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(((moonshots)))

Moonshot Thinking

Throughout the course of history, we’ve seen that when people set their minds to wildly ambitious goals, the seemingly impossible starts to become possible. Moonshot thinking is about just that — pursuing things that sound undoable, but if done, could redefine humanity. Moonshot Thinking is about more than simply aiming high. It’s about understanding a transforming world, designing for a human-centered, regenerative future, and inspiring others toward action.

A recipe for Moonshots: 

Anyone in any field can take a moonshot! In fact, moonshots do not have to include any science or technology breakthroughs. Moonshots relate to problems that are super important and urgent for humanity (or for yourself) and yet very difficult to pull off. Most Moonshots typically sit at the intersection of these three ingredients:

1. A huge problem in the world that affects potentially many (starting from you)

2. A radical, sci-fi sounding solution that may seem impossible today

3. A breakthrough that gives us a glimmer of hope that the solution could be possible in the next 5-10 years

During these AoCxMoonshots weeks, you will be able to experience the “Moonshot Thinking”, a place where chaos makes it easier to make radical breakthroughs and activate significant potential to benefit you and humanity  — repeatedly. 

The intention is not for you to come up with any particular Moonshot idea or have a Moonshot outcome, but to experience some of the elements of Moonshot thinking to inform the journey of Alchemy of Chaos, innovation, and how it connects and mirrors your inner journey. All the while reflecting on addressing some of the most pressing challenges of our time.

In the pre-work this week (and throughout the rest of the program) we will start sharing the Moonshot thinking practices, frameworks and principles that have been most helpful to Moonshot factories around the world, and encourage you to use them too!

Chaos and Innovation

We can’t predict the future, but we can build for it! 

Innovation is chaotic, and then chaos is required to innovate, for every type of innovation, but specially for difficult and urgent/important innovations, or more radical innovations designed towards a future we want to happen while chaos dances around it, increasing levels of ambition, becoming more sustainable and impacting the world for good such as moonshots innovation. 

But one thing I realized over this time, is that little is talked about the chaotic inner journey of such innovations, of such moonshots, of doing real innovations and creative processes, the ups, the downs, the resistances, the egos, the let go, the birth, the death, the emergencies, the space, the transitions. All the ingredients required to do real innovation and that are not given space, instead of money, ideas, talent, or milestones.

The pandemic has brought home just how fragile the society we've built is—and I don't just mean our public-health systems. I mean our food supply chains, education infrastructure, cybersecurity, job markets, information networks, electoral machinery, and more. The next few decades will likely bring more crises… more chaos, and we aren't equipped. The future will happen even faster. And the old futures we had been anticipating are now in the trash. While the new ones are largely unforeseen chaotic dances. The pandemic has been a major largely-unforeseen event that has shifted the course of history. Disruption is real, and chaos happens all the time. 

And yet innovation still these days remains mainly incremental, trying to linearly predict things from what we know, rather than from what we do not know. What if instead the key to innovation would be not to predict the future, but to hold the uncertainty of the not-knowing? And the chaos that arises in there, within and outthere, knowing that the only thing we know is that an unprobable is probably the most likely to happen.  

And so what we need to shape the future is a mindset to live through chaos. When i land into the beginning of an innovation or moonshot process, chaos for me feels much more like a place to rest, a place to be held, because fundamentally, that is where the new is being birthed.

Chaos and Think Big, 10x not 10%

Chaos gives you a magic power that allows you to rethink things, to start over, to be bold and not trapped by the past. We live in a time between two stories — one that does not serve us anymore, and the other that has yet to be written. A time of  exploration, experimentation, and wondering. A time of uncertainty, but also one of the opportunities where taking bold bets will considerably payout, in particular in areas that prioritize care for people and the planet. To create a new renaissance.

Chaos in particular pushes me first and most importantly  to aim to make things 10x better, not just 10% better. And that is very liberating.

Innovating requires becoming a Chaos Pilot: Taking moonshots is no smooth sailing. It’s an inherently unpredictable and bumpy ride. Rather than shy away from the uncertainty, it’s best to just embrace it. That means challenging yourself to stare into the unknown and instead of being paralyzed by it, seeing it as a source of creative energy and momentum. The sooner you decide to surf the chaos, the easier the chaos gets — and could even be used to your advantage.

Chaos allows multiple collective view points to come and dance together. In fact, the lone inventor having a eureka moment is largely a myth; innovation comes from great diverse teams. Best innovations deliberately assembles teams from a wide range of backgrounds, cultures, and communities, to generate creative chaos and new ideas. Former rocket scientists work alongside concert pianists and puppeteers, and marine biologists mingling with physicists and machine learning experts. Or a mix of humans like the one in this cohort. 

Innovation Journey = Inner Journey

The journey of innovation is not always rosy, Chaos is never going to be predictable because that's exactly what it is. The same way as the innovation process, the moonshots finding. And it is not about thinking it’s all highs and cheers. Not at all. It is edgy, it is dark and light like shadows and brightness, it is death and rebirth, it is hearing all the voices, including the violent, the soothing, the unresting and inspiring ones. It is that that gives us some hints about what chaos stands for and lets the light in between the cracks for innovation to happen.

Embracing chaos will allow you to go from thinking this is totally crazy, to yes, that is going to be a thing.

It pushes you not to value the polished and being done with something journey, but the process of finding and learning something you don’t know.

Embracing chaos will allow you to offset the emotional path of least resistance, with radical candor, intellectual honesty, audicity, being willing to try everything, and yet being very humble and clear that almost everything you try will not work out!

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(((alchemy of chaos)))

The Truth of Chaos

Chaos, originally, was understood as a formless, nonlinear void. A dimension where all possibility lives, and where all creation - or organized chaos - arises. But the thing about a formless, nonlinear void is that it is absent of certainty, which tends to bring up a lot of fear. Fear of the void. Fear of the nothingness. Fear of the unknown. Fear of the end of the reality or realities we have come to know - in other words, fear of death.

Part of my work as facilitator is to continue to tap into what chaos truly is - not my beliefs about it or projections on it. At first I thought chaos was like that quote from Chögyam Trungpa: “The bad news is you’re falling through the air, nothing to hang onto, no parachute. The good news is there’s no ground.” And then, when I created a deeper dialogue with chaos, what struck me was this understanding of the paradigm of chaos that definitely goes against the grain of my previous understandings. As opposed to a free fall, it felt much more like a place to rest, a place to be held, because fundamentally, everything we know is simply organized chaos. And now, my most current thoughts/musings on it are: What if chaos is perpetual and unrelenting? What if it isn’t about “getting through” the chaos or “alchemizing” the chaos or “handling” the chaos so that we can return to some other state of non-chaos? What if this whole exercise is about cultivating a deep and everlasting relationship to chaos so that we may perpetually become within it? To keep jamming with it, in Primavera’s words?

Not-Knowing and Chaos

Dan Brown says in his book Origin, “despise chaos, create order.” This is our brain’s natural programming. And he also talks about how the exhilaration felt by early explorers was that they were glimpsing something that they had never before seen, and in that moment long held beliefs about their world and what they new would disintegrate in the face of new discovery. And that this was the point. And now more than ever, I feel and see so many people grappling with a new kind of reality: a reality in which no matter how hard we try, we cannot know the answers to these massive questions about how our society is functioning, and breaking, and who we are within that. The gaps in understanding are too large to comfortably allow our minds to fill in those gaps. Assumptions either don’t work, or they create significant dissonance. And I think that the last two years have presented the entire globe with a stark view of the true chaos of the shared reality we inhabit. The dissonance has been so great, and so painful.

Most people I know have a deep longing for peace. And chaos is seen as the opposite of peace, which is perhaps one of the reasons we try so hard to eliminate chaos. But what if we could re-contract our relationship with chaos, and the not knowing within that? What if we could create an avenue to experience peace in the midst of chaos, or even because of chaos? Is that even doable? What would be possible for how we are able to live, or what we are able to see, of what we allow ourselves to experience, discern, or decide?

And as Pablo said in session, what if chaos is a verb? What if chaos isn’t something to be alchemized, but instead a verb grounded in movement that we apply to catalyze the birth of all our desires?

Sitting with/within chaos causes parts of previously unknown aspects of the inner landscape to rise into being. The more I contemplate this, the more I sense that what is required of me is that I must allow myself to experience what it is to sit unflinching within the chaos…and trust that the biggest shift to cultivate this ability has to happen internally first.

In facing and embracing the truth of the chaos of not knowing, we can carry ourselves onwards and through into what is emerging.

Death and Chaos

It is said that one must fully turn towards death, and allow a full immersion in the contemplation and true understanding of it, in order to fully live. Personally, studying the bardo of death has been one of the most transformational journeys I’ve been on in recent years. Death and letting go is an essential part of vitality and life force, both as singular humans and as part of the greater ecology of planet earth. The cyclical nature of living systems remains to be one of the truest and surest experiences we can count on. Change is the only constant. So why then do we resist change and death of certainty with such vigor?

The collective fear of the void, the nothingness, the vast field of the unknown...causes people to reject the chaos, but really, it is an invitation into primordial possibility. A chance to actively engage with the great mystery. This void is the true nature of all that is, and we are just as much a part of that as we are part of the land of life and form. If you’re reading this, you have accomplished so much, and therefore you must have developed the skill of taking risks, but have you taken your risks with one foot still in certainty, just in case? What is it really like to jump with both feet into the void, and then to stand there/fall there/float there, and get comfortable being uncomfortable?

To me, at least in the context of this program, coming into right relationship with chaos involves coming into right relationship with death - death of your expectations, death of aspects of yourself that are holding you back, death of the need for certainty, death of old ways of being, death of patterns of governance, death of ego-fueled stories.

Certainty and Chaos

Certainty is the opposite of chaos, except through the frame that chaos is the only true certainty.
What is it that is so desirable about certainty?
What is it that is so (un)desirable about the great mystery?

Agreements are changing. Illusions we have clung to are disappearing.
Even though we are experiencing rapid change at unprecedented speeds, nature is here to remind us that the expiry of “life as we know it” is not only a normal part of any process of living systems, it is a vitally important part.
The snake that becomes blind for a time as it sheds its skin.
The caterpillar that becomes cellular soup in order to reform into a butterfly.
The buried seed that only sprouts after being covered in darkness and coming completely undone.
The dead fallen tree that gains a new life as it houses and fuels vital ecosystems within the forest.
I’m sure there are hundreds more examples like this.

What might you discover if you decided to use the unknown as a superpower? Is it possible that chaos = clarity, when you lean all the way in? What if a calibration point for how deeply or effectively you are opening to chaos is how much clarity you feel?

Chaos as Natural Order

The natural order of our world IS chaos, in the deepest form that we have scientifically discovered, on the quantum level inside each of our cells, in the depths of dark matter. Our entire world and everything we know, everything we can identify, everything we can relate to, the humans and trees and tables and butterflies and planets…it is all simply organized chaos. Once this realization landed for me, it made it much easier for me to open to chaos. Realizing that it is all unknown is what ultimately allows me to merge with the fear of the unknown, and allow more joy and possibility and trust and surrender.

However, this change has to happen internally first. And change comes most readily in the midst of chaos.

What would it mean for you if you considered that order and certainty are the illusion, and chaos is your true state?