Zone of Impossibility: Why Entrepreneurs Should Look For Impossible Challenges
There is a world of difference between almost impossible and impossible.
If you took physics in high school, you learned that it was impossible to see anything smaller than half the wavelength of light, no matter how powerful the microscope. This limitation is a hard, fixed law of physics, not a matter of how good the microscope is. It’s just a law of nature, proven mathematically by Ernst Abbe in 1873.
Except… Betzig and Hell figured out how to break this law, for which they won the Nobel prize in 2014. Now, there is no theoretical limit to the smallest size that can be visualized (the techniques basically use fluorescence to determine multiple tiny points in the object and produce a collage image. For an explanation, see this article). In the image below, the left is the best resolution you can get with a conventional microscope, and the right one is with a nanoscope.
The funny thing is, once they showed that it was not impossible, a slew of other people started coming up with ways to see things smaller than the wavelength of light. Perhaps the biggest advantage Betzig and Hell had was that they believed that it was possible. They were right — it was not impossible, it was just almost impossible.
There is a world of difference between something that’s impossible and something that’s almost impossible (just like there is a world of difference between a stock market that is perfectly efficient and one that is almost perfectly efficient — at least for people who are as talented as Warren Buffett).
And now that I’ve mentioned Buffett, this would be a good time to segue to business, which is what this post is about.
In general, the harder something is, the more value it can have. If you’re building an innovation-led company, what you want to do is to try to pursue things that are really, really hard to do — so hard that most people think they’re impossible. Things that are actually impossible of course have no value, so you wouldn’t want to do those, and things that are easy have low value. The things with the greatest value are things are almost impossible. Here is a graphic representation of the value-impossibility curve.
There is a zone of impossibility, where something is so hard that people think it’s impossible, but is actually possible. And where you automatically get a moat of defensibility once you achive it. If you can stay in that zone of impossibility, then you can build a great company. In fact, you could argue that the every truly great company was built in that zone of impossibility.
As an example, I was talking to a guy who works at Google, and he told me that the conventional wisdom was that to accomplish what Google did with its maps — to annotate it with all the additional information that it now has, and to street view every road — was impossible. The belief was: “That would take hundreds of thousands of hours to annotate a map of the world. It’s impossible.” So Google hired enough people to annotate it, an initiative they call Ground Truth. Sometimes when people say something is impossible, they just mean that it is a very big project that would be almost impossible to do. It turns out that this very difficult project has become one the most valuable products that Google has.
In fact, we’re surrounded by things that would seem impossible if someone hadn’t done it already, and I don’t mean things like breakthrough cancer drugs. I mean ordinary things. A friend of mine visited Russia few decades ago when it was still USSR, and he called the operator to get the phone number for a person in Moscow. The operator laughed at him and told him, “Do you know how many people live in Moscow? You expect me to have the number for every person in Moscow? That’s impossible.” (For those of you who are younger, every home in the U.S. would get these things each year called white pages that would list every phone number and name in their city.)
In industries where competitive pressures haven’t forced people to push the boundaries, you will often find companies thinking possible things are impossible (think Detroit in the 1970’s, when the zero defect was an impossible goal). The pharmaceutical industry is one of them. The profit margins are so wide in the industry that many companies have survived despite inefficiencies. In fact, I believe almost no revenue-producing pharmaceutical company has ever gone bankrupt. And very small percentage of non revenue-producing companies have ever gone bankrupt either.
What this means is that you will often hear in the pharmaceutical industry, “oh, that’s impossible,” when another company is doing the supposedly impossible thing just down the road. “Impossible” often means “we haven’t tried it” in drug development.
Early in my career, I learned a lesson: when you think something is impossible, it becomes impossible.
Once, I was involved in planning a launch of a product. The engineers at our company swore up and down that the fastest they could ship the product after approval was 60 days. They said they would have to break the laws of physics to do it any faster — until we had a teleconference with our partner to give them the news.
Upon hearing the timeline, the partner fell silent. Then they cleared their throat and said, “we usually ship within 48 hours of approval.” Once this information was relayed, and details emerged of how our partner managed this feat, our engineers changed the timeline to 48 hours.
When I was at Genentech, I was on the other side of this story. We had a teleconference to discuss unblinding timelines. Our partner told us they took 6 weeks between database lock and final readout of the study. Our statisticians cleared their throats and told them our management would never agree to that. The partner asked what our timeline was, and our statisticians told them, “We usually lock the database on Friday, read it out on Saturday, program any additional analysis on Sunday, and issue the press release announcing the results on Monday.”
Of course, the two above examples illustrate exceptional execution. Some things are impossible because you may not have the people with talent and experience to pull it off. What’s possible for one group may be impossible for another. When I was at another company, I tried to push the statisticians to move as fast as Genentech did. The head of the group was wise enough to tell me, “We just don’t have the people with the experience and skill to do that. We could try, but we would make mistakes. I recommend taking at least two weeks for this.” He was an extremely good manager, and I conceded that it would be a bad idea to try to meet a 48-hour timeline (by the way, just to brag about our people, at KindredBio, we did this in 48 hours).
So, there are many kinds of impossible things. There are things that are actually impossible, of course. But, there are things that are impossible because we don’t know how to do it, or don’t have the capabilities in that particular organization to do them. There are also things that seem impossible simply because they haven’t been done before, or because people believe they’re impossible. For those things, it turns out that people who don’t know that they are impossible, or mavericks who want to challenge the status quo, or people who have no choice but to make it work, can turn them into possibles.
We saw a clear example of this during COVID. The CEO of Merck told everyone that a vaccine approval in 2020 was impossible. In fact, he went as far as to call his competitors charlatans: “I think when people tell the public that there’s going to be a vaccine by the end of 2020, they do a grave disservice to the public.”
He noted that Merck was the best vaccine developer in the world, “Let me just give you one data point. In the last quarter century, there have only been seven, truly new vaccines introduced globally at the clinical practice… Merck has four, the rest of the world has three.”
Of course, in the end there were two vaccines approved in 2020. Unsurpisingly, Merck’s wasn’t one of them
Merck is in fact an excellent vaccine developer, and I’m sure they could have developed a COVID vaccine in 2020 as well. But, they didn’t believe it was possible.
Sometimes when we were making a strategic decision at my company, such as whether to pursue one drug or another, or one technology or another, one option was a lot more difficult but offered greater rewards. For example, we might have the option of trying a new, less proven technology to manufacture our product. And the technology, if it works, could give us a 5–10X cost advantage over our competitors.
A lot of people will shy away from the less-proven technology, because of the risks and because it will be harder. Other people will favor the new technology because of the rewards, despite the fact that it will be more difficult.
In many cases (obviously the risk/benefit has to make sense), I tell people we should choose the new technology because it will be more difficult, not despite the fact that it will be difficult. That’s because it’s only possible to build a competitive advantage if you are good at something that is hard to do, and your competitors are not. You can’t build a competitive advantage on something that’s easy, that anyone can do. In fact, unless your business model is a commodity/compete on price model, you might even outsource things that are really easy.
If you’re not outsourcing something, you might ask, what is it about this that we’re doing that puts it into the zone of impossibility? For example, when we developed drugs, we ran the programs internally. We ran the studies so efficiently that we did them in about half of the time and at half of the price of what it might take other companies. When we first laid out our development timelines, many people told us it was impossible. Five years out from founding the company, our teams completed five pivotal programs. Our protein engineering team of less than ten people has produced several dozen lead molecules, despite the fact that they had make almost every reagent from scratch (there are few commercially available veterinary reagents). The work they have done would have taken some other companies hundreds of people. Again, most people would say this was impossible.
The key take-away is that there is a world of difference between almost impossible and impossible. Almost impossible things, the things that most people think are impossible but are actually not, are where the most valuable innovation happens.
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“We’ll never survive!” — Buttercup
“Nonsense. You’re only saying that because no one ever has.” — Westly, from Princess Bride
