Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life

by Ozan Varol

Regular success, as the Challenger and Columbia disasters remind us, can portend long-term trouble. Research shows that success and complacency go hand in hand.44 When we succeed, we stop pushing boundaries. Our comfort sets a ceiling, with our frontiers shrinking rather than extending. Corporate executives are rarely punished for deviating from a historically successful strategy. But the risk of punishment is far greater if an executive abandons a successful strategy to pursue one that ends up failing. As a result, instead of risking something new, we maintain the same “proven” formula that led to our success. This tactic works well—until it doesn’t.

To prevent complacency, knock yourself off the pedestal once in a while. “You have to disrupt yourself,” Steve Forbes says, “or others will do it for you.”46 If we don’t experience variability in our track record—if we don’t prevent our confidence from inflating after a string of random successes—then a catastrophic failure will do that for us. But catastrophic failures also tend to end your business or your career. “If you’re not humble,” said former world heavyweight champion Mike Tyson, “life will visit humbleness upon you.” One way to stay humble is to pay attention to near misses.

It’s easy for us to say we would have delayed the Challenger launch, drafted Brady in the first round, or seen the writing on the wall for Blockbuster. Concealing the outcome removes the distorting lenses of hindsight. It’s not easy to put blind analysis into practice outside a business school classroom. In the real world, outcomes aren’t concealed. Once the cat is out of the bag, it’s hard to put it back in. But there’s a trick to putting blind analysis into practice without playing it stupid: the premortem.

With a premortem, the investigation comes before we have acted, when the actual outcome isn’t known—before we fire the rockets, close the sale, or complete the merger. In a premortem, we travel forward in time and set up a thought experiment where we assume the project failed. We then step back and ask, “What went wrong?” By vividly visualizing a doomsday scenario, we come up with potential problems and determine how to avoid them. According to research, premortems increase by 30 percent the ability of participants to correctly determine the reasons for a future outcome.

Think of premortems as the opposite of backcasting, which we explored in the chapter on moonshot thinking. Backcasting works backward from a desired outcome. A premortem works backward from an undesired outcome. It forces you to think about what could go wrong before you act.

No one likes to be the skunk at a picnic, the lone holdout pounding her fists at the table. Skunks, like messengers, have a habit of getting shot. It’s no wonder that groupthink pops up even in organizations whose lifeblood is creativity. Faced with potential backlash, we censor ourselves rather than go against the grain. We conform, rather than flout. Success only exacerbates this tendency toward conformity. It drives overconfidence in the status quo, which in turn stifles dissent, precisely when dissent is most needed to prevent complacency.

The causes of failure in a complex system—whether it’s a rocket or a business—are usually multiple. Numerous factors, including technical, human, and environmental, might combine to produce the failure. Remedying only the first-order causes leaves the second- and third-order causes intact. These are the deeper causes lurking beneath the surface. They make the first-order causes happen and may lead to them again.

Killing the Bad One often gives rise to the Worse One. In attacking the most visible causes, we unleash a Darwinian process of creating a more insidious pest. When the pest returns, we apply the same pesticide, up the dosage, and express shock when nothing changes.

The safety net may be there to catch you if you fall, but you’re better off pretending it doesn’t exist.

The journey cannot end once the mission is accomplished. That’s when the real work begins. When success brings complacency—when we tell ourselves that now that we’ve discovered the New World, there’s no reason to return—we become a shadow of our former selves.