Ozan Varol was a real life rocket scientist who worked as an operations specialist on the Mars Rover mission. This book isn’t exactly about rocket science (which ironically isn’t even a real science field as such) but a set of guidelines that can be followed on how to think about and plan for critical situations. They are applicable to a startup working on their product, a scientist working on a problem, a doctor treating a patient or even a parent teaching their kids about grown-up life. It does have a lot of NASA missions’ references which explain the practical use of the points made by the author.
The book is divided into three sections. The first section is called Launch and it deals with how to plan and think about your mission. The second is called Accelerate and it builds on the first section by talking about the practical implementation of your plans. Finally, the last section Achieve is a sort of ending remarks on how react to successes and failures to get better the next time. Let’s dive straight into it.
Our obsession with certainty leads us to unknown knowns which is a fancy term for thinking we know something we don’t. We seem to think we have a lock on truth but we almost never do. This chapter describes patients suffering from Anosognosia, who don’t know if they are suffering from anything but in reality are unable to describe what they feel. This is similar to what happens to us when we wrap ourselves in the certainty blanket. We create stories to fill in the gaps in our understanding so we have a feeling of control.
We need to embrace anomalies and create a culture where uncertainty is first acknowledged and then build a system that quantifies it to deal with it. By acknowledging uncertainty we become brave enough to take risks that come with it. We are taught to put things in finite and known buckets but there’s always some bucket we don’t know which. The right approach is to write down the worst case scenario with how likely is it to occur. Writing it down makes it real and it begins the process of planning for handling them like building redundancies or how to keep specific systems functioning even if components fail.
Whenever you hear ‘we’ve always done it this way’, know that this is probably not a good enough reason to continue doing it that way. There may have been a pretty good reason for something to start the way it did, but it could be totally out of whack now. QWERTY keyboards were specifically designed to slow down typing speeds as fast typing regularly led to blocked mechanical keys. We, however, continue to use them to this day despite advances in keyboards. This problem blindness was also discussed in Chip Heath’s book Upstream. Going back to the fundamentals and questioning everything we do regularly is the only way to bring in first principles thinking in our lives.
Einstein was known for his unique thought experiments that would raise interesting questions. His famous light in a moving train thought experiment is what proved to be the genesis of his general relativity theory. Not all of us have the genius to concoct a great thought experiment but we all can do mini thought experiments to prove or disprove some of his theories by coming up with a set of things that would disprove what you are suggesting (what must be true for X to be true or vice versa).
An interesting aspect of our life that this book brought up was how we have eliminated boredom from our lives. There is no significant duration of time (even 5 mins) where we aren’t constantly doing something or consuming something. Our brain just doesn’t get the time to get bored anymore. Boredom is actually good as it lets your mind wander and make connections. This is called combinatory play. Allowing yourself to indulge in random thinking can lead to combination of multiple ideas or fields to come up with something totally original.
People don’t generally go for missions that have a low % chance of success. In jungle terminology, everyone is chasing mice and not the antelopes (when in fact the calorific value tradeoff in case of antelopes is much higher). Going for loony objectives just doesn’t come naturally to us. At Google X, they do it everyday. From Google Glass to Project Balloon they go for crazy ideas that have low probability of successes but have huge payoffs or returns if they do work out.
One way to encourage moonshots is to encourage divergent thinking. The part of the brain that comes up with new ideas is different from the one that evaluates them. This is why we must use convergent thinking after divergent thinking. We need to first go out and explore all kinds of solutions and then our convergent thinking (the evaluating part of the brain) to rank our possible solutions. One way to come up with solutions is to ask ‘What would a science fiction solution look like’? You can inculcate a habit of divergent thinking by saying ‘this could work if ..’ instead of shooting down ideas with ‘this would never work’.
Backcasting is a useful technique of working backwards from an assumed success. Amazon’s press release before even beginning a project is a step towards this. At Amazon you are supposed to experience the full post launch journey, complete with fictitious user reviews and complaints. This allows project owners to stay true to the customer centricity and think backwards from their overall goals of how users would perceive their products.
We must think of questions as lenses. We can use a wide angle lens to see broadly and a zoom lens to see the details. Answers are usually hidden in the questions themselves and reframing a question to reveal the answer is usually the best strategy. We often define a problem as the absence of our solution instead of the problem itself. This is linked to the first principles thinking where going back to the problem with an open mind without being attached to how we may have solved it before or how it is usually solved.
It is also important to understanding the difference between tactics and strategy. Strategy is a plan for achieving the objective. Tactics are the actions you take to implement the strategy. Depending on the situation, we need to bring out strategic questions that deal with the overall plan or tactical questions that deal with specific implementation issues.
Having a mindset of proving oneself wrong is a great way to constantly explore more optimal solutions. It is important to stop oneself from forming an opinion too quickly as it hard wires into beliefs. Instead, we should make a ‘working hypothesis’ which can be changed or abandoned with data. Ideally have multiple hypotheses so you’re not married to any single one of them.
Varol calls this Test as you fly and fly as you test. In an ideal test, there must not be a predetermined set of results. Testing should unveil the uncertainty lurking in the corners. A good test should emulate real world scenario and not be based on a sanitised test environment. This chapter describes the creation and subsequent testing of air bags to land the rover on the Martian surface. The team found a weirdly shaped rock that caused the test airbags to burst and instead of calling it an aberration, they filled the test area with those rocks and built airbags that were resilient to them.
A related point is around observing data to improve an existing product. There is a wide variance between self reporting of how someone uses a product vs objective observation and the latter should be the preferred mode. Behaviours of test subjects change as a result of observation. Double blind tests are a direct result of this observation effect.
Treating failure as an option is the first step to encouraging originality. One can only generate lots of good ideas if one is not averse to failing and taking risks. However, we need to stop glorifying fast failing and instead focus on fast learning. Learning from failures is hard as we are hardwired to hide our faults. We must practice saying ‘how fascinating’ every time we fail.
One of the more common problems in organisation is that too often the messenger gets shot. This is one of the prime reasons behind group-think and why even organisations as safety centric as NASA, often fail disastrously like in case of the Challenger Space Shuttle fiasco of 1986. Creating a psychologically safe environment where people are encouraged to drill down and report errors is the key to learning from and avoiding failures.
This last chapter of the book was the knockout punch for me. It just gives such a refreshing new take on successes. Dumb luck leads to successes more often than we’d care to accept. A thing that has worked before may not work again and if it does, it may not worth next. Success wraps problems that exist in our system and make us complacent and overconfident. Failures and variability makes us humble.
An approach that is suggested is to look for near misses in our successes. To seek out aspects that could have gone just wrong and where we got lucky. The technique of pre-mortem allows a team or a company to work backwards from a fail case (think of this as the opposite of backcasting which works backwards from a success case) and come up with all the reasons why something could have failed. Our mind finds it easy to come up with stories given we know what happened and this makes pre-mortem a perfect technique to come with possible things that led to the hypothetical failure.
I run a startup called Harmonize. We are hiring and if you’re looking for an exciting startup journey, please write to jobs@harmonizehq.com. Apart from this blog, I tweet about startup life and practical wisdom in books.