Building Moonshots

WAY 2Start from the Almost Impossible: Moonshot leaders must manage across all four innovation horizons.

About the Way

As part of fostering a moonshots mindset, a critical leadership skill is the capability to simultaneously manage four innovation horizons. Good leaders can build great groups by extending their outlook to include the fourth innovation horizon to the almost impossible. This fourth horizon is the wellspring for your group's vision.

Reaching for the impossible future has long thwarted decision‐makers. Early in Peter Drucker's career, when he began building the foundations of business management as a field in the mid‐1950s, he recognized the dilemma facing business leaders: “To make decisions ten or fifteen or twenty years ahead, as everyone of us is forced to do almost every day, is therefore by definition an impossible, if not an insane, undertaking. Yet we have to do it.”¹ Or as Daniel Schrag, an earth scientist at Harvard University who was a White House scientific adviser during Barack Obama's presidency, asked incredulously in late 2022: “Who believes that we can halve global emissions by 2030? It is so completely outside the realm of the technology and economics and politics of the world. Is it technically feasible? I guess. But it's so far from reality that it's kind of absurd.”²

Leaders of all types still search for aids—models, methods, and tools—that help them to tackle the difficult task of planning long term, especially for what feels near impossible. ...