Innovation ≠ Recklessness
Like many of you out there, I followed the news about the recent implosion of OceanGate’s Titan submersible OBSESSIVELY. I was horrified by the initial reports of dwindling oxygen supplies and impenetrable darkness that those six souls might be enduring. Fascinated by the idea paying $250,000 to be bolted into a sardine can so one could descend 2.5 miles below the surface of the ocean to catch a glimpse of the ruins of RMS Titanic through a 21” porthole. But mostly I was dismayed by reports that OceanGate’s visionary founder Stockton Rush had ignored repeated warnings of the potential for “catastrophic” problems with the Titan submersible.
The critiques – which came in 2018 from OceanGate employees as well as a few dozen industry experts – focused on the company’s refusal to submit the Titan submersible to inspection and certification by a third-party agency, even despite known possibilities for failures at extreme depths of the carbon-fiber composite hull and the viewport enabling passengers to see outside the craft, neither of which was rated for the pressures of a 12,500 foot dive.
Mr. Rush’s brash response to these concerns in a 2019 OceanGate blog post was that “bringing an outside entity up to speed on every innovation before it is put into real-world testing is anathema to rapid innovation.” He doubled down on his claim that innovation and recklessness go hand-in-hand in a 2019 profile in Smithsonian Magazine: “There hasn’t been an injury in the commercial sub industry in over 35 years. It’s obscenely safe, because they have all these regulations. But it also hasn’t innovated or grown—because they have all these regulations.” While we at Satya Rasa Consulting admire the vision and “what if?” thinking that drove Mr. Rush to explore new corners of the universe, we actually believe that his steadfast refusal to submit the Titan submersible to testing and outside evaluation was unnecessarily reckless and, in the end, anathema to innovation.
Adam Grant, in his 2016 book Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World, does a brilliant job of debunking the myth that originality requires extreme risk taking, and notes that “originals are actually far more ordinary than we realize.” He cites a study of risk tolerance vs. risk aversion by management researchers Joseph Raffiee and Jie Feng that tracked over five thousand American entrepreneurs for fourteen years as they launched new ventures, to see whether they would be better or worse off if they kept their day jobs. “Whether these founders kept or left their day jobs wasn’t influenced by financial need,” Grant writes; “individuals with high family income or high salaries weren’t any more or less likely to quit and become full-time entrepreneurs. A survey showed that the ones who took the full plunge [of quitting their day jobs] were risk takers with spades of confidence. The entrepreneurs who hedged their bets by starting their companies while still working were far more risk averse and unsure of themselves.”
Contrary to popular expectations and portrayals of successful entrepreneurs as risk takers, the study showed that the entrepreneurs who kept their day jobs were fully one third less likely to fail than those who went “all in” on their business ventures by quitting their day jobs. “If you’re risk averse and have some doubts ablut the feasibility of your ideas,” Grant writes, “it’s likely that your business will be built to last. If you’re a freewheeling gambler, your startup is more fragile.”
Extreme risk taking is actually as much a trauma response as extreme risk aversion. Numerous research studies have documented the ways in which trauma impairs executive functioning (which governs planning, problem-solving, inhibitory control and being able to change course as our circumstances evolve – the very skills that are at the heart of successful innovation and transformation)…and when this kind of higher-order functioning of our nervous systems goes haywire, we become either reckless or terrified of our own shadows. While “thinking outside of the box” and stepping into unfamiliar territories certainly require a tolerance for the unfamiliar, these activities cannot be done well without solid executive functioning; we need to be able to assess the risk/reward equation and to make thoughtful choices and adjustments to our plans as we move along every new path. The failure to do this, to have a healthy respect for risk and to try to mitigate it along the way, is nothing more than a blind gamble. Will blind gambles pay off sometimes? Sure. But if you have read this far, then you know in your heart that there is a better way to innovate – a way that involves honest risk assessments and an ability to change course when needed – and we at Satya Rasa Consulting can help you and your company to find that middle path.