An Ode to R2D2: Part 2 of 4

Be An Outsider

Most people assume that I worked on DoD projects at Palantir. After all, I’d just spent a decade targeting terrorists in Toyota Hiluxes. That, and lifting rubber boats up and down to delight passing cruise ships were my only marketable skills, and the latter certainly wasn’t data-driven. But, on team R2D2, I never touched a DoD project. That would have violated Droid Training Principle #2.

“Thou shalt not work on projects in the same industry from whence ye came, for a period of one year.” In other words, if you know what you’re doing, do something else. The team’s leaders insist on this, because they believe it takes outsiders to solve wicked problems. For Droids, domain expertise isn’t an asset, but a disease that blinds them from imagining the possible.

Luckily, my condition was curable with “time in a different problem space,” and my experience using crayons and trigonometry to rewrite mortar firing tables was “exactly what the commercial resourcing team needed.” So, despite R2D2’s best efforts to throw me for a loop, I boarded a plane from Palo Alto to London to do something I’d done a hundred times before. “Hi, I’m Andy. I don’t know how to do what you do, and I’m here to help.”

The Marines had prepared me for this moment. As a Marine officer, once you’re no longer a liability to your team, you switch teams and roles. If you can fog a mirror, you’re ready for a rifle platoon. If you can successfully navigate that platoon from a live-fire range to the barracks (your platoon sergeant can help you), you get an 81mm mortar platoon. That comes with a fleet of trucks, stocked with high-explosives and white phosphorus. Make it a year without accidentally shooting down an F-18, and you’re ready to be an instructor at the Marines’ Top Gun.

I’d already spent a career as an outsider, and I’d certainly never thought of it as an advantage. Every year, I drifted to a new team, begged my teammates to teach me what they did, and tried to convince them I wouldn’t get everyone killed. I was tired of it. I wanted to specialize. I wanted to belong.

Watching the Droids do their thing changed my perspective. One of the reasons they are so good at solving hard problems is that they are unencumbered by the beliefs and processes the experts have been throwing against a problem for years. They arrive with fresh perspective, and without the scar tissue that restricts mental mobility. The Droids working on DoD projects could imagine decision-making tools that weren’t bounded by the constraints of Microsoft Office.

They’re also talented integrators, and they’re good at this because they have range. Droids don’t work on the same projects for long, and that’s by design. The team’s goal is to build robots with paper-deep expertise across hundreds of topics, but thoroughly mapped APIs. Afterall, wicked problems are multi-disciplinary. They can’t be solved in expert silos. Someone has to architect the cross-functional solution, using the right amount of the right tools. Otherwise, teams default to what they know. Not every problem can be solved with a large language model and a better Kanban board.??

Alas, I didn’t convert my targeting skills into an outsized win for Palantir’s commercial resourcing team. I learned a lot more than I delivered during my time there. But, this lesson fundamentally changed how I thought about experience and solving hard problems.?

The Marine Corps made me an outsider. R2D2 taught me that it was a superpower.?