Chasing A Moonshot, Without The Trappings Of Silicon Valley

How do we solve the biggest issues facing the world today? I’m talking huge ones like hunger, homelessness, air pollution, illiteracy. Those big, hairy problems that have perplexed humans for centuries.

You solve them with a moonshot, of course. Or that’s what much of the elite world of social change — the TEDs, the larger-than-life philanthropists, the Skolls — would have you believe. Don’t think about how to make the problem 10 percent better, the thinking goes, but 10 times better. Bring together the world’s geniuses from a variety of disciplines, unite them under a common purpose, and they’ll design their way to a radical new solution to end poverty or halt climate change. The money will follow, the idea will gain hold, and soon enough, we’ll be waving at the problem through a rearview mirror.

The metaphor originated in the 1960s, when President John F. Kennedy famously said the United States would go to the moon in that decade “not because [it] is easy but because [it] is hard.” The term has resurfaced in the last decade or so, and it moonshotted (sorry) after Google created a “moonshot factory” in 2010 called Google X — now just known as X.

Astro Teller, the company’s “Captain of Moonshots,” says that X sits at the nexus of huge problems, radical solutions, and breakthrough technologies. It has not yet created a commercially viable product, but has worked on self-driving cars, drones for freight deliveries, and weather balloons that carry the internet.

Teller has spoken prolifically on stages like TED, and his principles for “radical creativity” appear in countless business books. He’s particularly known for his celebration of failure. “In order to do something radical,” he said in one talk, “you have to be prepared for most of the things — literally 99 percent of the things you do — not to work out.” X staff actively try to kill new ideas as quickly as possible, and when they do, they are given bonuses. The ideas that cannot be killed, like the weather balloons, are given more resources over time. (Called Project Loon, it will likely soon spin off into its own company.) The ultimate dream, it appears, is for X to use a “think big, design fast, fail forward” approach to build the tech company of tomorrow.

As popular as X has become, though, its approach to moonshots isn’t the only one. From the MacArthur Foundation to the Kairos Fund to countless Silicon Valley executives, moonshots — and more broadly, the obsession with scale — abound, and each organization that chases them carries its own twist.

As an extreme counterpoint to X, take 100Kin10, a nonprofit that was created soon after President Barack Obama issued a call during his 2011 U.S. State of the Union address to add 100,000 STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) teachers into American classrooms in ten years. STEM skills are sorely lacking in American education compared to the rest of the world, Obama said, and they are needed to solve many of the world’s pressing problems, from food security to climate change.

Like X, 100Kin10 defines itself with moonshot language — it hopes to solve a sticky, multidimensional problem. It too has attracted capital against the promise of achieving a big goal (though unlike X, it is philanthropic capital). But that might be where the similarities end.

Perhaps the biggest defining feature of 100Kin10 is its deep, networked approach to uncovering the problem in the first place. Three years into the organization’s creation, executive director Talia Milgrom-Elcott realized that it could reach its moonshot goal on time — but that it could do so without addressing the underlying issues. The team could recruit STEM teachers, but there would be no guarantee that they would remain in the classroom a few years later.

“Despite our progress, [we realized that] not enough people want to become teachers or stay in the classroom,” she says. “What if every other problem [related to STEM education] can be traced back to that? It was as if we were in a sinking boat, and the team of us was bailing it out as fast as the water was pouring in.”

Milgrom-Elcott’s team set out to plug the leaks in the boat, using a process inspired by Toyota’s 5 Why’s: “Keep asking ‘why’ until you stop learning something new.”

And ask it did. 100Kin10 talked to thousands of stakeholders in STEM education, from teachers to principals to government staff, to understand what was keeping it from being a healthy, vibrant profession.

“For the first time, we could see everything in one place,” says Milgrom-Elcott. “The problems, their root causes, every connection.” Those connection points were particularly salient, as “no single, isolated change or program is going to make a lasting dent in any big problem we care about.”

With this philosophy top of mind, 100Kin10 learned over 100 distinct root causes to the problem, which it arranged into seven “grand challenges.” The challenges include limited professional development opportunities, limited access to high-quality instructional material, and a perceived lack of prestige for the profession.

100Kin10 now has a network of over 280 organizations across the United States that are committed to solving this problem together. Selected members of the voluntary network meet several times a year to advance STEM education against the grand challenges, and as a result of those discussions, 100Kin10 now has its sights set on a bigger goal: to make teaching a sustainable, healthy profession writ large.

As mentioned, the organization’s self-defined “moonshot” is to bring 100,000 new STEM teachers into the classroom by 2021. Chasing this moonshot, in 100Kin10’s formulation, does not mean finding a single breakthrough technology, but rather addressing several interlocking levers of the problem simultaneously. In Milgrom-Elcott’s words, it is trying to “get to the middle of the hairball.”

Meanwhile in Silicon Valley, X brings together people with diverse skill sets — we’re talking liquid-crystal technologists and ceramic sculptors—who, according to a 2017 Atlantic story, “have a particular talent: They dream up far-out answers to crucial problems.”

Within an hour, an internally-formed team will go from talking about a tough problem like the dearth of housing to debating the viability of self-driving housing units. The societal problems they tackle feel obviously large — housing, transport, connectivity — and more energy is spent devising the radical solutions and breakthrough technologies than debating the problem, or creating a network map of its root causes.

The problem must, however, hold muster. “I know how Pollyannaish this sounds, but we want to make the world a radically better place,” Teller said in another talk. “And we have conversations all the time, and at the end of the conversation we say, ‘That would make a lot of money for Google; wouldn’t make the world a radically better place. Next!”

There are structural differences between 100Kin10 and X that make direct comparisons complicated. While 100Kin10 is laser-focused on STEM education (and, more recently, sustainability in the teaching profession), X is sector-agnostic. If housing isn’t the right place to spend time, the team can move on to crafting radical solutions to water purification or vaccine delivery.

100Kin10 does not have that luxury. It was formed with a specific topic in mind, and its network was created with that framing. Failure cannot mean starting from scratch, enticing as that may sometimes sound.

More salient, 100Kin10 is a nonprofit that acts as a sort of convening body for hundreds of disparate members. It synthesizes information from its network and spearheads its overall direction. Network members are not formally compensated for their participation, it does not have a straightforward revenue model, and the fruits of everyone’s labor are intended for public benefit.

“We’re trying to support and catalyze the diffusion, adaptation, creation, and improvement of ideas that will lead to sustainable change in STEM [education],” Grace Doramus, who leads 100Kin10’s strategic initiative team, wrote in an email. “We are trying to solve education’s most systemic challenges, not completely ‘disrupt’ the system in the true sense of the word.”

This model has some potential downsides. 100Kin10’s network appears to be highly engaged at the moment — over 500 people participated in person last year — but it is built on goodwill and a shared belief in the end goal. Both of those could evaporate, the network could turn toxic, or worse, the philanthropic funds backing it could dry up. By design, 100Kin10 has limited control over its future.

X, on the other hand, is looking to create a disruptive technology business. Its team tests hypotheses through user research, but the bulk of the work takes place internally with its ragtag team (the kite surfers, astrophysicists, etc.). It wouldn’t make sense for X to engage stakeholders in the deep, sustained way that 100Kin10 has; building a technology business means owning and retaining intellectual property over an idea.

X doesn’t mind taking a circuitous route to find profits — its team will give teleportation “a brief hearing” in ideation meetings — but at some point, the moonshot must hold up to the market, and Alphabet (i.e., Google’s parent company) presumably must benefit handsomely from it.

Finally, there’s the slight difference in price tag. Since its inception in 2012, the work of 100Kin10 has cost $103 million — mostly raised from wealthy philanthropies. X won’t share its budget, but in 2015, it was estimated to have spent $3.5 billion. If you annualize 100Kin10’s budget, you could have 200 100Kin10’s for every X.

In the end, X is looking to create the next Google. The new company should solve an entrenched social problem — Loon, for example, will ideally bring the internet to unconnected parts of the world — but it should do so within the confines of a for-profit, technology-led model. The $3.5 billion it spent in 2015 were not philanthropic dollars.

For all the “Pollyannaish” ingenuity X promises with its moonshots, there is little talk (at least externally) about whether societal problems are best solved through the private sector. Do the electrical engineers and balloon scientists who work there question the limits of the free market and Silicon Valley’s “winners take all” mentality? Do they ask themselves whether it’s possible to square personal enrichment with lofty social goals? Or the role of genius new technologies in solving “hairball” problems?

Or are we expecting too much of X? Maybe it primarily sees itself as the lab for Alphabet’s future-facing work — and if it can work on a socially relevant topic, that’s a bonus. Maybe its premise of saving the world with moonshots is more marketing than reality, an open secret to recruit highly skilled Millennials who seek “purpose” in their work.

“Most of the world’s most intractable problems have not gone unsolved because of a lack of ingenuity,” wrote Courtney Martin in these pages. “They’ve gone unsolved because they exist within complex, interlocking systems that must be healed concurrently over generations. Most likely by the people who are most affected by them, not kite surfers and aerospace engineers.”

Martin calls for us to move away from the moonshot metaphor, the scale- and hero-worshipping method of changing the world. Instead, she says, the type of social change we need must “look soberly and collaboratively at systemic inequality.”

Perhaps 100Kin10 is doing a bit of both. Its goal is sizable — especially its new one about making teaching a sustainable profession — but its approach is collaborative. The network will likely not get fabulously wealthy while doing it, but it might get us a little closer to getting inside the hairball of a social problem. And if it fails, at least the price tag is a bit easier to swallow.