More Moonshot Secrets: Making Audacity the Path of Least Resistance
Countering human nature is hard. Here’s how we do it at X.
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After I spoke at TED about X’s moonshots, people who saw my talk and read my transcript on Medium asked to hear more about our secret sauce: how we get teams to deliberately prove themselves wrong and cheerfully break things that they believe in without curling up into a ball of anxiety. I couldn’t jam all those thoughts into my 16 minutes on stage, so here are some of the bits that ended up on the cutting room floor. — Astro
Almost every day in the moonshot factory is messy. Even when you’re sure you’re learning lots of valuable things during weeks or months of frustration, everyone worries, “What happens if I fail? Will people laugh at me? Will I get fired?” At the end of the day, we all have to pay the bills and want the people around us to think highly of us. So it’s human nature to gravitate toward the paths that feel psychologically safe.
That’s why, if you want your team to be audacious, you have to make being audacious the path of least resistance. People have to feel safe even as they make mistakes or fail altogether — which means we, as managers and leaders, have to make it easy and rewarding to take risks and run enthusiastically at really hard things. Here are a few things we’ve tried at X so our emotional environment keeps us brave enough to say and act on things that have a very good chance of being wrong — and just might be crazy enough to be brilliant.
Bad ideas brainstorms
Our Rapid Evaluation team, which generates hundreds of ideas for possible X moonshots, does mental gymnastics in the form of “bad ideas” brainstorms. The goal is to get used to saying silly things in front of each other. What if someone on your team said, “Obesity is a growing problem and battery life is limited. Could we create an implantable fat-powered fuel cell that charges your mobile devices?” How do you look at someone the same way after that idea? But that’s the point: you can’t get to the good ideas without spending a lot of time warming up your creativity with a bunch of bad ones. Most people never develop those muscles because they’re too worried about what someone else is going to think of them. It’s a shame, because a terrible idea is often the cousin of a good idea, and a great one is the neighbor of that.
Keep saying the hard stuff out loud
It’s hard to lead people into behaviors that run counter to human nature. We all know intellectually that to accomplish something truly difficult, we have to actually face up to the problems and solve them. But knowing that emotionally is a whole different problem. That takes frequent encouragement, reminders, and reinforcement.
We’re trying an experiment right now to encourage teams across X to speak up about things that might someday kill a project or slow it down — and make it business-as-usual for managers to hear and respond to these things. We’re calling our experiment “pre-mortems.” (You may be familiar with the concept of a post-mortem…all the somber meetings and mea culpa documents after something has gone wrong.)
Our “pre-mortems” live on a site where anyone can post something that they’re worried about going wrong in the future. It could be specific to a project like Loon or self-driving cars (and you don’t have to be on the team to speak up), or it can be broadly about how we do things at X. It could be short term or long term. People are probably already saying these things in smaller groups, but they might not be saying it loudly, clearly, or often enough — often because these are things that might get you branded as a downer or disloyal, such as, “Will xyz thing really have the impact we’re hoping for?” or “Are we doing enough to help society understand why we’re doing xyz?”
It’s critical to have these worries aired early and to the right people, because they’re valuable to helping us all understand and evaluate the risks we’re facing. We’re still in the early stages of this experiment, and in tandem with some other feedback tools we have, it’s going to be a good test of the psychological safety people feel across X or in different teams, and show us where we could be doing better.
Killing a project is success, not failure
We keep people brave by rewarding teams that kill their projects. We see killing projects as a normal part of doing business because it means we can go faster and take on ideas that are more promising. Last year we killed over 100 ideas that we’d been investigating as possible moonshots. I didn’t kill them. The teams themselves killed each one as soon as the evidence was on the table because we regularly send unmissable signals that we see the project termination itself as a form of success.
Not long ago a team of 30 engineers killed a project they’d been working on for 2 years. We’d made great progress on the technology, and we could have kept going but realized that a company with large scale expertise in this particular field could make progress faster and were more likely to get to the price point that was necessary for the product to compete in the market. So we decided to find a partner to license our work to and ended the project at X. The next week, I stood the entire team up on stage at one of X’s all hands meetings, and I announced they were getting a bonus for killing their project. I said, “Thank you! By ending their project, this team has done more to speed up innovation at X this month than any other team in this room.” And they got a huge round of applause from their managers and peers. They then went on vacation, came back, and found new roles in other teams around X, enabling us to go even faster at other ideas with brighter futures.
Agree to expect problems
Here’s some mental judo that I do with people who are new to X, to help them see that I want them to work first and hardest on the things that are most likely to torpedo their project. I say to them, “Do we want to be the kind of people who are intellectually honest with ourselves?” They’ll say, “Yes, of course, we’re going to be intellectually honest.” And then I ask them, “Is it a good thing to find out whether a project has an Achilles heel or not?” I promise you, they say yes. And then if you ask them, “So when do you want to know if it has a massive flaw…as soon as possible, or only after we’ve put in a couple of years of work?” This sounds really obvious, but it’s really valuable for teams and their leaders to be on the same page: a sticky problem is not a reflection of anyone’s failure as a person, but an expected side effect of the innovation process. If you have this conversation, you’ll all be at least a little more open to working transparently through whatever issues arise, rather than pretending they don’t exist for a while or avoiding the hard stuff altogether.
The path of least resistance is free
You’re thinking: My boss isn’t like you! And we don’t have billions of dollars in the bank! Somehow society has developed this notion that you have to have a huge amount of money to be audacious. I don’t believe that. Everything I’ve written here and everything I said at TED is even more critical if you have a really tight budget. Taking good, smart risks is something that anyone can do, whether you’re on a team of 5 or in a company of 50,000.
I’m often asked to talk to CEOs and leaders, sometimes big companies, sometimes startups, sometimes governments. These are people who are responsible for making sure their organizations are supporting innovation, so they want to hear how Google or X approaches it.
I invite them to a quick quiz, and the outcome is almost always the same. I say to them, I’m going to give you two choices. Choice A, you can deliver $1 million of value to the business that you work for, 100% guaranteed. Choice B, you have a 1 in 100 chance of delivering $1 billion of value to the business that you work for. Who’s going to take choice A?
No one raises their hands. So I say, who’s going to take choice B?
Everyone raises their hands.
Ok, I tell them, most of you just identified yourselves as moonshot thinkers. And you passed the math test. Choice B is 10 times the expected value of Choice A. These are exactly the tradeoffs you have to make if you want to accomplish anything really big and meaningful. Great!
Then I say — how many of your managers or CEOs or boards of directors would support you in choosing B?
There’s usually some laughter, and people look around at each other nervously — because usually no one is raising their hands.
This happens ALL the time. I stand in front of a group of people who want to innovate, who are cajoled by their bosses and boards and shareholders to innovate more and faster, yet they face a nearly insurmountable obstacle: they don’t really feel that their bosses are supportive of the risks that come with dreaming big.
This isn’t an intellectual hurdle. It’s not a financial hurdle. Innovation gets blocked most often on these emotional issues — yet psychological safety is free. That means any company, any group of leaders, can choose to make being audacious their path of least resistance. So if your leadership team says, “We don’t have time for feelings” or “We don’t have the money X has,” they’re missing the point: the secret ingredient you need for moonshots doesn’t cost a thing.
