How to Nurture Crazy Ideas That Change The World

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Safi Bahcall is a second-generation physicist, a biotech entrepreneur, a former public company CEO, and bestselling author of Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas that Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries. He was also on President Obama’s Council of Science Advisors and it was during that time that he started down the path that would lead him to write Loonshots. I recently had the opportunity to speak with him for an episode of The Future of Work with Jacob Morgan. You can listen to the full episode with Safi below.

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A few years after Safi started a bio-tech company his father was diagnosed with a rare type of leukemia. Safi figured that since he's in the field, he would be able to help his father out. He quickly realized that nothing he did made a difference and his father passed away shortly after.

According to Safi, "I had access to all the latest science, and tools, and technologies 'cause I was in the field, but nothing I could do made any difference and he died not much later. And then over the next few years, as our company grew, I just kept noticing everywhere I looked inside tiny companies or the biggest companies and buried in the basement of those organizations were promising ideas that could have helped my father. Not because any of the people involved are bad people. Because of some weird mystery that happens when people come together in a group. It sort of boils down to this one question of, why do good teams kill great ideas?"

And so, Safi's journey to explore answer this began...

He uses a great analogy to explain behavior and corporate culture. Imagine a glass of water, if you put your finger in it and move it around, the water just sloshes around your finger. But if you lower the temperature to 32 Fahrenheit then suddenly the behavior of those molecules changes. But as Safi told me, "there's no CEO molecule with a bullhorn saying, 'it's 33 Fahrenheit everyone slosh around, oh wait, it's 31 degrees everyone now freeze!" So what's the right approach?

Culture and structure

Inside of organizations, this all boils down to two core things, culture, and structure. Culture is the pattern of behavior that you can see on the surface and structure is what's underneath that drives those patterns of behavior. We keep hearing about and focusing on the culture of an organization but we need to go one level deeper in order to really get change to happen. Yelling at your employees to be more innovative or to be more engaged will have the same impact as yelling at a block of ice telling it to melt.

What do you reward?

A far more effective approach is to focus on what you reward. For example if you celebrate and reward rank, which is very common in many organizations around the world, then you will get a very political culture. In this type of an environment everyone is fighting for that bigger title and collaboration becomes tough. But as Safi told me, what happens if instead you reward something like intelligent risk-taking and don't reward rank at all? Now that structure creates a culture of new ideas and results from those ideas.

The two forces that shape organizations

What is it that ultimately shapes how the organization operates? There are two forces leaders must pay attention to. Stake in outcome and perks of rank. Stake in outcome is what someone gets if a project succeeds and perks of rank are the benefits of ascending the corporate ladder. For example if you are a part of a small bio-tech company that develops a cure for something like cancer your stake in outcome is huge and everyone at the company becomes a millionaire. However, if you're part of a 50,000 person bio-tech company in that same scenario, your stake in outcome is minuscule or non-existent. Then there are perks of rank. Here, the exact opposite is true. If you're a part of a large organization you see much higher perks in rank whereas if you're a part of a small company, these perks are low. According to Safi, these dynamics are crucial for leaders to understand so that they can work on creating the right conditions.

Artists and soldiers

Artists focus on wild and creative ideas and constantly have to test and experiment. For every great idea or piece of art they create they may have ten failures. Soldiers on the other hand are all about removing risk from the equation entirely. They want on-time and on-budget with no errors. On the battlefield you don't want experiments and tests that are likely to result in failure. As Safi told me, they have different objectives, different interests, different desires, and they speak a different language. They also oftentimes don't like each other and don't understand each other. One group tries to maximize risk and the other tries to minimize risk. Yet organizations need both!

The Chief Incentive Officer

One of the keys to solving this dilemma of competing forces is by truly understanding the incentives of your people. This means that as a leader you need understand your employees as human beings not just as workers. If you have three employees, Joe, Mary, and Amy, and you pay them all the same and have a cookie cutter template for their incentive program then you won't be able to manage the forces accordingly. Joe might care more about money, Mary might value rank, and Amy may care more about working on challenging projects. This doesn't mean you need a separate incentive program for every single employee in your company. You might have 40 Joe's, 100 Mary's, 300 Amy's, etc. As Safi points out during our discussion, we have a CTO focused on technology, a CRO focused on revenue, a CMO focused on marketing, why not have someone like a Chief Incentives Officer who can create tailored plans for the people who work there which is arguably one of the most important things that any organization can do. This can be a single role or something that leaders do for their own respective teams. According to Safi...

“If you're running a company, which would you rather have? A workforce that's got the best gadgets of anybody in your industry or the most motivated workforce in your industry? Personally, I'd rather have the most motivated workforce. Yet, what companies have as they spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on Chief Technology Officers. And then, you know HR is sort of a back office afterthought. But imagine if you thought of it strategically. You have a budget. How do you think just as strategically about using that budget to incentivize your people? Like you do with a Chief Revenue Officer to use your marketing budget or a Chief Technology Officer to get the best product. What if you could make that a weapon?”

To hear the full fascinating discussion with Safi click the play button below.

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