The Power of Asking The Right Questions: What Traditional Entrepreneurs Stand to Learn From Policy Entrepreneurship

By Sanjiv Goyal Featuring Tom Kalil

In this article, you will learn about:

• Why the key to collaboration is communication.
• What traditional entrepreneurs can learn from policy entrepreneurship.
• How policy entrepreneurship affects the economy.
• How to know if you’ve set an ambitious goal.
• Which societal problems should be a top priority for our government.
• Why collective systems thinking and systemic global solutions are the future.
• What we need to focus on to prevent future pandemics.

The Power of Language

Language builds bridges. Though most Americans speak English, different parts of the population may as well be speaking different languages. In a country so vast, we have to be able to work together. That means convincing diverse groups of people, government officials, investors, and authority figures to work toward common causes.

The success of teamwork largely comes down to focus. With so many distractions how do we get ourselves and others to pay attention? We have to utilize the power of language. The way to get anyone to focus on something is to ask a question.

Curiosity is the cure, but you have to be selective about which questions you ask. In a post COVID19 world, what questions should we be asking right now? What questions will lead us to a brighter future? What questions will get us through this pandemic and prevent another? For answers to these queries, I consulted Tom Kalil, Chief Innovation Officer at Schmidt Futures. He is a master of asking the right questions.

Tom advised the Clinton and Obama administrations serving as the Senior Advisor for Science, Technology, and Innovation for the U.S. National Economic Council, and the Deputy Director for Policy in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, respectively.

While working in the White House, Tom found that scientists, entrepreneurs, and engineers spoke one language, and policymakers and members of Congress spoke another. The scientific community came to him with findings that had vast implications, and he would turn the technobabble into real-world examples accessible to government officials.

Painting a picture visually, Tom put the data into terms anyone could understand:

“We could store the Library of Congress in a device the size of a sugar cube.”

“We could detect cancerous tumors before they are visible to the human eye.”

“We could develop materials that were stronger than steel at a fraction of the weight.”

Tom had the difficult task of getting our governing body to concentrate on what he believed were top innovative priorities. He knew that the key to convincing them was asking the right questions. In order to get funding for projects, he got Congress to pay attention to the benefits by asking and answering:

1. What have we gotten for the investment we have already made?
2. What might be possible if we continue to make those investments in R&D

and create an environment that fosters private-sector innovation?

The Role of Entrepreneurship in National Innovation

The government makes foundational investments in long-term research but ultimately it is entrepreneurs that take those insights and turn them into commercial products and services. The pace of the private sector often outperforms the pace of government research.

What Kalil was practicing is called policy entrepreneurship. A policy entrepreneur is someone who, “from outside the formal positions of government, introduces, translates, and helps implement new ideas into public practice.”

How is this different from traditional entrepreneurship?

Tenets of Traditional Entrepreneurship:

• Identifying unmet needs in the marketplace
• Raising capital
• Creating a startup
• Recruiting employees
• Developing a product or service in order to grow into a financially successful firm

Tenets of Policy Entrepreneurship:

• Identifying opportunities for policy change
• Gathering resources for a cause
• Connecting policy problems to policy solutions
• Recruiting and connecting people who can affect change
• Promoting policy innovations by telling new stories/making arguments that break down traditional alignments of interests

One way to think about policy entrepreneurship is that it functions to identify problems and define and frame those problems, and then say what are we going to do about them?

The root of any entrepreneurial venture is accountability. You have a goal you are trying to achieve and there is some set of actions by particular individuals and organizations that you think will move us in the right direction. You strive to create a coherent relationship between ends and means for the benefit of all.

Traditional entrepreneurship seeks to answer the questions: How can we solve a problem or meet a need in an efficient and profitable way? How can this be improved and marketed?

Policy entrepreneurship asks: How can you be a champion for change? What will this development mean for people? Who do I need to connect to make this happen?

Both are concerned with making ideas (the unseen) tangible in the world (seen).

The Power of Asking the Right Questions

Asking the right questions sets everything in motion. However, in order for the process to work, you must stay curious and spend time envisioning possible outcomes. If you start asking the right questions, they lead you to the next right questions and so on and so forth until you arrive at the “right” answers.

When Tom worked at the White House, he was exposed to innovative ideas in a similar way that a venture capitalist hears pitches from entrepreneurs. He identified the ideas that were aligned with the goals of the Administration and then figured out the coalition that would be needed to make them happen.

In order to get the “right” answers, Tom would pose the following question to his visitors: “In the early 1960’s President Kennedy challenged the great minds of our country to find a way to put people on the moon and have them safely return. Now, fifty years later, what are the similarly ambitious goals we should be striving to meet in the 21st century?”

Most people would look at him and say, “That’s a really good question.” But once in a while, he would get a good answer. Once he had a worthwhile “Moonshot”, he would then ask the people presenting it the next set of questions.

He would ask them to imagine they had a meeting with the President in the Oval Office. The President tells them: If you give me a good idea and you explain to me why you are excited about it, I will call anyone on the planet to set it in motion. It can even be a conference call. I can direct people who are in the government, and outside of government, I can influence people by challenging them to do something.

All you need to do is:

1. Tell me what your idea is.
2. Tell me who to call to make it happen.
3. Tell me what I have to ask them to do.

In his thought experiment, Kalil marries asking the right questions with visioning, a winning combination.

How Can We Prevent Another Pandemic?

What are the “right” questions we could be asking to solve this problem? According to Tom, there are three general questions you can apply to any issue to get results.

In terms of a goal:

1. Where are we today? (As of 2020)
2. Where do we want to be? (short or long-term)
3. How would we get there?

If we apply that to COVID 19, we are living in a disrupted, chaotic world. Where do we want to be? Better prepared for the next pandemic or global health crisis. In many ways, our response or attempt at a response failed. “Better prepared” isn’t quantifiable.

The better question is: What specifically would we need to do in order to be better prepared? For one, decreasing the time it takes to produce, test, and release new drugs. What else would we need to do? These are the questions we have to come together as a collective and find the answers to by working together.

Conclusion

Tom Kalil’s stories and achievements demonstrate how powerful communication skills and asking the right questions can be. In this uncertain era of history, we must learn to work together to tackle the problems facing us all. The principles of policy entrepreneurship exemplify a systemic manner of approaching obstacles that would serve us well to apply across the board.

Where could you apply some iteration of these thought experiments in your life and or business? I’m curious to hear your thoughts. Please leave your own useful questions and ideas about Pandemic preparedness below.

If you like what you have read and are looking for more thought-provoking discussions check out the PanIIT Conference Global Summit 2020 starting on December 4th. This conference is an opportunity to coinvent and codefine paradigms for the new world. We hope you will join us.