How to Fly a Horse

by Kevin Ashton

  Microsociology shows us that these interactions are not trivial. Everything that happens between two or more people is rich in meaning.

  Before microsociology, the dominant assumption was that people in groups made decisions using reasoning, in a series of steps something like this:

  1. Define the situation.

  2. Define the decision to be made.

  3. Identify the important criteria.

  4. Consider all possible solutions.

  5. Calculate the consequences of these solutions versus the criteria.

  6. Choose the best option.

  Microsociology showed conclusively that we seldom think this way, especially not in groups. In group interactions, our decisions are more likely to be based on unwritten rules and cultural assumptions than on pure reason. Ludwig Wittgenstein, an Austrian British philosopher, said that these interactions, which on the surface look like nothing more than talking, are like a game, because they consist of “moves” and “turns.” He called the game Sprachspiel, or “the language game.”

  In a group, words are heard in a context that includes emotion, power, and existing relationships with other group members. We are all social chameleons, adjusting our skin to blend in with, or sometimes stand out from, whatever crowd we happen to be in.

  Sociologist Erving Goffman called the moves in the language game “interaction rituals.” Later, his colleague Randall Collins called series of these moves “interaction ritual chains.” The chain starts with the situation—for example, a business meeting. The way each individual behaves in the meeting will depend on a number of things: their level of authority, their mood, their previous experience in similar meetings, and their current relationships with the other people in the room. All these things change their behavior. They will not act the way they might in a different situation—for example, when they are unwell and visiting the doctor. In the meeting, the greeting “How are you?” signifies nothing more than courtesy. Collins writes, “ ‘How are you?’ is not a request for information, and it is a violation of its spirit to reply as if the interlocutor wanted to know details about one’s health.”

  In the other case, when a person is visiting the doctor, the question “How are you?” at the start of the appointment is a request for information. It would be a violation not to provide details about one’s health. The same person being asked the same question gives a different reply because they are participating in a different ritual.

  Organizations are made of rituals—millions of small, moments-long transactions between individuals within groups—and it is these rituals that determine how much an organization creates.

  10 | RITUALS OF DOING

  The biggest lesson from the story of Kelly Johnson and the Skunk Works is that creation is doing, not saying. The most creative organizations prioritize rituals of doing; the least creative organizations prioritize rituals of saying, the most common of which is the meeting. “Meeting” is a euphemism for “talking”; therefore, meetings are an alternative to work. Despite this, the average office worker attends six hour-long meetings a week, almost a full working day. If an organization uses Microsoft’s Outlook software to automatically schedule meetings, their employees attend even more meetings—nine hour-long meetings a week. There is no creating in meetings. Creation is action, not conversation. Creative organizations have external meetings—for example, with customers, as Lockheed did to win its wartime contracts to make planes—but the more creative an organization is, the fewer internal meetings it tends to have, and the fewer people tend to be at those meetings. The result is more people spending more time at the coal face of creation.

  Much of what happens in internal meetings is called “planning,” but planning is of limited value, because nothing ever goes according to plan. Kelly Johnson had little use for plans and did not need to know the details of how things were going to happen before doing them. Engineering plans are important for getting a product built, but engineering plans are doing, not saying. Even then, some engineering plans are made after the product is built. Johnson describes his first day at Lockheed:

  I was assigned to work with Bill Mylan in the tooling department, designing tools for assembly of the Electra. Mylan was an old hand and knew his business. “I’ll build them, kid, and you can draw them later,” he explained to me.

  You cannot control the future. Being too rigid about making things happen the way you planned stops you from reacting to emerging problems and causes you to miss unexpected opportunities. Have high expectations about what and few expectations about how. This is the opposite of the way most organizations operate. Many “executives” spend half of their week in “planning” meetings and the other half preparing for them. You cannot build a plan that predicts your setbacks—like the engine expert being arrested as a spy, or his engine exploding the first time you turn it on—but you can build an organization that executes anyway.

  Saying instead of doing is worse than unproductive: it is counter-productive. In 1966, Philip Jackson, one of the psychologists who discovered that teachers do not like creative children, introduced a new term to describe how organizations transmit values and shape behavior: the “hidden curriculum.”

  Jackson used the term to describe schools:

  The crowds, the praise, and the power that combine to give a distinctive flavor to classroom life collectively form a hidden curriculum, which each student (and teacher) must master if he is to make his way satisfactorily through the school. The demands created by these features of classroom life may be contrasted with the academic demands—the “official” curriculum, so to speak—to which educators traditionally have paid the most attention.

  We learn the hidden curriculum as children, when our minds are eager, we hunger for friends, and we are most afraid of shame. We learn it without knowing: the hidden curriculum is a set of unwritten rules, implied, often at odds with what we are told. We learn the opposite of the official curriculum: that originality ostracizes, imagination isolates, risk is ridiculed. You faced a choice as a child you may not remember: to be yourself and be alone or to be like others and be with others. Education is homogenization. This is why nerds are targets and friends move in herds.

  We carry this lesson through life. Education may be forgotten, but experience gets ingrained. What we divide into discrete periods like “high school,” “college,” and “work” is in fact a continuum. And so the hidden curriculum operates in all organizations, from corporations to nations. Jackson says:

  As institutional settings multiply and become for more and more people the areas in which a significant portion of their life is enacted, we will need to know much more than we do at present about how to achieve a reasonable synthesis between the forces that drive a person to seek individual expression and those that drive him to comply with the wishes of others.

  Organizations are a competition between compliance and creation. The leaders of our organizations may ask us to create sometimes, but they demand that we comply always. Compliance is more important than creation in most organizations, no matter how much they pretend otherwise. If you comply but do not create, you may be promoted. If you create but do not comply, you will be fired. When rewards are given for compliance, not contribution, we call it “office politics.” We are required to comply not with what the organization says, but with what the organization does. If a CEO stands up and gives an annual all-company PowerPoint presentation about his love of innovators and risk takers, then allocates most of his company’s money to the old product groups and gives all his promotions to the people who manage them, he sends a clear signal to anybody who understands the hidden curriculum: do what the CEO does, not what the CEO says. Talk about innovating and taking risks, but do not do it. Work in the old product groups and focus your actions on old products. Leave the innovative, risky products to less organizationally adept, more creative people, who will be fired as soon as they fail and who will fail because they are not given any resources. This a
pproach to getting ahead is one many organizations demand, although they do not realize it and will not admit it. Jackson writes:

  No matter what the demand or the personal resources of the person facing it there is at least one strategy open to all. This is the strategy of psychological withdrawal, of gradually reducing personal concern and involvement to a point where neither the demand nor one’s success or failure in coping with it is sharply felt.

  Can someone both be inventive and follow the hidden curriculum that puts compliance and loyalty over creation and discovery? Perhaps, but the two things are opposites:

  The personal qualities that play a role in intellectual mastery are very different from those that characterize the Company Man. Curiosity, as an instance, is of little value in responding to the demands of conformity. The curious person typically engages in a kind of probing, poking, and exploring that is almost antithetical to the attitude of the passive conformist. Intellectual mastery calls for sublimated forms of aggression rather than for submission to constraints.

  Also, why bother? Why spend the energy and imagination needed to maintain a false identity—to be a conforming Clark Kent so you can keep your creative superself hidden—when you can get equally good results by conforming without creating or by taking your creative abilities somewhere where they will be appreciated? This is the dilemma creative people face everywhere. They seldom choose to resolve it by being secretly creative. Most people resign or become resigned after taking a new idea to their boss for evaluation. Proposing something new is a high-risk transaction. For Kelly Johnson at Lockheed in the 1930s, it worked. For Robert Galambos at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in the 1960s, as in most organizations most of the time, it did not.

  Building a creative organization is hard, but keeping it creative is many times harder. Why? Because every paradigm changes, and only the best creators can change with the consequences of their creations.

  In the summer of 1975, a few months after the fall of Saigon and the end of the Vietnam War, a Skunk Works engineer named Ben Rich presented an idea to Kelly Johnson. It was a design for an airplane shaped like an arrowhead: flat, triangular, and sharply pointed. Rich and his team called it the “Hopeless Diamond.” Johnson’s initial reaction was not positive. Rich said, “He took one look at the sketch of the Hopeless Diamond and charged into my office. Kelly kicked me in the butt—hard too. Then he crumpled up the proposal and threw it at my feet. ‘Ben Rich, you dumb shit,’ he stormed, ‘have you lost your goddam mind?’ ”

  Kelly Johnson’s arrival at Lockheed in 1933 was soon followed by the start of the Second World War. Partly as a result of Johnson’s work, World War II was the first major air war: airplanes killed 2.2 million people—more than 90 percent of them, around 2 million people, civilians, mainly women and children. The weapons used to defend against air attacks were crude and ineffective: antiaircraft guns that, on average, fired three thousand shells for each bomber they destroyed. As a result, nearly all bombers reached their targets. In the age of the nuclear bomb, this was a frightening statistic.

  Immediately after the war, the new, urgent problem was how to defend against death from the sky, and the solution was surface-to-air missiles, which used the new technologies of computing and radar to locate, pursue, and destroy attacking aircraft. In Vietnam, the next major air war after World War II, surface-to-air missiles destroyed 205 U.S. planes, one for every 28 missiles fired—performance more than ten times better than the antiaircraft guns of World War II. Flying over enemy territory had become so dangerous it was almost suicidal.

  This was the context for Ben Rich’s “Hopeless Diamond” proposal. The paradigm for understanding aircraft had shifted. The problem now was not how to fly, or how to fly faster, but how to fly in secret.

  The Hopeless Diamond was an attempt to solve that problem.

  After bursting into Ben Rich’s office, kicking him, and throwing his proposal on the floor, Kelly Johnson yelled, “This crap will never get off the ground.”

  Not every great innovator is a great manager of innovation. Johnson’s yelling and screaming might have been the end of Rich’s proposal but for one thing: the “Show me” rule.

  The Skunk Works engineers had developed a tradition: when there was a dispute about something technical, they bet each other a quarter, then ran an experiment. Johnson and Rich had placed about forty of these bets during their years of working together. Johnson had won them all. There were two things Johnson always seemed to win: arm-wrestling matches—he’d worked as a brick carrier when he was young and had developed arms like thick ropes—and twenty-five-cent technical bets.

  Rich said, “Kelly, this diamond is somewhere between ten thousand and one hundred thousand times lower in radar cross section than any U.S. military airplane or any new Russian MiG.”

  Johnson considered that. Lockheed had some experience building aircraft that evaded radar. In the 1960s, the company had developed an unmanned drone, called the D-21, that took photographs, dropped its camera to be picked up later, then blew itself up. The technology worked, but the program was a commercial failure. Johnson thought about the twelve-year-old drone that had failed, and said, “Ben, I’ll bet you a quarter that our old D-21 drone has a lower cross section than that goddam diamond.”

  Or: “Show me.” And so on September 14, 1975, the two men met in creation’s equivalent of a duel.

  Rich’s team put a scale model of the Hopeless Diamond into an electromagnetic chamber and measured how hard it was to detect on radar—a quality the Lockheed engineers had started to call “stealth.”

  Rich and Johnson received the results and looked at them eagerly. The Hopeless Diamond was a thousand times stealthier than the D-21. Rich had won his first ever bet with Johnson. Johnson flipped Rich a quarter. Then he said, “Don’t spend it until you see the damned thing fly.”

  The plane, code-named “Have Blue,” did fly. It was the first-ever stealth aircraft, the parent of every subsequent undetectable aircraft, from the F-117 Nighthawk, to the MH-60 Black Hawk helicopters used in the 2011 raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan, to the Lockheed SR-72, an almost invisible plane that flies at over forty-five hundred miles per hour. It was the product of an organization that valued action over talk, spent little time planning and lots of time trying, and resolved disputes about ideas not with arm wrestling or rank pulling but with two simple words: “Show me.”

  1 | THE INVENTION OF GENIUS

  There is a desert more than a thousand miles long on Africa’s Atlantic coast. Much of it is a sand sea, or erg, where the wind makes dunes twenty miles long and a thousand feet high. The desert is called the Namib, and it is home to a people called the Himba, whose women cover their skin and hair with milk fat, ash, and ocher, both for beauty and to protect themselves from the sun. In 1850, the Himba saw something odd in the dunes: men with white skin, covered in clothing, coming toward them through the sand. One of the men was thin and nervous. In time they found that he had a fetish for counting and measuring, and whenever he removed his Quaker-style “wide-awake” hat, they saw he had combed his hair over a bald spot that rose on his head like the moon. His name was Francis Galton. These people who had learned to live well in one of the world’s most desolate places did not impress him. He wrote later that they were “savages” who needed to be “managed,” whose food and possessions could be “seized,” and who could not “endure the steady labour that we Anglo-Saxons have been bred to support.”

  Galton was one of the first Europeans to visit the Namib. He took his prejudices about the Himba and other African people he met back with him to England. After his half cousin Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species, in 1859, Galton became obsessed with it and started a career measuring and classifying humanity to promote selective breeding, an idea he eventually called “eugenics.”

  Galton’s book Hereditary Genius, published in 1869, proposed that human intelligence was inherited directly and diluted by “poor” br
eeding. He later came to doubt his use of the word “genius” in the title, although it is not entirely clear why:

  There was not the slightest intention on my part to use the word genius in any technical sense, but merely as expressing an ability that was exceptionally high, and at the same time inborn. A person who is a genius is defined as a man endowed with superior faculties. The reader will find a studious abstinence throughout the work from speaking of genius as a special quality. It is freely used as an equivalent for natural ability. There is no confusion of ideas in this respect in the book, but its title seems apt to mislead, and if it could be altered now, it should appear as Hereditary Ability.

  Geniuses, then, were not a species apart but men (always men, of course) with “superior natural ability.” Galton is not specific about what geniuses have a superior natural ability to do, but he is very clear that men like him are far more likely to be endowed with this superior ability, whatever it is, than anyone else: “The natural ability of which this book mainly treats is such as a modern European possesses in a much greater average share than men of the lower races.”

  Lastly, and most importantly, this ability, while natural and bestowed mainly on “modern Europeans,” could be improved with selective breeding: “There is nothing either in the history of domestic animals or in that of evolution to make us doubt that a race of men may be formed who shall be as much superior mentally and morally to the modern European, as the modern European is to the lowest of the Negro races.”

  Or: we can breed better people in the same way we can breed bigger cows.

  The comparison to cows is not trite. Just as cows are graded using a classification system (in Britain, for example, an “E3” carcass is “excellent” and neither too lean nor too fat, while a “–P1” carcass is “poor” and skinny), so Galton proposed a grading system, or “Classification of Men According to Their Natural Gifts,” ranging from “a,” meaning something like “of below-average quality,” to “X,” for a one-in-a-million genius. The system, which Galton believed was “no uncertain hypothesis” but “an absolute fact,” enabled him to make what he clearly thought were absolute comparisons between “races”: