Ambitious projects don't fail because they are ambitious.
They fail because we lack the courage to face uncertainty.
Fear paralyzes us in subtle ways.
We were driving to Orly Airport in Paris, France at 6:45 AM on a misty Sunday morning. This was for a big vacation. We were taking our children to the Caribbean, the first time since we were married there 20 years ago. So, a more important vacation than most.
Driving through Paris was the riskiest part of the trip. If there was traffic or an accident, it would delay us perhaps to the point that we would miss our flight. I was full of fear that would happen. I kept paying attention to the time. Okay, if we make it through the first half hour and the GPS destination time does not become later, then there is less risk that we will hit traffic. During the holiday periods in Europe, particularly France, when you travel on a weekend day there is always a risk that you end up in a multiple-hour traffic jam. I recalculated the risk in my head for every 30-minute block, then 15-minute block, and then 5-minute blocks.
Fear is why ambitious projects fail.
Whenever we fear something, we become more cautious, more risk-averse. I see this all the time in project co-design sessions when an ambitious idea emerges. Inevitably, someone levels "This is too ambitious" criticism followed by: "We need to make sure that what we are planning is feasible." This is actually fear masquerading as rationality.
The fear of infeasibility makes sense. Project failure can be damaging financially, socially, and psychologically.
The problem with fearing infeasibility is that the more ambitious a project is, the less we are able to judge its feasibility. With an ambitious project, there is no precedent. You can only truly judge feasibility by trying. We also overestimate what we can do on our own, and underestimate what we can do together.
Simply being bold enough to ignore the feasibility criticism and start an ambitious project is not enough. Fearing and thinking about potential risks over and over again takes time and energy and usually, as was the case that Sunday morning, does little to change the outcome.
When innovation progress gets stuck, it is because otherwise would-be game changers embrace the feasibility criticism and temper their ambitions. They are also blinded by their need for certainty and miss new opportunities that make the infeasible, feasible.
Jason Crawford, the author of The Techno-Humanist Manifesto, points out that humans are problem-solving animals and that we have a history of solving unsolvable problems.
"Our problem-solving ability is based on two deep and powerful facts. The first is that reality contains a vast space of possibilities in which to search for solutions. This is because the possibility space is combinatorial: new possibilities are created from the combination of simple elements. And combinations grow very quickly."
He backs this up by pointing out that if you are engineering proteins or simple organisms like yeast, there are10379 and 10577,584 functional possibilities respectively. In other words, it is highly likely that there are solutions to the problems that make ambitious ideas seem infeasible.
Ambitious projects are a profound act of creativity happening in a vast space of possibility. Creativity cannot be planned. It requires the willingness and ability to react to opportunities. Embracing the creative nature of ambitious projects is how we avoid ceding our ambitions to the feasibility trolls and the uncertainty hobgoblins of our minds. However, we still need a way to cope with the fear of the uncertain; otherwise, we will put too much energy into worrying.
Coping with our fear of uncertainty
In project design, we attempt to cope with uncertainties by quantifying them as part of risk planning. It is a common practice to give each risk a score, a combination of probability and magnitude of impact. We then proceed to plan how to mitigate, or prevent, the risks with the highest scores.
However, this exercise tends to fan the flames of uncertainty. This is especially the case when there are risks driven by external factors we cannot control. To mitigate a risk, you have to have some control over the factors that feed into the risk. What are we then supposed to do? Hope for the best? Just live with the fear of uncertainty?
The experience of driving through Paris made me wonder if there are better ways to handle fear, a way that would reduce the waste of energy that accompanies fear. Then I remembered a process I learned about a few years ago.
Tim Ferriss practices what he calls fear-setting. Instead of goal setting, you set your fears. You think about what will happen if the fear you have comes true. What will you do, or what will be the possibilities if what you fear comes true? It is about deciding how you will deal with the consequences a priori.
You could look at fear-setting as a means of being prepared. A way of mitigating risk, but it is more than that. It is about giving ourselves the confidence to proceed in the face of fear, in the face of uncertainty.
Had I thought about this earlier that day we were traveling through France, I might have done some fear setting and realized that if we got stuck, there would be multiple flights each day to our destination from that airport.
It turned out there was no problem. We made it to the airport on time and I am now writing this looking out over the Caribbean.
Applying fear-setting to ambitious projects
There is a part of risk planning that is similar to fear setting, but is often overlooked.
We need to plan a response in addition to planning mitigation. When the biggest risks become reality, it often means we have to reduce our ambitions. However, with a good response plan in place, the project will still be worthwhile.
We can go even further and design our ambitious projects in a way that makes them more able to respond. A response-able project is one that is designed in such a way that the effort will not be a waste even if the biggest risks become reality.
For example, if a project is to identify a biomarker that allows us to select out the patients who would respond to a particular therapy, it is both ambitious and risky. What if no biomarker provides enough separation between different subgroups to allow us to predict who would respond? A response-able project design would be to make sure that the samples and data you collect can easily be put to use even if the primary goal of finding a predictive biomarker fails. If it fails, your response could be to use the samples and the data to understand some of the mechanisms that underlie the disease process.
Knowing that even in the face of failure the project will deliver something of value makes it easy to engage in an ambitious project without wasting energy on worrying about risks. That energy can be redirected towards being curious. Making a project more response-able also makes a project more adaptive, more able to pursue those nearly infinite possibilities when they arise.
As I describe in Assembled Chaos, when we started the U-BIOPRED project we were told multiple times that integrating different types of high dimensional data, “omics”, was not feasible. We did not know how to do it. It remained part of our ambitions, be we figured even if we could not integrate multiple types of omics datasets, having a well phenotype cohort of individuals with sever e asthma would in and of itself be highly valuable. Today, integrating omics datasets is part of many projects in the life sciences. U-BIOPRED was part of the beginning of a wave of innovation.
How to build response-able ambitious projects
Create a counterweight to fear—a compelling vision. One of the best ways to create a compelling vision is to give it a face. Have stakeholders tell their story. Having a deeper understanding of the problem and its human impact is always motivating.
Conduct a premortem. Develop a future scenario where the biggest risks of the project become reality. What could you do instead?
Build the ability to respond into your project. Include efforts to make the assets, i.e., datasets, such that they can be repurposed. Plan to build relationships with other initiatives that can provide alternatives. Put effort into making the protocols and standard operating procedures reusable.
Structure your milestones to include decision points where you will implement your responses. This helps to remind everyone about the response-able nature of your project.
Get curious about failure. Don't just ask how, ask why, and then identify new opportunities.
Resilient ambitious projects
David Krakauer, President of the Santa Fe Institute, considers science as a collective wave, not a collection of discrete particles. Build your project to be able to respond so that it will contribute to the collective wave of innovation in your field regardless of what happens.
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