Thinking Slow and Old
[Originally published 12 February 2021]
So here’s another short story from the Army.
I was conducting battalion range day, and because of a deal that was made long before my time, I had a handful of guys from other units show up without weapons to join my session the morning of. Understandably, you need a rifle to shoot, but issuing them weapons presented some immediate logistical challenges, since range days start at 0700hrs and the ranges themselves are always located in some faraway forest.
So my CO asked me for a solution. I suggested that we just bring over a pool of weapons, and have the troops that weren’t issued personal weapons share them with others. Now, these guys weren’t high-speed operators; they were combat support guys: engineers, mechanics, box-kickers, school instructors, etc.. They just needed to clear rifle quals. It doesn’t matter if you don’t have a personal weapon that’s perfectly zeroed for you; you just needed to pass the damned test.
So that’s what we did. I got volun-told to take charge of what was essentially a pilot program for the Army, and because it went well, the same model’s been adopted here and there across the whole Army. It however has not seen universal uptake because of some of its inherent flaws: a lack of personal accountability, the finickiness of transferring weapons between users, and how potentially hairy it is to have a shared pool comprising about a hundred rifles lying around. Ultimately, these pitfalls are why there are still a bunch of units that are continuing to do the same thing they’ve always done.
Legacy Thinking
I like to call entrenched modes of thinking ‘legacy thinking’ — somewhat inspired by the space industry’s tendency to default to trusted ‘legacy’ brand names like Lockheed or Boeing even in the face of promising new technology. And I think that the space industry is a perfect microcosm with which to contextualise this discussion, but we’ll get to that later.
I think it’s easy to get carried away with new ideas. We are, even now, lost in a sea of soundbites that all feature the words ‘disrupt’ and ‘revolution’. It’s fashionable. I blame hustlebeasts, VC, and social media. It’s gotten to the point that we forget the merits of going a bit slower and deferring to traditional wisdom. If the Army had also just gotten swept up in the zeitgeist of ‘new is better’, it would have made me personally look great, but it would have ignored the glaring flaws with my idea that, ultimately, I hadn’t even realised until we did the pilot.
Rebel and rail as we might, we cannot avoid recognising that legacy thinking has its merits. I’m not saying old is necessarily gold, only that having something that is old forces us to think about the new in a different way. We approach replacement systems in a fundamentally different way than we do entirely novel ones, and the differences are reflective of the circumstances.
The aim of any approach is fundamentally to solve a problem. A novel approach however means that we are addressing something that has never been solved before. All old approaches were novel once, and if we’re looking at things contemporaneously, the existence of an old approach today means the problem has been solved already. That means any new approach purporting to uproot an old solution must not just solve the problem - it must do it better, so much so that it is worth the trouble of having to switch and relearn everything. If I told you that you could run faster on your hands than on your legs, you probably still wouldn’t do it because that sounds way too hard.
So here, in terms of definitions, we have 3 kinds of approach: novel, old, and new.
Novelty
Novel approaches concern problem spaces that are formless, and consequently, lawless. It’s the difference between playing chess and actual combat. On a chessboard, there are only so many things I can do, and while the possible combinations might number legion, they are nonetheless finite. There are rules. Everything is defined. Pawns go forward and bishops move along diagonals. There are constraints as to how creative you can get.
And then there’s real combat, where anything goes. Sure there are basic rules like gravity and the amount of blood one can lose before becoming fully exsanguinated, but besides that, go nuts! Call in fire support to flatten the tree line; mortar them with white phosphorous (NB: don’t do this, it’s illegal); hell, fix bayonets and charge if you feel like meeting your maker sooner than you need to. There is no arbiter to tell you what can or can’t be done, Geneva Convention aside. It is the sort of problem space wherein there are no limits on how you can tackle an issue, or even what issue to tackle. The only thing that matters is the final measure of efficacy.
It might therefore appear at first that it’s easier to succeed with a novel approach than a new one, because there’s nothing else to draw a direct comparison against. Very often however you’ll find that the problem isn’t even recognised as such, because no one has known any other way of living. Motorists vigorously opposed the adoption of seatbelts because they never saw it as an issue.
I speak from experience here because my startup is attempting a novel approach of this same sort: satellites have never had a means to feasibly operate in Very Low Earth Orbit before, so satellite operators don’t even consider it an issue. Operating closer to Earth has so much to offer. Optical imaging enjoys higher resolution. Telecomms and internet satellites get reduced latency. All satellites enjoy cleaner signals and lower power draws. And yet, all these benefits may as well not even exist, because what’s the point if you can’t get there? Well now with us they can, and they do seem to be slowly coming around to the idea.
Ultimately, while novel approaches don’t have to contend with the shadows of older brothers, the lack of identifiable focus areas is just as fatal of a problem. It’s akin to the paradox of choice — we are paralysed by the sheer number of options before us. So many directions to go in, too short of a life and attention span to do anything but make a guess and hope you’re right.
There are no guarantees with novel approaches, and all the vulnerability to criticism in the world. You could build something that truly revolutionises the way we live, or you could build something completely and utterly useless, like a solar-powered battery-less flashlight. Some issues go unsolved because they were thought unsolvable. Some are just non-issues, period. You just have to grab your ankles and pray real hard that you aren’t wasting your time. That is a special kind of terrifying in and of itself.
Thinking Slow
And then we have legacy thinking, which forces an immediate and focused comparison between the old and the new, such that the new approach only has 3 ways of beating out the old:
1) Achieves what the old approach did but better, faster, more efficiently;
2) Achieves the same result with less effort or resources expended; or
3) Achieves a better result with the same or greater ease.
If we’re looking at getting from A to B, 1) would be roller skates instead of shoes, 2) would be a bicycle or a horse, and 3) would be a car.
In a way, your path to success becomes clearer because your competition is a known quantity. In turn, legacy thinking is practically Darwinist in that it forces you to produce something that actually generates more utility, or perish. As inherently contradictory as it might seem, legacy thinking affords structure to innovation. While this does mean that you won’t ever create something truly new, it does provide a level of certainty that we all too often take for granted, because while we might not succeed, at the very least we know we are doing something worthwhile — our efforts are not futile.
Innovation often consists of frequent tiny steps forward that look like 1) and 2), with the occasional once-in-a-generation leap like 3). What is easy to forget however are all the innovations that didn’t make the cut — the superior handstand running techniques of the world spring to mind. One of the pitfalls of legacy thinking is that we tend to get set in our ways that it takes something truly remarkable to jolt us out of our stupors. Who’d ever questioned cabs before Uber?
We do not change traditions for marginal benefit — it’s just too much effort for too little gain. Looking at it from a utilitarian viewpoint, the cost of switching outweighs the utility. Therefore for a new approach to oust the old:
[(New utility) - (Switching cost + Legacy utility)] > 0
Therein lies the difficulty of challenging legacy thinking. There is a whole graveyard of ideas that were good, just not good enough to convert. Any number of faults lands you there — merit, timing, execution. If only there were a junkyard of discarded ideas that we could dumpster dive in every now and then to fish out a winner.
Someone should make an app for that.
P.S. Patience, Anakin
So, you understand what innovation and legacy thinking is. Now let’s go off the rails a little and talk a bit about ‘why’ using my pet subject: space.
Space is probably the most conservative industry in the world because of the magnitude of the consequences should a mistake be made. A collision at 1,000km up will generate thousands of debris particles that will continue to orbit at 8,000m/s for the next hundred or so years, forming a giant locust cloud or shotgun blast that shreds anything in its path. There is no margin for error.
Which is why I find it so interesting, and uplifting, that space is also one of the fastest moving industries in terms of innovation. Nary a day goes by where I don’t hear of some batshit crazy new idea. Anti-grav machines, private factories on the moon, space stations built out of foam and old Soviet rocket boosters (these are all real examples that I or my colleagues have interacted with). This game really is all about patience, timing, and having what is called in Hokkien ‘ti-ki’ — a colloquial term for having steel teeth that means, in equal parts, dogmatic stubbornness and belligerent determination.
The standards here are as high as they get. For example, commercial launch services. Legacy spacecraft gets a kilo of materiel into space for about US$26,000. The disruptive new SpaceX gets the same kilo up there for US$2,000 (or less, if Starship works). That’s a reduction of at least 13x. That’s the kind of margin that space demands before anything changes. The graves in the space section of the innovation cemetery run particularly deep.
And yet there is no shortage of bodies for this meat grinder. It’s hard, yes. We all knew that going in. The expression ‘it’s not rocket science’ exists for a reason. And yet, there’s something about space that makes us want to try, fail, and keep trying.
Jacques Cousteau once said, “the sea, once it casts its spell, holds one in its net of wonder forever.” I thought about that quote often when I used to scuba dive. It popped into my head every time I stood On Deck (see what I did there) and looked out at the endless horizon: the sail flapping in the evening breeze, the cool scent of salt and suntan lotion, the last rays of light cresting over islands in the distance and colouring the cloudless sky auburn. It was one of those sights that you just knew was special, and that you should pay attention to because you might never get another moment like that.
That is, in a sense, what space is. It is an irresistible force, the call to adventure, the ringing of church bells and the cry of ‘to arms!’ There is a sense that we are caught in a certain type of moment, the last one right before the train speeds off into the distance, and we are all trying to clamber on at the last second. No one wants to be left behind, but for this, it seems especially urgent.
It’s many things. Call it necessity, or call it hubris. I think of it as the spirit of human endeavour. We are a people born to climb, leap, sprint, fly. We are restless creatures. We dreamt of lands beyond oceans, and now we dream of worlds beyond stars. We will never be satisfied. There will always be a horizon.
That, in my opinion, is ‘why’.
(NB: This was written with the counsel and advice of my friends and fellows from the On Deck Writing Fellowship. I am immensely grateful to them for their help and their time.)
