Building Moonshots

WAY 25Make Your Ideas Compete: Separating ideas from their owners helps you move from criticism to critique.

About the Way

Moonshots are, by definition, world changing. The goal of a moonshot is to be bold, better, and more impactful by an order of magnitude. And when ideas are so plentiful—from employee brainstorms, idea competitions, creativity workshops, open innovation sources, and more—how do visionary leaders choose the one idea that offers the biggest impact and is moonshot worthy?

The answer is that they don't choose only one. Although most teams know that they should explore multiple ideas at the start of a project, moonshot leaders task teams to continuously explore competing ideas in parallel across the entire innovation cycle. Although the long‐term vision remains the same, like any long‐distance trip, there are often multiple routes to the final destination. Moonshot leaders can view teams as different nimble scouting expeditions, all of whom help map more of the terrain ahead and uncover additional customer insights.

Smart leaders also uphold one critical rule: make ideas compete, not teams. Too often, team personalities and egos lead to siloed development, sparking needless tension and even hiding information. By separating the ideas from their owners, leaders help teams move from unhelpful criticism to constructive critique. As everyone in the organization is working together to achieve the same vision, teams should be incentivized to share insights and questions ...