The importance of irrational optimism, and letting people work on things they believe in
Time after time I never cease to be amazed by the importance of optimism, dedication and irrational belief for delivering groundbreaking results in cutting-edge technological projects. I really believe many if not most of humanity’s breakthroughs should be accredited to optimism just as much as they should be accredited to ingenuity.
When you’re working on something really difficult with high uncertainty, you really have to believe with your heart it will work in order to make it happen, because otherwise on the way there it will seem like it failed so many times that you will just give up. Actually — the rational thing will be to give up because you WILL have solid and scientific proof that it isn’t working, and all your managers will agree with you and be proud of you for failing a bad idea fast — unless they are really optimistic about it themselves and believe that it will work with their hearts.
In the past I worked on a government “science-fiction” technology of a sensing system. The technology was unbelievable but (as usual) it was over-promised. Decision-makers were sold they will have a working product years before it actually happened, and for that reason many of them were very disappointed that the (actually very preliminary) experiment results were showing it isn’t working at all (this project ended up winning the highest award for a technological project years later).
The project lacked funding and with high probability was on its way to being closed. I was optimistic — I understood the details up close and I knew that more important than anything — the team was unbelievably strong (until this day this is one of the strongest tech teams I saw). If you looked closely at the experiment results you could see the signal exists, the noise level was extremely high but the team had already mapped years of very promising directions to solve these issues. I understood that more than anything they just needs more time, and in order to get that time — I had to get the project heavily funded.
A few months later Israel had encountered a very urgent situation and we thought of an idea for how this technology could be used to solve it. It was something that we had never done before and it was a completely new use-case for this sensing system, but the situation was urgent, we believed it could work, and not less important — if we succeed it could really help buy time (and funding) from the high-level decision makers.
Everyone worked really hard in order to set-up the field experiment that was supposed to prove (or disprove) the feasibility of this concept. The conditions were far from being optimal, we had to patch-up components from several places that weren’t designed for this task — but this is what we had and we weren’t going to give up without a fight. We had to argue and get to very high tones with the managers of that R&D group that really didn’t want to dedicate even a single extra hour of their people into the dying unfunded project.
We went to the field and encountered unreasonable hardships. We literally had to hang from a crane dangling in really strong winds in mid-air. Thanks to the dedication and resourcefulness of the team members these challenges were solved, and we performed the experiment successfully. Now “all that was left” was to analyze the results and see if we found what we were looking for.
The manager of the R&D group in charge of this technology, let one of the team-members that were more pessimistic about that idea to analyze the results (he is a great person and a one of the smartest people I know, just not really optimistic about that idea).
After about a day or two he came back with negative results — we failed.
Another team member who really believed with all his heart in that technology, couldn’t accept that statement as it was. He just had to try it himself. Nobody gave him approval to work on this, so he just had to do it on his free time. A few days later he told me he has interesting news. We met during the weekend for several hours and he showed me the unbelievable results — it worked. He looked at the data from every possible direction, tried every signal processing technique he could think about — he just wasn’t willing to accept that the signal wasn’t there.
Today, several years later, and after countless such events that would have failed the project without the optimism and dedication of a few scientists and engineers, this project is a fact. It is already a funded, working and strategic product and won the highest award for a technological project in Israel. The distance between a genius “nobel-prize winning” idea, and the actual working product, is unbelievably large. I don’t even want to imagine how many genius ideas humanity lost because they weren’t championed by people who are optimistic and dedicated. It is so easy to give up, it is the most logical thing to admit it just doesn’t work.
Today at Aidoc, we see this phenomena all the time. So much of our technological breakthroughs failed countless times unless they succeeded. So many times we knew the logical thing is to give up, except that we believed in the idea so much that we decided to hang on to the strand of promising results and the potentially huge gain. The most important foundations that enable us to reach these achievements are:
1) We only take geniuses, but we will not take geniuses that are not dedicated or optimistic.
2) We are lucky to have a management that understands these challenges and enables us to continue working on things we believe in, even though at certain moments in time they don’t look like they’re promising or advancing fast (as long as they have a potential to move the needle for strategic company goals).
3) We understand that even if you have the most genius idea, and the brightest engineer — if he\she doesn’t believe in the idea and doesn’t really want to make it happen — you must convince him even if it takes a lot of time, or just let him work on something else, because otherwise you’re just wasting everyone’s time on your way to a predetermined conclusion.
