Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries

by Safi Bahcall

As teams and companies grow larger, the stakes in outcome decrease while the perks of rank increase.

People responsible for developing high-risk, early-stage ideas (call them “artists”) need to be sheltered from the “soldiers” responsible for the already-successful, steady-growth part of an organization.

Skill in investigating failure not only separates good scientists from great scientists but also good businessmen from great businessmen.

It’s natural to assume that the inventor of an idea should also be its chief promoter and defender. But the best inventors do not necessarily make the best champions. The roles require different skills not often found in the same person.

A stream of departing employees signals serious dysfunction.

Without the certainties of franchises, the high failure rates of loonshots would bankrupt companies and industries. Without fresh loonshots, franchise developers would shrivel and die.

Teams with an outcome mindset, level 1, analyze why a project or strategy failed.

Teams with a system mindset, level 2, probe the decision-making process behind a failure.

System mindset means carefully examining the quality of decisions, not just the quality of outcomes.

Ferocious attention to scientific detail—or artistic vision or engineering design—is one tool, tailored to the phase, that motivates excellence among scientists, artists, or any type of creative.

“I discovered that the best innovation is sometimes the company, the way you organize.”

the weak link is not the supply of ideas. It is the transfer to the field. And underlying that weak link is structure—the design of the system—rather than the people or the culture.

Neither efficient markets nor invisible hands are fundamental laws. They are both emergent properties.

team size plays the same role in organizations that temperature does for liquids and solids. As team size crosses a “magic number,” the balance of incentives shifts from encouraging a focus on loonshots to a focus on careers.

As a group grows, the balance of incentives shifts from encouraging individuals to focus on collective goals to encouraging a focus on careers and promotion. When the size of the group exceeds a critical threshold, career interests triumph.

The greater your skill on the projects to which you have been assigned, which we can call project–skill fit, the more likely you are to choose project work. The lower your project–skill fit, the more likely you are to choose politics.

In high-fitness organizations, reward systems discourage politics and employees are well matched to their roles. As a result, they are eager to spend time on their projects—building the best coffee machine. In low-fitness organizations, politics strongly influence promotion decisions and employees are poorly matched to their assignments. As a result, they are inclined to spend time on politics.

The manufacture and assembly of planes belongs in the franchise group. The loonshot group is for developing the crazy new technologies that might go inside those planes.

Leaders who order their employees to be more innovative without first investing in organizational fitness are like casual joggers who order their bodies to run a marathon.

Employees who are not stretched by their assigned projects have little to gain from spending more time on them.

Training encourages spending time on projects, which reduces time spent on lobbying and networking. In other words, it improves organizational fitness.

If the prize for promotion were not as rich—if project success earned you the jackpot of your dreams, and promotion earned you no more than a used tissue—then the battles would not be as fierce.

Tilting the rewards more toward projects and away from promotion means celebrating results, not rank.

Imagine appointing a chief incentives officer, well trained in the subtleties of aligning value, who is solely focused on achieving a state-of-the-art incentive system. How much might politics decrease and creativity improve if rewards for teams and individuals were closely and skillfully matched to genuine measures of achievement?

A wide span encourages creatives, whether film directors or software designers or chemists, to come together and help a colleague solve a problem. A span of two, on the other hand, encourages sabotaging your peer to win a promotion.

had the Song emperors appointed and listened to a Chinese Vannevar Bush, the scientific and industrial revolutions might well have taken place five centuries earlier. And we would all be speaking Chinese.

Loonshots flourish in loonshot nurseries, not in empires devoted to franchises.