HOW TO NURTURE CRAZY IDEAS

Growth is all about innovation. Yes, you can create value in business by filling whitespaces, entering new markets, or looking for smart ways to raise prices. Yet, none of those recipes are as infinite neither as exponential as innovation is. Innovation sounds good on paper, but how can business leaders create a structure that really fosters it? How can they ensure the business never runs short of Innovation?

Simple: start nurturing crazy ideas. And Safi Bahcall -in his book Loonshots- states clear the how. First, defining this new concept of Loonshots, “widely dismissed ideas whose champions are often written off as crazy”. Those that end up as the biggest breakthroughs in history, whether a never seen before product, a life-saving medicine or a brand-new billions-worth business.

But rather than thinking about the almighty entrepreneur whose visionary ideas just flow out and turn into immediate success, Bahcall proposes to create a structure that can really seed, garden and bloom many of these Loonshots even within the largest companies. Wild ideas that turn into billions are not restricted only to Steve Jobs like innovators or to small startups.

The author identifies competing forces within small and large structures that may shift the same person from being conservative or a recurrent ideas rejector in any given moment, to a pure risk taker entrepreneur in another context. And leveraging his background in Physics, introduces a great analogy with the phase transitions.

Such as a molecule of water completely freezes when it touches a block of ice, and a small piece of ice is melted when in contact with hot water, the same happens with different groups within the organizations. In small startups, everyone is completely invested into the project and could earn multiples if successful, so they are more prone to take risks and less concerned about ranks or salary increases. In contrast, within large groups, the stakes in outcome are not that high and people are more concerned about the ranks, becoming more risk averse. Group behavior is inherent in both cases, so any given individual could get trapped by being a molecule in the opposite state.

"Entrepreneurs often say that big companies fail because big-corporate types are conservative and risk averse. But put that big-corporate type in a startup, the tie will come off and he′ll be pounding the table supporting some wild idea" - Safi Bahcall

The magic is in separating these two phases, creating a structure that can operate as a small innovative startup on one end, but still be capable of running enormous and successful businesses on the other. This is what the author names “Life at 0° Celsius degrees”. A complete dynamic equilibrium between the ice and the water.

While one group (he calls them soldiers) are working on the highly successful and established business, others are entitled to nurture the crazy ideas (calls them artists) so much needed to ensure greater business success for the future, acknowledging that in early stage these ideas are enormously fragile. Fragility lies on the different types of hurdles a crazy idea must overcome before becoming that project in which everyone is completely bullish about: “Ideas are ridiculed, experiments fail, budgets are cut”.

So fragile projects require -according to Bahcall- strong hands to keep them safe, and to navigate them to safe port even after facing the “three deaths”. Those moments in which the organization may shut down the project (sometimes more than 3, for sure). Be it a false fail within the testing stage, be it a rejection for extra funding, be it a general disbelief, those Artists shall be guards to their ideas and keep working on them, really understanding the failure, incorporating learnings and making the idea more and more robust one failure at a time. Importantly, with the humbleness to understand what isn’t working and with the clarity to know if it can be pivoted or if it is the moment of letting go.

Worried about this difference between persistence and stubbornness, the insightful question that Loonshots present is: “When someone challenges the project you′ve invested years in, do you defend with anger or investigate with genuine curiosity? When you question yourself the least is when you need to worry the most”.

The invitation is to be more courageous. To believe in those out of the box ideas that may seem too disruptive in the way you do business today but could be converted into the make it or break it for your success and business continuity in the future. Those organizations who identify, nurture and successfully bring the Loonshots into the market will prevail, while those who fail will sooner than later become part of the landscape of the past.