Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries

There’s no way to analyze the behavior of any individual and explain the group. Being good at nurturing loonshots is a phase of human organization, in the same way that being liquid is a phase of matter. Being good at developing franchises (like movie sequels) is a different phase of organization, in the same way that being solid is a different pha

One molecule can’t transform solid ice into liquid water by yelling at its neighbors to loosen up a little. Which is why Bush didn’t try to change military culture. A different kind of pressure is required. So Bush created a new structure. He adopted the principles of life on the edge of a phase transition: the unique conditions under which two pha

Like Vannevar Bush, who insisted, as described in chapter 1, that he “made no technical contribution whatever to the war effort,” Catmull saw his job as minding the system rather than managing the projects.

Tilting the rewards more toward projects and away from promotion means celebrating results, not rank.

Evaluating decisions and outcomes separately is equally important in the opposite case: bad decisions may occasionally result in good outcomes.

I soon learned that Bush developed a new system, during the Second World War, for nurturing radical breakthroughs astonishingly fast. His system helped the Allies win that war, and the United States lead the world in science and technology ever since. Bush’s goal: that the US should be the initiator, not the victim, of innovative surprise. What Bus

In the previous chapter, I described an important step in developing new insights into forest fires: creating a model that was simple, but not simplistic. Hemingway wrote that “the dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.” He called it his Theory of Omission. The power of beautiful prose comes from what y

In the high-stakes competition between weapons and counterweapons, the weak link was not the supply of new ideas. It was the transfer of those ideas to the field.

In 1988, a fire in Yellowstone National Park burned 800,000 acres, 36 percent of the total park area—the largest fire in the park’s history. Analyzing park policy is where percolation theory first showed what it can do. Until 1972, Yellowstone policy required rangers to put out every small fire immediately, whether it was caused by humans (a carele