The Astro Teller post

Originally published on LinkedIn.

Astro Teller says "most of why we waste time at work is fear." He runs Google X, the division that built self-driving cars at Waymo, and he has spent years building a workplace where people actually behave like anything is achievable. I re-listened to his HBR IdeaCast episode this week and two big ideas stuck with me:

1.) Teller has a thought experiment: If your job is to train a monkey to recite Shakespeare on top of a ten-foot pedestal, which do you do first? Everyone at traditional organizations builds the pedestal, because you can show your boss the pedestal and your boss says "good job," even though you've made zero progress because all of the risk was on training the monkey. If the monkey can't learn Shakespeare, the pedestal is scrap. His operating metric is "learning per dollar," and the logic is simple: "You learn nothing when you succeed, except maybe to do that again. You learn exclusively when you fail... failure is learning. They're identical." Healthcare, legal, and software engineering are already running cheap learning loops like this with AI. The opportunity is there for anyone willing to invest in the experiment.

2.) During the interview, Teller does his one-hour innovation talk in sixty seconds. Choice A: A million dollars of guaranteed value for your business this year. Choice B: A billion dollars, one chance in a hundred. Everyone picks B, and then he says leave your hand up if your manager would support that choice, and every hand in the audience goes down. "You don't need a lecture on innovation. You need a new manager." When projects die at X, the people stay, the code stays, the learning stays. Teller calls it "moonshot compost." Most organizations don't have anything like this. In my world, when a campaign ends, you write an exit memo you barely finish in November after three months of 60-hour weeks and then you walk out the door. A handful of people hold the knowledge, and when they leave, the information is dead. But that's not unique to campaigns. Any organization with high turnover or short project cycles faces the same problem, and Teller's answer is that you have to design your system so nothing is wasted.

Teller rollerblades through Google X every day as one of what he calls the "hundreds and hundreds of signals" you have to send so people actually behave differently, when every professional instinct drives you away from taking billion-dollar risks. I think about what it would look like to send those signals in any organization where the cycles are short and the fear of failure is real. Teller's point is that you can build systems that make it safe to learn, and that the learning is what makes you win.

Thanks to Harvard Business Review, Alison Beard and Astro Teller for a conversation worth the relisten.