–66, proposes that designing for “small losses” can prevent systemic failure.

this strategy “intelligent failure,”

Intelligence.failure

“Failure should not be pursued for its own sake. It is a means to an end, not the end itself. If the goal is learning, then unanticipated failure is the unavoidable byproduct associated with th...

“The faster the action-failure-action cycle, the more feedback that can be gathered and used for adjustment...

when information is quickly generated, evaluated, ...