The beginning
Answers simply serve as a launch pad to discovery. They’re the beginning, not the end. Our ability to make the most out of uncertainty is what creates the most potential value. We should be fueled not by a desire for a quick catharsis but by intrigue. Where certainty ends, progress begins.
The business
Moonshots force you to reason from first principles. If your goal is 1 percent improvement, you can work within the status quo. But if your goal is to improve tenfold, the status quo has to go. Pursuing a moonshot puts you in a different league—and often an entirely different game—from that of your competitors, making the established plays and routines largely irrelevant.
Some moonshots are too impractical to materialize in the near future—if ever. But you don’t need all your moonshots to take flight. As long as your portfolio of ideas is balanced—and you’re not betting your future on a single moonshot—one big success will compensate for the ideas better left to novels and movies.
All new ideas are crazy until they are not. Shocking the brain through moonshot thinking doesn’t mean we stop considering practicalities. Once we have our wacky ideas, we can collide them with reality by switching from divergent to convergent thinking—from idealism to pragmatism. This is where it is vital to ask the practical questions that allow you to work out what is achievable and potentially profitable.
Cross-pollination
Our resistance to comparing seemingly dissimilar or unrelated things stifles the cross-pollination of ideas from different disciplines. Life, it turns out, doesn’t happen in compartmentalized silos. There’s little to be learned from comparing similar things.
To facilitate cross-pollination, creative people often develop diverse interests, recognizing that a revolution in one industry can begin with the adoption of an idea from another. The fit often won’t be perfect, but the act of comparing will spark new lines of thinking.
Great leaders should be the optimal blend of creative and analytical. They should represent a constant balance between the right and left brain. They should take great pride in trying something new knowing that there is risk but also great reward. An Art Thinking mindset (art thinking + moonshot thinking + first principles thinking) doesn’t mean abandoning the analytical side; it just dares you to think beyond immediate metrics and traditional practices – it allows freedom of thought.
Holding brainstorming sessions together with artistis and students focused on the future of your industry can help solidify your organizations place in that environment and you can get a better sense of what challenges you are facing in future and to better understand how you must evolve to drive the organization forward.
Get ahead of the curve by asking ‘what if’, before your competitors do!