Why do big challenges succeed?
Challenges are curious instruments. The seemingly impossible can be achieved by a motivated team. Let’s consider the reasons big challenges are effective in cracking seemingly intractable problems.
- They capture our imagination
We put a man on the moon. More specifically, we sent two astronauts 238,900 miles into space, landed them on the moon, and successfully returned them to earth. Better still, we broadcasted the event in near real-time.
The best challenges stretch the limits of our imagination, while still having technical feasibility.
2. They have profound impact
What if a single bomb could devastate an entire city?
3. They have external competition
Sputnik is launched. The symbol of the USSR’s technical superiority challenges the argument that capatialism is superior to communism. In response, the US launches a massive space program.
4. They require teams who are appropriate staffed and backed with executive support
Working on a PowerPoint presentation to win executive support is time-consuming and stressful. Projects that are appropriately funded, protected, and left to a talent team to self-manage are most likely to succeed in solving huge, complex problems.
Example: The Mac project was lead by Steve Jobs, run as a skunkworks project apart from the money-making Apple II team, and staffed with a few dozen movitated team members. The personal computer was changed forever by this small bandit group.
5. They have a challenging deadline
Want to win the DARPA Grand Prize? They are not going to wait for you to get your project ready for prime time. The challenge is taking place with or without your team. Of course, the timeline will be impossible short, so ship or sink.
6. They require disregard for the health of sacred cows
Definition of disrupt:
verb (used with object)
1. to cause disorder or turmoil in: The news disrupted their conference.
2. to destroy, usually temporarily, the normal continuance or unity of; interrupt: Telephone service was disrupted for hours.
3. to break apart: to disrupt a connection.
4. Business. to radically change (an industry, business strategy, etc.), asby introducing a new product or service that creates a new market: It’s time to disrupt your old business model.
Walmart should be the Amazon of e-commerce. Yahoo! should be the Google of search. When lots of stakeholders lose if a new technology displaces the status quo, innovation dies. More accurately, it is first-degree murdered by powerful incumbents.
7. They call for complimentary teams with limited politics
For a challenge like the DARPA Grand Prize, the team must function in harmony. There is little time for politics. The members are not fighting for promotions or bonus checks. The challenge is so complex that no one person has the requisite expertise to dominate the conversation. A divide and conquer strategy is necessary to complete the project on time.
8. They provide bragging rights to the winner
Freud came up with the idea of the super-ego.
The superego is the ethical component of the personality and provides the moral standards by which the ego operates. The superego’s criticisms, prohibitions, and inhibitions form a person’s conscience, and its positive aspirations and ideals represent one’s idealized self-image, or “ego ideal.”
We live in a land of plenty. The majority do not have food or shelter insecurity (unless you are renting in San Francisco). Despite our high-paying jobs, fancy cars, and nice threads, the happiness index is little changed from our ancestors. The search for purpose and self-actualization continues to be elusive. A big challenge fills this void. Winning a prestigious award provides the ultimate satisfaction for our insatiable ego.
Summary
We are reaching an inflection point where compute power, data capture, and machine-learning is allowing small teams to solve our most pressing problems. There are implications to how rapidly existing businesses and organizations will be disrupted. More importantly, artificial intelligence, self-driving cars and other futuristic technologies have scalability that threaten to displace huge segments of the work-force. That is a topic for another day. For now, the genie is out of the bottle. Its not going back in. Massive innovation is coming at faster and faster rates. No big problem will go unchallenged as the number of successful moonshots rack up in the win column. A brave new world is in sight.
