Astro Teller is the captain of the moonshot factory. In his TED Talk ‘The unexpected benefit of celebrating failure’ he discusses the methods that X (formerly Google X / Solve for X) employs to get useful data from developmental failures.
The word moonshot is continually used to remind everyone working on a project that the thing they’re doing is big and important. The word factory is used to remind everyone that a system is in place to develop and build the projects they’re trying to bring to life. The secret of the moonshot factory, Teller says, is that it’s a messy place. Teams work the hardest on the most difficult parts of a project, to see if the project is truly viable, and gain valuable information about what went wrong to get new insight into the problem itself.
Teller does a quick summary of a few dead projects. First a vertical farming project that seeks to solve the problem of undernourishment. Vertical farming can use a tenth of the water and a hundredth of the land required for conventional farming techniques. Progress was made in the areas of harvesting and lighting but staple crops like grain and rice couldn’t be grown using vertical methods, so the project was ultimately shelved.
Shipping was another industry that X tried to completely change. Some landlocked countries have trouble with economic development because shipping infrastructure doesn’t exist. X’s radical solution was a lighter than air, variable buoyancy cargo ship. The project had potential to change the shipping industry and be cost effective at scale but building a prototype would have cost $200million. That starting cost was too much money to spend and against the company’s philosophy of tight feedback loops constantly modifying a design.
The lesson that Teller tries to give us here is that shifting your perspective is more powerful than being smart. The Makani wind energy kites are used as an example of shifting perspective, as the team realized they couldn’t improve on current wind turbine designs but found that climbing to higher altitudes gave them better opportunity to harvest the wind.
Aiming for the most difficult and impossible seeming parts of a project is the X strategy because if the project is going to be killed it’s best to be killed early. Teller says that the culture at X makes it safe to fail, teams who kill their ideas are rewarded and get applause and hugs. This is wildly different from what we generally understand about business and innovation but ‘enthusiastic skepticism’ seems like a very infectious idea. This talk is worth a look just to get updates on Makani and Loon, but the idea of failure as an innovation tool is fantastic.