Sometimes these nuts are individuals -- loony inventors who, in the solitude of their laboratory or in very public battles with the saner world, accomplish something everyone else knew was impossible. Sometimes these nuts travel in herds -- banding together in organized skunk works to, again, accomplish something everyone else knew was impossible. In either case, these nuts have converted the impossible into the possible. They have proven that it can be done -- or so it would seem.
And, yet, what have they really proven? Maybe not very much. Maybe all they have demonstrated is that an individual nut or a hoard of nuts -- with every nut being quite certified and obviously driven -- can accomplish something that has eluded normal people. How can we replicate them?
This creates the challenge of "going to scale." Sure, you can do it in the small. But can you do it in the large?
At Garfield High School in East Los Angeles, Jaime Escalante proved that you could teach calculus to underachieving Latino students. Or, at least, he proved that he and his colleagues could do it. But can everyone else do it in every other school? Indeed, can anyone else do it anywhere? Obviously not. When Escalante and his colleagues left Garfield High, much of their success left too.
Certainly, Escalante created his success with an innovative pedagogical strategy that matched his students and their circumstances. Still, his success was not purely a function of a new, innovative teaching technology. His success was also dependent upon the maniacal drive of the certified nut.
All this exposes a fundamental flaw in one of government's most attractive strategies for innovation: the pilot project. A pilot project is designed to reveal whether a new idea is feasible or not. A pilot project is a small-scale experiment that, with a limited investment of resources, can test the potential of some nut's idea.
Indeed, the argument for a pilot project is quite persuasive: Don't devote scarce resources trying to make a new idea work everywhere. The most likely result will be to waste those resources. After all, most ideas propounded by nuts are -- well -- nutty. And government can embarrass itself enough trying to make logical things work. Why should government risk embarrassing itself on an untested -- that is, nutty -- idea? Instead, government should first put it to a test.
And thus, another pilot project is born.The pilot is given a small budget. The money is not overly generous, but it appears to be adequate to test the idea. After all, if the pilot does prove effective, it will have to be implemented in competition with all the demands on the government's budget. Funding will never be generous, so an experiment with a profligate budget will not provide a real test.
But, the pilot attracts another resource -- something even more valuable than money. A pilot attracts nuts. Who would go to work on something that is guaranteed to be short-term and not guaranteed to work? Only a nut. Only someone who is driven to make it work. Only someone who is blessed with the maniacal belief that it can be made to work.
Sometimes, of course, these nuts are wrong. Sometimes, despite their driven devotion, they can't make it work. Sometimes the pilot proves what the skeptics said all along: This idea will never work.
Sometimes, however, the nuts are right. Sometimes, they are able to make the idea work. Yet what have they proven? All they have really proven is that with limited funding and unlimited determination, the idea will work.
Can the idea work in normal circumstances? Can normal humans -- people who have real families, eat dinner before 9 p.m., and go to baseball games -- make it work? This isn't obvious. Certainly, the pilot project hasn't proven it.
Peter Drucker once observed: "Whenever anything is being accomplished, it is being done, I have learned, by a monomaniac with a mission." Pilot projects attract monomaniacs with missions. Escalante was certainly such a monomaniac.
In pursuit of their mission, these monomaniacs are innovative. They have a mission, and in their drive to accomplish it they are willing to experiment will all sorts of innovative ideas. These monomaniacs will do whatever it takes. That is why we think they are nuts.
And, that is why it is difficult to replicate their success. That is why it is difficult to take something that has worked in a pilot project and take it to scale.
Going to scale requires that the pilot project be replicated by ordinary humans -- not by monomaniacs, but by people who lead normal lives. The monomaniacs who made the pilot project such a wonderful success can't take it to scale. There aren't enough of them.
The fallacy of the pilot project is that to replicate the innovation that the pilot produced, we also have to replicate the nuts. And, as we all know, human nuts don't grow on trees.
