Think like a Rocket Scientist

Last month, while in transit, I dropped into the bookshop at Hyderabad airport. The cover design and the snappy name caught my eye - "Think like a Rocket Scientist" by Ozan Varol. I just finished reading the the book and thought would post a book review.

The book is all about tackling problems in the class of "rocket science" - exploring, bold unknown frontiers with innovative solutions such as the famous NASA Moonshot and the Mars exploration and more recently Elon Musk's space explorations. The author stresses that the same thinking and approaches used by Rocket Scientists can serve each one of us in our professional life, be it be as CXO, Technical leader, People leader or even as an Individual contributor. The author himself was a rocket scientist once (among many other subsequent career achievements) being part of team that sent Rovers to Mars.

To summarise the central theme, I will begin a quote from the book, "To think like a Rocket Scientist is to look at the world through a different lens. Rocket Scientists imagine the unimaginable and solve the unsolvable. They transform failures into triumphs and constraints into advantages. They view mishaps as solvable puzzles rather than insurmountable road blocks. They are moved not by blind conviction but by self-doubt; they goal is not short term but long-term breakthroughs. They know that the rules are not set in stone, the defaults can be altered, and a new path can be forged."

As you can see, all transformative challenges in all fields of human endeavour need this approach.

The book is divided in three sections typical of a rocket launch - LAUNCH, ACCELERATE & ACHIEVE. These three stages cover the entire lifecycle of any major innovation. From Idea generation, Validation, Solution Design and Execution and, more importantly - Learning from Failures.

The LAUNCH phase is about idea generation strategies, for eg. Thought Experiments, Reasoning from first principles, Challenging existing wisdom, avoiding the certainty fetish and so on.

The second stage, ACCELERATE is about taking the ideas to next level by asking right questions , viewing the challenge from a wide angle rather then zoom lens, ensuring that the solution addresses the strategy rather than tactics. the key thing here, is doing what scientists do, changing our default approach of convincing others that you are right to proving yourself wrong. Thorough testing is another aspect covered here - "test as you fly" and "fly as you test" are two interesting concepts borrowed from rocket science.

The third stage, ACHIEVE, is about unlocking your full potential that includes both success and failure. The author explains why the current popular "Fail Fast, Fail often" is a recipe for disaster. How it is important to focus on Inputs of a decision, rather than the Outcome. I found this concept very insightful and counterintuitive - inputs are in your control, Outputs are not. But we always evaluate a decision by the output. For eg. a team that loses a match by a few points may be changed than a team that wins a match by few points. The author says, there is little difference between the two scenarios yet we overreact due to the outcome. He argues that 'near misses' ( an aviation term we are very familiar with ) are more important to pay attention to than doing postmortem of disasters. Also, it is essential to do a "post mortem" of success as much as a failure to capture true learnings. He also addresses how corporates and leaders can do that.

What I liked about the book was that it is full of quotes, anecdotes and snippets of wisdom from famous men and women. There are examples from wide spectrum of industries and products and services. There are many counter intuitive ideas and examples that open-up one's mind.

The book also comes up with new concepts like "Backcasting" ( as opposed to Forecasting), "Pre-mortem" ( as opposed to "Post-mortem"), 'Intelligent Failure", "Functional Fixedness" and others.

Some interesting examples from the book... there are many many more,

• How to create a "intelligent failure" culture - Google X rewards a Project team for pulling the Plug on a project. At Google X , any team itself can abort a project rather than Management.
• Elon Musk went back to first principle based thinking about building his own rocket at fraction of the cost when Soviets told him it will cost him 100 million to buy one.
• In Amazon, new product/service proposals are first launched internally in the form of a "press coverage" complete with FAQs for customers. This is using the power of "Thought experiments" , to create innovative ideas - not a dollar is spent on the actual product at this stage. Albert Einstein is the most famous user of thought experiments. His breakthrough theories of Relativity and Space-Time continuum all began as thought experiments.
• In a powerful section of how not to confuse Strategy with Tactics, the example given is that of a Stanford team that designed a home use Baby Incubator blanket that costs USD 27 whereby making a USD 50,000 traditional hospital incubator redundant. The blanket, made of innovative wax, can be "recharged" by soaking it in boiling water. In use in several countries saving many infant lives. The team originally thought that their task was to make a cheaper Incubator so that more babies in developing countries can afford them. However, when they visited Nepal they found that the incubators in hospitals were unused because most of the babies that needed them were in remote areas with no hospitals and even electricity. They then realised that their startegy was to "make babies warm" and not "make a cheaper incubator" and this lead to the breakthrough innovation.
• An experiment with Bees and Flies in a bottle that underscores the need for "divergent thinking" in idea generation phase.

The book essentially covers all the typical human Behavioural and Thinking approaches that get us into hot water or lead to suboptimal results or loss of big opportunities. The book certainly will give you several "aha" moments !!

I will end with a beautiful anecdote (from the book). This is given context of need for divergent thinking to generate possibilities for the future ( typically called brainstorming in corporate lingo).. An idea may seem impractical and even of no utility but can hold keys to a goldmine... Benjamin Franklin was watching the first hot air balloons with humans take-off in 1783 when someone asked him "What good is Flight?". Franklin purportedly replied "It is a child just born, one cannot say what it will become". Imagine, if we had shot down the idea of humans flying as impractical and killed the idea in the first stage !!

My own thoughts are this book has lots of inputs for Leaders of "Start-ups" and "Grown-ups". Recommended read !!!