Finding your moonshot - part 1

When did you last feel really inspired by where you work? 

You know… that feeling of waking up in the morning so excited about going to work because you know your organisation makes a profound difference. Your company is doing something so audacious, so remarkable, that even if it gets half way to achieving its goal, it would still change the world!

Sadly too few people truly know that feeling. But it doesn’t have to be like that. Too often we have small expectations of where we work and even smaller expectations of our ability to turn that situation around. However, as Mandela is attributed to saying...

 “your playing small does not serve the world.”

And playing small certainly doesn’t serve ourselves. 

The two parts to this article will provide some clues and a process for playing LARGE.

I will introduce or reintroduce you to a concept that has on numerous occasions changed the course of history for individuals, corporations, communities, countries and even the planet. This article is about finding your moonshot.

 A moonshot is an ambitious, exploratory and groundbreaking initiative, the outcome of which is of great significance. 

click here to watch a quick video explaining what moonshots are and why they are so important

The original moonshot, was in fact literally a shot at the moon. As referenced in the video above, JFK in 1961 famously said the US government would put Americans in space and on the moon before the decade ended. True to his promise and despite the incredible audacity of this goal, on July 20 1969 Apollo 11 landed the first humans on the moon.

Since that time the moonshot has become ubiquitous with almost all organisations attempting to change life on earth as we know it. And every moonshot starts with one person, daring to ask different questions, playing large, and in so doing finding different answers that not only motivate themselves but release the passion of communities, companies, countries and society as a whole. 

Elon Musk is famous for his moonshots: SpaceX’s moonshot is to privatize space travel, Tesla’s is to provide fully electric cars for everyone, Hyperloop promises a rapid transportation system taking you from Sydney to Melbourne in 45 minutes, the Space Internet’s moonshot is to provide wifi to the world via low orbital satellites providing.

My favourite Musk moonshot of all however was shared with me by a friend who had a private meeting with Musk in his office. Behind Musk on the wall was a huge image that looked a lot like earth, but the more my friend looked at the image the less he recognized any of the land masses. Towards the end of the meeting he asked Musk what part of earth was captured in the image.

“That’s not earth” Musk said “that’s Mars once we terraform it.”

Musk’s moonshots not only set him apart, they attract the world’s best talent and investment. Why? As Israeli Nobel prize winner Daniel Kahneman said...

“If you realistically present to people what can be achieved to solve a problem, they will find that uninteresting. You have to overpromise in order to get anything done. When you look at big successes, the people that carried out those big successes were unrealistically optimistic.

This may be necessary to get the initial resources and it may be necessary to get the enthusiasm that is needed to achieve anything at all, because there is so much inertia that realistic promises are at a major disadvantage.”

 Russian revolutionary activist/anarchist Mikhail Bakunin echoed this sentiment 200 years ago.

“By striving to do the impossible, man[kind] has always achieved what is possible.”

So what are the criteria for a great moonshot? As detailed in a recent HBR article there are three as follows.

1. It inspires - Kennedy’s quote raises the spirit; a more typical corporate goal of increasing return on invested capital from 13.4% to 13.9%, not so much. That kind of financial target might be important, but it’s unlikely to get people to do extraordinary things
2. It is credible - easy to assume that a moonshot is just a ridiculous stretch target. But before Kennedy made his speech he had Vice President Johnson do a detailed assessment of underlying technological trends to ensure that the goal had a reasonable chance of success
3. It is imaginative - it isn’t an obvious extrapolation of what’s happening today (which for Kennedy would simply have been to fly farther into space), but something that offers a meaningful break from the past.

In part 2 I will share how you can find your moonshot by answering a few simple questions. Till then... start playing LARGE.