Building Moonshots

WAY 31Recruit a Challenge Board: Creating honest oversight helps to drive you and your team forward.

About the Way

When pursuing a moonshot endeavor, your team should set up a challenge board designed to push your thinking forward. A challenge board is a small circle of advisors, often informal, who deliberately and constructively challenge your team in two ways. First, these advisors push your team's abilities further, helping you to look over the innovation horizon to highlight issues your team may not realize you need to know. Second, similar to a traditional board of directors, a challenge board can question overt and hidden assumptions to help your team confront uncomfortable truths early on in your planning.

University of Pennsylvania organizational psychologist Adam Grant calls this type of group a “challenge network.”¹ Grant urges us to surround ourselves with people who make us think hard because “we learn more from people who challenge our thought process than those who affirm our conclusions.”² He cites a study in which employees who avoided coworkers giving tough feedback had worse job performance over the following year. Grant recommends looking for disagreeable people who are givers, not takers. He explains, “Disagreeable givers often make the best critics: their intent is to elevate the work, not feed their own egos. They don't criticize because they're insecure; they challenge because they care.”³

First Round Capital partner Phin Barnes gives similar advice ...