Building Moonshots – Manage the Almost Impossible

Co-authored with Dr. William Cockayne

Is your team working to create a world-changing competitive advantage in its industry? Below is Way #0 to “Manage the Almost Impossible” from our book on 50+ ways to build moonshots.

Way #0: Manage the Almost Impossible

Organizations with moonshot goals must manage across all four innovation horizons.

About the Way

As part of fostering a moonshots mindset, a critical leadership skill is the capability to simultaneously manage four horizons. Good leaders can build great organizations by extending their outlook to include the fourth innovation horizon to “almost impossible.” This fourth horizon is the wellspring for your organization’s vision.

Reaching for the impossible future has long thwarted decision makers. Early in Peter Drucker’s career, when he began building the foundations of business management as a field in the mid-1950s, he recognized the dilemma facing business leaders: “To make decisions ten or fifteen or twenty years ahead, as everyone of us is forced to do almost every day, is therefore by definition an impossible, if not an insane, undertaking. Yet we have to do it.”

Business leaders still search for models, methods, and tools that help them to manage this difficult task. In the early 2000s, a trio of leaders at consulting firm McKinsey described a corporate model of managing three horizons of growth that soon became popular among the Fortune 500. Their three-horizon framework has helped managers visualize innovation activity in terms of time:

• Horizon 1 (H1) is focused on extending and defending their core businesses,
• Horizon 2 (H2) is focused on building and testing emerging businesses, and
• Horizon 3 (H3) is active investment in research, partnerships, and MOUs that could be the seeds for future businesses.

You can find variants of these horizon labels in various corporate roadmaps, such as “now / next / new”, “defend / build / invest” or “trees / plants / seeds”. The McKinsey team ends with an afterthought: “Without deliberate initiatives to develop good ideas into horizon 3 opportunities, a company’s long-term growth prospects will fade.” What feeds your Horizon 3?

By necessity, we have added a fourth horizon. Horizon 4 (H4) has long been the source of world-changing, once-unimaginable changes that drive the work of blue-sky research centers, university science labs, and teams seeking to create entirely new industries. The boundary between H3 and H4 is where you find tomorrow’s breakthroughs, inventions, and paradigm-changing innovations. H4 addresses the activities where teams explore, find, and convert new ideas into H3 seeds as part of wandering, being curious, and following sources of inspiration. Innovation leaders who want radical growth include this fourth horizon as an important element of their team’s vision setting and strategy.

Value of the Way

By taking H4 into account, leaders understand why they want to change the future and where to take an organization. Management can also provide clearer guidance that help frame common activities in H3 – such as R&D proof-of-concepts, internal pilots, corporate lab demos, and employee idea competitions – that then will lead to more intentional, more focused, and more organized efforts in H3 and H2.

Certain organizations are designed to live in Horizons 4-into-3 and aim to transform the fantastical into the feasible. They give us excellent examples of innovation practices, as well as talent, that thrive in H4-into-3. Consider DARPA – founded by the US government in 1958 with a singular mission: to make pivotal investments in breakthrough technologies for national security. DARPA’s strategic plans discuss closing the gap between H3 and H1, specifically “to find the people and ideas on the Far side, and accelerate those ideas to the Near side as quickly as possible”. DARPA’s ability to imagine and accelerate breakthrough ideas have led to global benefits beyond defense: such as the internet, Global Positioning Systems, and self-driving cars, as well as contributed to other major inventions like mRNA vaccines. Moreover, DARPA’s model has been replicated beyond defense in energy (ARPA-E) and information (I-ARPA) with new proposals – at the time of our posting – to address health (ARPA-H) and infrastructure (ARPA-I), plus similar organizations around the globe.

Following the Way

The first step is to add the pursuit of the “almost impossible” into your group’s lexicon! Create a four-horizon innovation map to document the activities your team (or organization) is pursuing today in support of innovation and growth. Place these activities in their corresponding horizon(s), and some activities might cross or sit on a horizon boundary. Make the map visual and big, either physically or digitally, so that everyone can see and contribute to it. Also discuss and capture the criteria for when an activity moves to the next horizon – factors such as optimal or maximum timing needed, who approves the change, and if any requirements are needed. Revisit this innovation map as part of regular team meetings, reassessing portfolio progress and adding new possible sources – especially at Horizon 4.

Living the Way

Example team discussion prompts:

• Who is incentivized and empowered to look beyond our company’s current opportunities to make the case for bringing the “almost impossible” inside? Who on our team needs to do this?
• Does our organization search for H4 opportunities today, and how can we boost this process?
• How do we support our organization’s search for H4 talent and their growth / transition across the other innovation horizons?
• How do we fund the search for H4-level ideas, and how can we facilitate (even accelerate) the migration of these ideas across the other innovation horizons; i.e., speed an ‘insane’ opportunity to gain market leadership?

Example in Action

Facebook presented a horizon model as its official “10-year roadmap” in one combined graphic at the company’s F8 developer conference in 2016. The first horizon was labeled “Ecosystems”, the second horizon was marked “Products”, and the third horizon was marked “Technologies”. In his conference keynote, CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg described how Facebook operates internally to move technologies to market, stating: “First, we build a new technology that can help people share and connect in some new ways. Then we take that technology, and we build it into a product that we think a billion or more people could use and benefit from. And then finally, once the product is at scale, we build a full ecosystem around that product – of developers and businesses and partners.” 

Facebook’s fourth horizon was not shown in this public roadmap, which raises the question: where are they looking for their next seeds of growth, and who might they be wandering with on this mission?

Facebook continued using this horizon model internally as a strategy guide and shared updates in 2017 and 2018. Facebook kept the same horizons while changing the map placement of several existing efforts – as well as introduced a few new items that marked some long-term focus areas.

Source: Facebook