The moonshot mindset you need to know about

 

From AI to space technology, project leaders delivering breakthrough projects reveal why uncertainty may be the most valuable asset a project team can have.

Let’s not be coy. Project professionals tend to pride themselves in maintaining control, so the increasingly uncertain world we find ourselves in – and the threats that it presents to the smooth delivery of projects – can take some getting used to. And what about those moonshot projects that push into unknown territory?

Someone who knows a lot about this world is tech behemoth Alphabet’s former Chief Strategist for Systemic Change and Responsible Technology, Salima Bhimani, who worked across Google’s most ambitious moonshot projects, including Waymo and DeepMind.

“A lot of people are facing uncertainty. It doesn’t matter whether you are a project leader or not – I think that’s just true of the environment and the world that we’re in right now,” she says.

A tricky place to be

Bhimani’s new book, Invent Now: The next leap in moonshots, considers how working on projects where there is no certainty needs people with the “audacity” to lead through it. This moonshot mindset can challenge the traditional project management way of thinking.

“When a company itself literally is trying to solve a problem that has not been solved before, or with a lot of uncertainty around whether it’s going to end up as something or not in the world, that is a difficult space to be in if you’re looking for a clear path to outcomes,” she says.

“Coming out of the moonshot world, the one thing that allows people to move through uncertainty is when you see it as raw material for invention,” she explains.

The best idea can sometimes come out of not knowing. Part of project leadership means “getting people towards a direction in which the unknown starts to become valuable to them as opposed to something that is distressing”, she advises.

Collective intelligence

“In the moonshot space, when you’re trying to solve something that hasn’t been solved before or you’re trying to solve a hard problem, creating that enabling environment is very important,” Bhimani says.

Part of this is making use of “collective intelligence”, which means involving everyone upstream or downstream of a problem – everyone that it touches – in a collaborative way, be it getting everyone in a room together or using data from different vantage points.

“We are in a moment where we do have tools like AI and we’ll have other tools along the way that allow us to take these differential data points and bring different vantage points together in a way that we couldn’t have before,” explains Bhimani.

“The opportunity is even more ripe for us to solve something that is genuinely unique that the world requires, and that will have a genuine impact on the world. Those ideas are going to come both from what we’ve traditionally done and the other path where we are harnessing this collective intelligence – not just the point-solution that you’re trying to solve but the ecosystem in which that point-solution belongs, and in which there’s these interdependencies. Across the life cycle of a project, that collective intelligence could be invaluable,” she argues.

Welcoming productive risk

Leaders need to say that innovation or invention is not a ‘nice to have’ but part and parcel of how an organisation is moving forward. In practice, this means bringing in collective intelligence as a requirement and to reward people for it, argues Bhimani.

“The point of the moonshot is not to end up where you already think you’re going to end up,” she points out. “It’s to end up in a different place that takes you to something better or bigger. This productive risk is an important part of the disposition for companies right now, given that everybody is feeling this pinch to keep pushing in a different or new direction, particularly with AI pressures.”

Jennifer Catena, Director of Delivery at space business Satellite Applications Catapult, says that a lot of collaborative R&D work that the company does is completely new or building on previous innovative work.

“In many projects, you know where you want to end up, but nobody’s written the path of how you get there, so that’s quite interesting in itself. And then when you get to the end and you sit in on a demo, you look at what the teams have just achieved together and you get this warm, fuzzy feeling. This is probably the first time someone’s done this. It is really cool,” she explains.

Bhimani’s ideas around collective intelligence are something that Catena feels can be sometimes lacking, but would be a welcome development.

“The space sector has a lot of big businesses in the UK, Europe and America, which have got a long history of delivering billion-pound programmes, but the bit that probably is missing is bringing in the collective knowledge of some of the smaller businesses which we are working on.

“The best bit should be where you pull together consortia who are all doing the same innovative activities and get them to be a less competitive entity together, so that they actually progress innovation much faster. This should be the aim of the space sector in the UK.”

A new mindset that can feel challenging

Catena is responsible for four programme managers and the project teams that work for them. What kind of mindset does working in the space sector require?

“I’ve done quite a lot of coaching with my team around this point, because when I first started, they all wanted this predefined scope of ‘This is what we’re going to do. This is how we’re going to do it. This is who’s involved’. They were quite frustrated at the beginning that that wasn’t arriving, but you do need to be comfortable with dealing with ambiguous circumstances in our project world,” she says.

Working in such a high-tech sector is demanding on project professionals who have worked in risk-averse environments.

“We have quite a high sense of failure and learning in a positive way, so you’ve got to be quite comfortable as a project manager to be adaptable to the circumstances, but meanwhile understand that a lot of the controls need to be adaptable too. Project managers love control, so it can be tough. Your control comes in a slightly different way. It comes through the people and the journey.

“When you’re leading an innovative project that nobody’s done before, then you really have to be part of the team rather than leading actions from outside the team. That’s because you focus the controls that you have around achieving what you need to achieve at the end, or perhaps the next milestone or deliverable, rather than managing every specific action. The relationship between the project manager or the project leader and the people who sit in the project team needs to be pretty tight,” Catena explains.

Keep your ear to the ground to keep steady

The advice she’d pass on to project professionals is to stay close to what’s happening on the ground. For her sector, this means the technical teams.

“They really do know what’s going on out there and what changes we might need to adapt to, to hold plans a little more flexibly so that you allow for space to either grow or adapt, but with control to know we are managing it successfully.”

Holding firm plans a little less tightly and being more adaptable takes a lot of resilience from project professionals, because it’s not always a natural stance to take.
As Catena explains: “The world that my team operates in – and the challenges that they have to be on top of – is really tricky to navigate.”

Coming into a sector like this with little experience of working in a similar environment can be daunting for someone who is being asked to navigate a moonshot project.

“I think that’s normal, but what we tend to do is wrap a lot more kind of coaching around newer people, so either project managers who are moving in from a different sector or even more of our associate-level project managers, just to make sure that they know it’s not them that’s failing; it’s actually the path that is changing, and that’s OK,” says Catena.

She gives some final words of wisdom about facing such a risky world of moonshot projects. Sometimes the outcomes you reach on a project aren’t what everybody wants.

“You can get to the end of an innovative project and have not quite built the exact thing that you needed, but you’ve learned all these lessons along the way – or you might have built something slightly different that is better. As long as you’re doing the work with your stakeholders on the same journey as you, and it is in the right direction towards the outcome you are working together to achieve, it’s kind of OK,” she says.
And isn’t that right for every project, moonshot or not?

Want more? Read Jennifer Catena’s article ‘Reframing project management in space innovation’ and watch the Project Podcast episode ‘Moonshot mindset: meet NASA’s project boss’