It Must be Dumb Luck

I grabbed a seat at the back of the large meeting room. Tables had been set up for the audience to face the speaker. He was a prominent, successful business coach who had helped countless people improve their lives. I sat at the back, because I knew I would struggle to keep quiet. I had already decided he couldn’t help me, but I showed up anyway.

Why?

I knew he couldn’t help me because I had tried these techniques before and failed. I came anyway because maybe, just maybe, he would show me what I had missed. Maybe there was a secret, an approach, a technique that had escaped me.

Then he started his talk, “We’re going to take the same business planning you have used to make your companies successful and apply it to our personal lives.” I stifled a groan. “I want you to visualize the best possible future you can imagine, and then we’re going to work our way back toward the present moment, working out the steps you will need to take to get there.”

The presentation was less than ten minutes old and I already wanted to leave.

I never said planning was a bad idea…

Look, I don’t want to be the guy that says planning is bad. Hell, I am all for preparation. But so much business planning assumes a level of control I often don’t get to make. It assumes you can actually control most if not all of the variables in your plan. What did Schwarzkopf say about war and plans? Thank God I’ve never been to war, but in my experience life gets a vote, and it rarely votes for my plan.

When you can start at the end and work back to the beginning, you are doing what is called causal chain planning. And it works great when you are planning for things you do repeatedly. However, what kind of planning do you use when you are doing something for the first time? Like say, making a new video game on new hardware?

Doing the Impossible

The game studio on third street in Phoenix looked like a giant HP ink jet printer. We sat in the windowless building overlooking the motion capture stage while the publisher ground through every page of game design. The guy writing the checks wanted to discuss every feature. Why? Because they didn’t trust us. They didn’t believe we would ship our newly contracted jetski¹ racing game on time or on budget. And they were right not to trust us. We were game developers. Notoriously unreliable. Every article I ever read interviewing developers started with the words, “We ran out of time.”

But their solution wasn’t a solution. They believed they could paper us to reliability. Document it all. Schedule it all. And we let them believe that.

After the meeting, I turned to the tech lead Doug and asked how he felt about the schedule. He said, “It really doesn’t matter what I think.” I asked why. “Because I have absolutely no idea how we’re going to make a jetski work on this hardware.”

Putting Fun in a Box

It turns out some things are easy to ask for, but nearly impossible to do. Despite having already developed a hit racing game² for the PlayStation 2, we couldn’t just put “quads on water” and call it done. The publisher wanted us to give them a nice linear schedule, one that would look like stacking lego bricks to make a nice pretty toy. Building physics based racing games however, was a lot more like building a ship in a bottle. It all looked like just so many toothpicks in a pile until you pulled the string and the model stood up. If it stood up.

Pushing the console hardware boundaries made people buy our games. And people buying our games made publishers want to work with us. Until they saw how we worked.

While the artists and designers got to work building levels and models on the publisher’s schedule, the real work started as the lead engineer sat in his office, poking and prodding the PlayStation 2’s development kit. We had only just recently gotten a full set of documents translated from Japanese. When I asked him how it was going, his answer was always the same, “I still don’t know what it can do.”

The night that changed our fortunes, came like any other, with an engineer at his desk, waiting for code to compile. As Doug was glancing over the newly translated manuals for the graphics processor, he saw a command that didn’t make any sense. “Why is there a read command on that buffer?” He hadn’t noticed it before. If he had, he’d probably ignored it. You fed this special piece of hardware polygons and textures and it spit out graphics you could render on the screen. Reading from that pipeline would be like trying to pull a bullet back out of the barrel of a machine gun. Then it hit him. “Holy crap.” He aborted his code and started to type.

The next morning he explained to me and the game lead. “I know how to do the water,” he said with a grin. “We’re going to use the GPU like a spreadsheet.” Doug realized that he could use the specialized computer that rendered graphics to calculate water displacements. The jetski would ride around basically on a rubbery sheet. And the best part of it? The special little computer could calculate the light reflecting off the water’s surface at the same time. It was as close to free as you could get in video games.

And nothing about that discovery was in the production plan. How could it be? How do you plan for discovery?

Could it Be Dumb Luck?

My dad was one of the most brilliant engineers I ever knew. He called himself a hired gun, because companies constantly sought him out to solve their hardest problems, the problems other engineers didn’t even know what to do with. After we got the jetski game on track, I called my Dad and asked him, why he thought he was so good at solving problems. When he told me the answer, I thought he was being a smart ass. But he was serious. “No, Scott,” he said. “It’s Dumb Luck.”

I pictured my Dad standing at his workbench as he talked. He always worked at a bench. Covered in loose leaf paper, electronic components and his trusty oscilloscope.

“You solve problems by dumb luck?” I repeated.

“Well, there’s a process,” he expanded. “Three steps.”

What did I have to lose? “What are the steps?”

“Step 1. Set your intention. You need to know what you are looking for.”

“That sounds suspiciously like The Secret to me,” I said warily.

“The Secret?” he replied. “Never heard of it.”

“What’s the second step?”

“Get in motion.”

“And the third step?”

“Pay attention.”

“That’s your third step? Pay attention?”

“Believe it or not, that’s the step most people miss. So many people get caught up in what they think should happen, they miss what is actually happening.”

I paused for a moment. I could see that. Hell, I’d done that myself. “Okay, so intention, motion, attention. But how does that work?”

“Very well,” he said with a laugh. “It has never let me down.”

“Why do you call that dumb luck?” I asked.

“Because a lot of people have asked me how I am able to walk in and solve problems that have stumped their engineering teams for months.” I remembered most of his contracts were just a few months, ninety days tops. “When I tell them my process,” he continued, “they don’t believe me, so then I tell them, ‘it must be Dumb Luck.’ After all, what else could it be?”

I laughed. “Yeah, I can see that.”

I thought about Doug. He’d had intention. He needed a way to render water, but didn’t know how. Nevertheless, he got in motion. Sure he read the documentation, but he was also trying everything he could think of. He tried to simulate water the traditional way, using brute force computing power, but there wasn’t enough. He tried to simplify the math, but he couldn’t. A tire touches ground in a very small area, like a point. A jetski is a surface smashing into another surface and distorting it. He didn’t need one math unit, he needed thousands of them. He even tried to write the math in microcode to see if he could get it to run faster. When he noticed the read mechanism, however everything changed. That single command turned the graphics pipeline into the thousands of little math units he needed. And he found it, because he was paying attention. The thing that didn’t fit his preconceived notion of what a graphics card should or could do jumped out at him. An anomaly became an opportunity. And from there magic happened. That game went on to sell more than a million copies.

But That Can’t Be Right! Can it?

A few days after attending the life planning session, I came across a podcast, that reminded me of my Dad’s Dumb Luck theory. Dr. Saras D. Sarasvathy,³ at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business is a pioneer in “Effectuation logic.” Dr. Sarasvathy studied nearly 30 entrepreneurs, selected using strict criteria. They had to be not only serial entrepreneurs, but each needed to have a failure and to have taken company public. In studying them, Dr. Sarasvathy discovered they all used a surprisingly simple, yet robust methodology. They skipped the traditional business plans, and, as she described it, “They stated where they were, with what they had, and they figured out what they could do.” Put more succinctly, they had an idea, explored it, and followed where it led. She called it the Effectual Entrepreneurship.

I heard echoes of intention, motion, and attention. Dumb luck perhaps?

Thanks, Dad.

Footnotes