It's Impossible! Yet it happened.

Hierarchy and history often kill new ideas. Beyond these workplaces, the impossible happens.

Here is an insight on what’s shifting in the world and how it can shape the way you think, act, and lead globally.

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In October 2024, I’m excited to be holding a limited number of 1:1 online strategy sessions to help leaders and their teams explore what they can leverage to de-risk and diversify their business. These sessions will focus on building upon existing talents, assets, and resources to achieve more with less for strengthened global success in 2025.

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Laura O’Sullivan, was a 16-year-old student from Cork in Ireland, when she developed an innovative cervical cancer detection system¹. This was driven by her interest in artificial intelligence and machine learning. Self-taught through online learning platforms like Coursera and edX, Laura used convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to analyze cervical smear images. By training these networks on a public dataset, Laura developed a system that significantly reduced cytologists’ workloads and provided faster and more accurate early detection. Her breakthrough has the potential to save lives worldwide through earlier diagnosis.

Many said it was impossible!

At 15, Jack Andraka from Maryland in the USA, set out to create a test for pancreatic cancer after a family friend died of the disease. Pancreatic cancer is hard to detect early and existing diagnostic methods were expensive and often inaccurate. Through online research, Jack discovered that mesothelin, a protein, is found at elevated levels in the blood of those with pancreatic cancer². He designed a simple paper sensor, similar to a diabetic test strip, using carbon nanotubes combined with antibodies that detect mesothelin. The nanotubes conduct electricity, and when the protein binds to the antibody, the conductivity changes which signals the presence of cancer.

Jack’s method was innovative because it was 168 times faster, 26,000 times cheaper (just a few cents per test), and 400 times more sensitive than traditional tests. His invention takes only five minutes to deliver results and has the potential to save countless lives by catching cancer early when treatment is more effective.

The standard reaction: It is not possible!

Workplace Playgrounds for Non-Experts

Professional scientists often dedicate their careers to achieving these types of breakthroughs. Yet, at just 15 and 16 years old, Laura and Jack accomplished what many experts would deem impossible. Their curiosity, combined with access to online learning and data, enabled them to make significant contributions to their fields. They did so without permission, vast resources, or expert guidance.

These types of breakthroughs aren’t limited to school labs and teenage homework desks. Established institutions can also be sites of impossible discovery. Any workplace can be a playground for non-experts.

In 2019, Wolf Cukier, a 17-year-old high school student from New York in the USA, made a groundbreaking discovery three days into his internship at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center³. While analyzing data from the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), Wolf focused on a system called TOI 1338, located about 1,300 light-years away. Initially believing it to be a stellar eclipse, he realized he had found an exoplanet, now known as TOI 1338 b, a circumbinary planet orbiting two stars. This discovery was particularly significant, as such planets are harder to detect than those orbiting single stars. Wolf’s work, later published in a scientific paper, has contributed to ongoing exoplanet research.

A planet discovered three days into a NASA internship? Impossible!!

How to Prevent Hierarchy and History Killing Ideas

In many workplaces, it is common for hierarchy and history to stifle innovation and kill ideas. At the highest level, this is when the default reaction to anything new or novel is:

It’s impossible!

This reaction is widespread. And, it may be doing more harm than good.

As leaders, it’s easy to react negatively or rely on expert advice and past successes to set expectations of what is possible. Yet this can suppress the very curiosity and questioning needed for breakthroughs.

“How to Boost Curiosity in Your Company - and Why”, an article from MIT Sloan School of Management, explores how curiosity and agile project management foster iterative learning and continuous improvement⁴. Professor Steven Eppinger, describes design thinking as a “mindset of curiosity.” He discusses how encouraging exploration, valuing questions over answers, and using feedback loops help companies navigate uncertainty and drive innovation.

“You want a process that gets you out of the habit of seeing the most experienced person as the one with all the answers,” Eppinger explains. “If we can create a culture in which we’re not expecting that at all, then we tend to listen much more inclusively to the whole range of people who are participating.”

In many science labs, boardrooms, and meetings held around the world, people like Laura, Jack, and Wolf wouldn’t be invited to join due to their lack of expertise. Yet, their curiosity, drive, and ambition may be exactly what organizations need to make groundbreaking discoveries.

The Shift: Newcomers Acting on Necessity

It is said that “necessity is the mother of invention,” and today, a shift is taking place where more people, in more places, can now invent and become an expert in their chosen field - without permission, vast resources, or traditional guidance.

This shift is enabled by increased accessibility of emerging technologies and greater access to knowledge and data. With just an internet connection, individuals are creating new products, services, and solutions outside of traditional centers of discovery.

An Updated Worldview: Inspiration, Instruction, Invitation

The likes of Laura, Jack, and Wolf inspire, instruct, and invite us to think and act bigger. They raise the bar for setting ambitious goals and using small, low-risk, low-cost experiments to achieve breakthroughs.

It pays to zoom-out, expanding our worldview, to know people who:

Inspire: They encourage us to think bigger and see possibilities where others see limitations, showing us what can be achieved through curiosity and persistence.

Instruct: They teach us by example and demonstrate the steps we can take to question norms, embrace innovation of all shapes and sizes, and drive meaningful change in our fields.

Invite: They call us to action, challenging us to rethink the status quo and experiment to achieve breakthroughs that were previously not possible.

Small Steps: Think, Act and Lead Bigger

Here’s how leaders can bring this into their organizations, starting small:

1. Audit your boardroom, meetings, emails, and key contacts. Are they filled with individuals because of their status or proven experience? Or, with people who ask exploratory questions and have a network to take ideas beyond the usual circles and bottlenecks?

2. Challenge the status quo as a measure of success. When you hear (or even say!) phrases like “We’ve always done it this way,” “That will never work here,” or “We’re not a technology company, so we should limit new technologies or data,” it’s a strong sign that the status quo may be hard to shift.

3. Question reliance on experts who have succeeded using frameworks from the past.

4. Rethink the discovery process - collaboration can extend beyond consultants to include the best minds or most driven people around the world. This opens up more opportunities for innovation.

5. Expand your inner circle. The simplest way to bring in new thinking is to include those who think and act differently. Seek out people from diverse geographies and backgrounds, those passionate about your industry’s problems, those who are tech-savvy, and those willing to challenge your assumptions and show you a new way forward.

6. Identify, invite, and involve non-expert talent. This could be for an innovation sprint, an open innovation project, or in a reverse mentoring program. Working with people who think and act differently, with the use of in-built feedback mechanisms, allows people (at all levels) in an organization to develop the ability to let ideas win over hierarchy and history.

There’s more to the world than what we see.

Breakthroughs are happening globally, even if they’re out of sight. Blindspots and biases make leaders and organizations miss the unexpected. When the most significant trends, technologies, and threats increasingly originate far from where we live and work, this poses a significant risk.

By seeing more of the world, we can make better sense of it, and set strategic priorities to secure important wins.

This week, on Thursday 3rd October, marks 90 days to 2025. It’s timely to take stock of where we are and where we want to be in the year ahead.

• In 2025, do you expect breakthroughs to stem from your organisation, industry, or country?

• What possible biases or blindspots exist within your organization?

• What barriers prevent challenging the status quo?

• In 2025, how could updating who you know, what you know, and how you work unlock value?

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Further Reading:

• Azeem Azhar, Exponential: How Accelerating Technology Is Leaving Us Behind and What to Do About It, 2021 (link here)

• “How to Boost Curiosity in Your Company - and Why”, MIT Sloan School of Management (link here)

1. Azeem Azhar, Exponential: How Accelerating Technology Is Leaving Us Behind and What to Do About It, 2021.

2. https://jackandraka.com/

3. https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/10/17-year-old-discovers-planet-on-third-day-of-internship-with-nasa.html

4. https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/how-to-boost-curiosity-your-company-and-why