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

by Safi Bahcall

And then we’ll see how small changes in structure, rather than culture, can transform the behavior of groups, the same way a small change in temperature can transform rigid ice to flowing water.

Applying the science of phase transitions to the behavior of teams, companies, or any group with a mission provides practical rules for nurturing loonshots faster and better.

Their goal was to develop a radar system using short wavelengths (ten centimeters,

called microwaves) rather than long wavelengths (tens or hundreds of meters, called radio waves). The shorter the wavelength, the greater the resolution.

Wavelength determines the size of the antenna needed, which is why microwave ovens fit in your kitchen and radio towers do not. A microwave radar system, if they could build one, would be portable. Any ship, plane, or even truck could carry one.

While the individual man is an insoluble puzzle, in the aggregate he becomes a mathematical certainty.

Sherlock Holmes, in The Sign of the Four

In forests, you gather evidence by taking aerial pictures and tracking the progress of fires over time. Fire clusters form and burn out, merge or fragment. Aerial photography, however, can’t help you track cliques of people. And asking terrorists to fill out a questionnaire about their social habits (Please list any terror groups you joined or left recently!) did not seem like a winning research strategy. Johnson and his team were stuck with an intriguing but inconclusive hint.

The techniques offer promise for twenty-first-century policing: protecting populations without violating privacy. “You don’t need to know anything about the individuals,” Johnson said, to detect the patterns in their collective online behavior.

That’s the magic of emergence.

DARPA funded the creation of the first major computer graphics center. It chose the University of Utah. The group at Utah, described in chapter 5, was co-led by a former DARPA program manager, Ivan Sutherland. Sutherland supervised the computer graphics PhD thesis of Ed Catmull, the Pixar founder, who has said he was “profoundly influenced” by the DARPA model of nurturing creativity. DARPA funded another engineer, named Douglas Engelbart, who built the first computer mouse, the first bitmapped screens (early graphical interfaces), the first hypertext links, and demonstrated

them in 1968 at what computer scientists now refer to as the “Mother of All Demos.”

Former DARPA program managers or directors currently lead or have recently led research groups at Facebook, Google, Microsoft, IBM, Draper Laboratory, and MIT Lincoln Labs. This small group’s management principles have spread throughout both private industry and public research in the US, forming an extended web of DARPA.

Simple changes that encourage, but don’t mandate, behaviors we would like to see have been called “nudges.” In their book with that title, Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler offer a handful of policy examples, ranging from the serious (a plan that improves employee retirement-savings rates) to the less serious but equally effective (painting a fly on urinals has been shown to reduce urinal spillage by 80 percent). For his work in helping launch the field of behavioral economics, Thaler was awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize.

For his work in bringing the psychology of individual decision-making—the study of cognitive biases—into economics, which inspired Thaler’s work, Daniel Kahneman was awarded the 2002 Nobel Prize.

What we have been doing is combining Nobels: applying the principles of these two separate disciplines to the same problem. We are identifying how subtle changes in incentives can influence collective decision-making. There is no way to understand why teams and companies suddenly change from innovating well to innovating poorly just by analyzing individual behaviors in isolation. The ability to innovate well is a collective behavior. It is another example of “more is different.”