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

by Safi Bahcall

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.

The most important breakthroughs come from loonshots, widely dismissed ideas whose champions are often written off as crazy.

Large groups of people are needed to translate those breakthroughs into technologies that win wars, products that save lives, or strategies that change industries.

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

The most important breakthroughs rarely follow blaring trumpets and a red carpet, with central authorities offering overflowing pots of tools and money. They are surprisingly fragile. They pass through long dark tunnels of skepticism and uncertainty, crushed or neglected, their champions often dismissed as crazy—or just plain dismissed,

My resistance to after-the-fact analyses of culture comes from being trained as a physicist. In physics, you identify clues that reveal fundamental truths. You build models and see if they can explain the world around you. And that’s what we will do in this book. We will see why structure may matter more than culture.

When groups are small, for example, everyone’s stake in the outcome of the group project is high.

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

Leaders spend so much time preaching innovation. But one desperate molecule can’t prevent ice from crystallizing around it as the temperature drops. Small changes in structure, however, can melt steel.

being good at loonshots (like original films) and being good at franchises (sequels) are phases of large-group behavior—distinct and separate phases.

In the high-stakes competition between weapons and counterweapons, the weak link was not the supply of new ideas. It was the transfer of those ideas to the field.

there “should be close collaboration between the military and [some] organization, made loose in its structure on purpose.”

Bush brought the two groups together. He used his credibility as an academic to reassure scientists of their independence. But at the same time, he explained their goal was more than clever ideas. Their goal was products that worked.

the big ideas—the breakthroughs that change the course of science, business, and history—fail many times before they succeed.

the breakthroughs that change our world are born from the marriage of genius and serendipity.

The magic of Bush and Vail was in engineering the forces of genius and serendipity to work for them rather than against them. Luck is the residue of design.

Rather than champion any individual loonshot, they create an outstanding structure for nurturing many loonshots.

Rather than visionary innovators, they are careful gardeners. They ensure that both loonshots and franchises are tended well, that neither side dominates the other, and that each side nurtures and supports the other.

The structures that these gardeners create share a common set of principles. I’ll call these principles the Bush-Vail rules. The first two rules are the ones mentioned above, the key to life at 32 Fahrenheit: separate the phases (the groups working on loonshots and on franchises) and create dynamic equilibrium (ensure that projects ...

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.

Early-stage projects are fragile.

“Although military officers became avid for a new development once it had thoroughly proved itself in the field,” Bush wrote, they dismissed any weapon “in embryo”—as they did with radar, with the DUKW truck, and with nearly every e...

Without a strong cocoon to protect those early-stage ideas, they will be shut down or buried, like Young and Ta...

Leaders of powerful franchises across every industry routinely dismiss early-stage project...

The goal of phase separation is to create a loonshot nursery. The nursery protects those embryonic projects. It allows caregivers to design a sheltered environment where those projects can grow, flourish, and shed their warts.

the list of failed companies with shiny research labs is long. True phase separation requires custom homes to meet custom needs: separate systems tailored to the needs of each phase.

he tailored the systems. He “moved away from the rigid task allocation” of telephone operations and toward a similar loose-touch style.

The new CEO described the efficiency system as a mistake: “You can’t say … well, I’m getting behind on invention, so I’m going to schedule myself for three good ideas on Wednesday and two on Friday.”

Loose goals and dream sessions might help artists. But they will harm the coherence of an army.

Maintaining balance so that neither phase overwhelms the other requires something that sounds soft and fuzzy but is very real and often overlooked. Artists working on loonshots and soldiers working on franchises have to feel equally loved.

Although equal-opportunity respect is a rare skill by nature, it can be nurtured with practice

Bush, although a brilliant inventor and engineer, pointedly stayed out of the details of any one loonshot. “I made no technical contribution whatever to the war effort,” he wrote. “Not a single technical idea of mine ever amounted to shucks. At times I have been called an ‘atomic scientist.’ It would be fully as accurate to call me a child psychologist.”

Bush and Vail saw their jobs as managing the touch and the balance between loonshots and franchises—between scientists exploring the bizarre and soldiers assembling munitions;

in the chain of creating a breakthrough, the transfer between the two sides is the weakest link.

A flawed transfer from inventors to the field is not the only danger. Transfer in the other direction is equally important. No product works perfectly the first time. If feedback from the field is ignored by inventors, initial enthusiasm can rapidly fade, and a promising program will be dropped.

Early aircraft radar, for example, was practically useless; pilots ignored it. Bush made sure that pilots went back to the scientists and explained why they weren’t using it. The reason had nothing to do with the technology: pilots in the heat of battle didn’t have time to fiddle with the complicated switches on the early radar boxes. The user interface was lousy. Scientists quickly created a custom display technology—the sweeping line and moving dots now called a PPI display. Pilots started using radar.

Key to that dynamic equilibrium—and Bush’s ability to speak freely to generals—was support from the top.

Not long after, one of the bumped heads came to FDR and launched into a tirade about Bush and his operation. The president, according to an aide who was present, was in the middle of signing letters. FDR paused for a while to listen, went back to signing letters, then said, “Look, Mac, I put that in Bush’s hands. He’s running it, and you get the hell out of here.”

Many companies, however, especially when faced with a crisis, try to legislate creativity and innovation everywhere (“The CEO must be the CIO—the Chief Innovation Officer!”). This usually results in chaos, the top-left quadrant.

We will see the False Fail over and over, both in science and in business. There are many reasons projects can die: funding dwindles, a competitor wins, the market changes, a key person leaves. But the False Fail is common to loonshots.

People may think of Endo and Folkman as great inventors, but arguably their greatest skill was investigating failure. They learned to separate False Fails from true fails.

There was no one internally to investigate and answer False Fails, no one to protect the program from critics with other agendas who wanted its budget for their own programs.

Endo was both the inventor of an idea and its skilled champion, as was Judah Folkman. But that combination is rare. 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.

Many of the best biotech and pharma companies today have learned to separate the roles of inventor and champion. They train people for the project champion job—the Deak Parsons skill-set—and elevate their authority.

On the creative side, inventors (artists) often believe that their work should speak for itself. Most find any kind of promotion distasteful.

great project champions are much more than promoters. They are bilingual specialists, fluent in both artist-speak and soldier-speak, who can bring the two sides together.

Although creating the role may induce some eye-rolling, the teams or companies that do it well will reduce the risk of what happened with radar at the Navy. They will avoid burying a great idea for lack of a great champion.

Contrarian answers, with confidence, create very attractive investments.

If you’ve poured your soul into a project, the temptation to dismiss bad outcomes is high. What you crave is reassurance that you’re on the right track. So you ignore or attack your challengers and turn for reassurance to your friends, mentors, mother.

LSC means not only listening for the Suck and acknowledging receipt but also probing beneath the surface, with genuine curiosity, why something isn’t working, why people are not buying. It’s hard to hear that no one likes your baby. It’s even harder to keep asking why.