The world turned upside-down
Do you have that feeling that we are driving in some sort of race right now? Whirling around and around at an unimaginable speed. The days blur, the work changes, and every day we’re hit with endless stories, tweets, and who knows what. It’s been tiring. Fortunately, today I had the opportunity to reconnect with some wonderful former colleagues of mine. People I hadn’t spoken to as a whole group in a long time, and it was a special positive moment to slow down in this race we are in.
One of my old friends had a thoughtful question — related to working on innovative projects with hospitals. They asked, what is my role in making sure that it is really the right time to implement my project? Let me give you some context, the friend has been noticing in the past few weeks that a lot of project partners were asking to accelerate projects. It’s like racing around the track, and the white-checkered flag is suddenly waving in front of you. Of course after all the time my friend has been working on these projects— months and years of doing laps on the track — this should be an exciting moment. Instead, my friend said they feel perplexed, a bit uncomfortable even. My friend wonders what happened to many of the concerns that had been talked about just a month ago? How do we balance a new “racing” environment while considering the usual checkpoints? If we were just in a car pile-up on lap 10, why can we suddenly say we deserve to finish on lap 11?
It’s truly a world turned upside-down. An innovator is the one worrying and the institution is the one hurrying. We can feel so stuck — both action and inaction can both be such terrible choices for different reasons. Do I hit the gas or hit the brake? SO UNFAIR!
To look at this a different way, one of the important concepts that I have learned in multiple classes at Cornell Tech is to focus on process (the hundreds of laps around the track) not just on outcomes (when I cross the finish line). My simplified way of thinking about it is:
Outcome = process + (in)action + luck/chance
In normal life, we are pretty biased. How do we normally evaluate races? We look at the winner. Then, we go back and say, “look at that pivotal move on lap 10, that was the key to their success”, even though 5 other losing racers may have made the same move and not been successful. We like to know if an outcome is good or bad and return to exclaim how great (or terrible) of an idea it was (check out a stock market news feed). It’s cheating, but we do it. Why do we use this hindsight? Because the weight of luck/chance in this equation is really heavy and makes it almost impossible to predict the future. But, of course we have a counter attack for this. We improve the quality of our predictions by having a reliable process. We innovate our process to improve an outcome — we don’t innovate the outcome itself. Think about how many hours that driver puts into practicing. Even the best drivers crash and won’t win every race. They optimize their process to plan for as many uncertainties as possible, even if they cannot cover them all.
Which brings me back to my friend. What a weird spot to be in! Even when one of the outcomes they have always wanted is right in front of them, something doesn’t feel right, and I think it is my friend’s sense that this process just isn’t quite right. There are still obstacles on the track and worse yet now we’re taking shortcuts that could be ignored. There are luck/chance variables that may not be accounted for and what if they are large enough to make the outcome negative? What if, in that unexpected sprint to finish, you actually end up crashing the car? If you crash your car, there may not be a next time. For innovators dealing with big systems, you know that trying something radical once could easily be the last time it is ever tried, even if it was just bad luck.
Of course, I like to think of myself as an innovative minded person and don’t want to sound afraid of trying new things, but I have a major fear in this situation — how many people don’t take the moment to think. They don’t pause to consider whether sacrificing their process is worth the hopeful outcome. We need to think about it! We can build contingencies. We can establish timeframes to revisit things in the future. We can acknowledge what we are risking in the process. We can build a process recognizing that now is different from the future (do take a mindful moment to remember that there is a now and a future).
As innovators, as entrepreneurially minded people, as individuals, I think it is important to acknowledge uncertainty — we cannot run from it. Realize what we feel and think about how to change our process to make it better. Recognize that luck/chance are major factors. Recognize that you have to love your process otherwise you might not even be happy with your outcome.
Be well everyone, we can do it.
