Amanda Wilde (Host): Next, hear from one of the world's foremost experts in creativity, innovation, and critical thinking. Welcome to the Healthcare Executive Podcast, providing you with insightful commentary and developments in the world of healthcare leadership. To learn more, visit ACHE.org.

I'm your host, Amanda Wilde. And this podcast episode, we are joined by a remarkable guest, Ozan Varol. Ozan is a rocket scientist, turned award winning professor, number one best-selling author, and an expert on innovation and creativity. Recognized globally as a thought leader, he helps organizations re-imagine the status quo and launch groundbreaking ideas. Ozan Varol will be one of the keynote speakers at ACHE's 2025 Congress on Healthcare Leadership, which takes place in Houston, March 24th through the 27th. To learn more and register, visit ache.org/congress. Welcome, Ozan. Thank you so much for being here.

Ozan Varol: Thank you so much for having me on, Amanda.

Host: Well, as I've already referenced, you've been on a unique professional journey. Going back to your academic years, how and why did you pivot from astrophysics to law and now to speaking and writing?

Ozan Varol: I've had so many transformations, metamorphoses, deaths and rebirths in my life. I came to the US when I was 17 by myself with just a suitcase to my name, and majored in astrophysics at Cornell. I then worked on the operations team for the 2003 Mars Exploration Rovers Mission, where we sent two rovers, their names were Spirit and Opportunity, to Mars. And I absolutely loved working on that mission. I learned so much. And yet, there was a disconnect between the really practical applications that I was doing on the Mars Mission and then the really theoretical astrophysics classes that I was taking in college. And I realized that I didn't want to go get a PhD in Astrophysics, and I had gotten what I wanted to get out of Astrophysics by working on this, what ended up being one of the most successful interplanetary missions in history.

And so, I found myself becoming more and more interested in the physics of society. And that led me to consider law school. When I was in college, I took a law class. I really enjoyed that, ended up going to law school, becoming a law professor. And I did that for 10 years. I got tenure. I was one of the youngest tenured faculty members. And a couple of years after I got tenure, I realized that it's time for another transformation. I had stopped learning and growing. I'd been teaching the same classes for years and years and years and answering the same types of questions and writing the same types of academic papers that only like 10 people in my subspecialty field would read. And I was really yearning to branch out and help other organizations, help other individuals re-imagine themselves, re-imagine the status quo in the way that I had in my life. And so, that led me to write my first mainstream book, Think Like a Rocket Scientist, which became a global bestseller and that launched my career in speaking and writing.

Host: A transformative journey lead by example. Were there leaders for you that have influenced your career journey?

Ozan Varol: Absolutely. There's so many. I draw inspiration from a wide range of people across really different fields because leadership isn't really confined to one industry or discipline. So, there's numerous individuals that have influenced me. One leader that comes to mind immediately is Adam Grant. He's a friend and a mentor in many ways. And for those who don't know him, he's an organizational psychologist, a professor at Wharton. And I watched him transition from academia. I mean, he was still teaching, but he started to write these groundbreaking mainstream books. And to me, he was a symbol of the possibilities of what can happen when you don't just stick to your lane, when you don't stay within the lines of a single path, you can branch out, explore new possibilities and still remain grounded from where you came from. Adam was a huge source of inspiration for me as I was contemplating a similar journey of my own.

Host: Taking off on that, your address at ACHE's 2025 Congress on Healthcare Leadership will be exploring how healthcare leaders can apply moonshot thinking to their work. What is moonshot thinking and what can attendees expect to hear in your remarks?

Ozan Varol: I think the best way to explain moonshot thinking is to take us back to the original moonshot, which was President Kennedy stepping up to the podium at Rice University in 1962 and pledging to land a man on the moon before the end of the decade. Now, at the time, this promise, this pledge was quite literally a moonshot. Many of the people in the audience thought that Kennedy was out of his mind. Even officials at NASA thought that he was promising the impossible. Because so much of what would be required to actually put a man on the moon just hadn't been done yet. No American astronaut had done a spacewalk before. Two spacecrafts had never docked together in space before. NASA didn't know if the surface of the moon was solid enough so that like a lander could land on it. They didn't know if the radios would work on the moon. Kennedy said some of the metals required to build the rockets haven't even been invented. We jumped into the cosmic void and hoped that we'd grow wings on the way up. And just less than seven years after Kennedy's pledge, Neil Armstrong took his giant leap for mankind.

And I think a lot of people look at that and say, "Well, that was a triumph of technology." But it really wasn't. It was the triumph of a certain thought process that rocket scientists used to turn the seemingly impossible into the possible. And that's moonshot thinking. And moonshot thinking is really the intersection of idealism and pragmatism. It's not just about dreaming big. It's about using strategies that I'll cover in my address at the ACHE Congress on Healthcare Leadership this year to give people really concrete strategies to apply this mindset in their own lives, to reimagine the status quo, to take a land their own moonshots, and to create an extraordinary advantage to shape the future of their industries through this moonshot model that I cover in my book, Think Like a Rocket Scientist.

Host: So when we're reimagining boundaries and letting nothing be impossible, like the sky is not the limit, and that in conjunction with the fact that we're in a time when our world is busier and more automated than ever, do we have to rethink where creativity fits in and where it's most important?

Ozan Varol: Absolutely. We live in a world, as you said, Amanda, where busyness has become this badge of honor. Most of us are moving from one email to the next, one notification to the next, one meeting to the next, always in this reaction mode, always focused on what's right in front of us.

But here's the problem, if you're constantly focused on what is, you'll only create more of what is. Creativity is about what could be. It's that bridge between the present and the possible. But if you don't carve out time to dream, if you don't step out of the trenches and intentionally create space for new ideas, you'll stay stuck doing what you've always done.

So, creativity in this day and age of just constant busyness doesn't just happen, it requires being intentional. And I call this putting yourself on airplane mode, we put our own devices on airplane mode. There's so much value in putting ourselves on airplane mode. When you ask people, where do you get your best ideas? Most people will say the shower. And if you think about it, it makes sense because the shower is like one of the only moments in your day where you're free of interruptions, you're free of notifications, you're in the solitary environment and You let your mind drift. You start daydreaming, and all of these amazing ideas begin to bubble up to the surface. Imagine the types of ideas that you'd be able to create if you can replicate those shower like conditions throughout the day, sitting and staring at ceiling for a few minutes, going for a walk. There's so many stories of scientists literally walking themselves into the right answer. They'll be stuck on a problem and instead of staying stuck, they'll get up, move, go for a walk. Now, this is important. No audio book, no podcasts, just you and your thoughts. And then, the answer arrives as if by magic. Because research shows that when you let your mind drift, your mind is actually hard at work still. Your subconscious is hard at work. It's making associations. It's marrying new and old ideas to generate breakthrough ideas that you otherwise would have missed. And because we're living in such an age of busyness, this has to be intentional. You have to be intentional about carving out the spaces, otherwise you won't be able to generate great ideas.

Host: So, you have to make room for this kind of thinking. You talked about JFK and moonshot thinking. What are some examples of how you've seen individuals unlock their full potential by reimagining the status quo?

Ozan Varol: Yeah. So many examples, because I think it's impossible to unlock your full potential unless you're re imagining the status quo. So, the re-imagination of the status quo, re-imagination of yourself, of your identity, of the lives you lived in the past becomes essential to unlocking your full potential.

But let's just stick to rocket science for a moment and let me bring in a more modern example of how re-imagination can unlock innovation. And I'll give an example from SpaceX here. SpaceX, it's a private company that started with this audacious goal of sending humans to Mars. Now, they were facing a significant financial constraint. They wanted to be able to send people to space at like 40 times less than the ordinary cost. And you can't do that by just simply sticking to the same playbook that NASA and the other industry giants had used in the past. They had to reimagine the status quo. They had to think differently to be able to manage this significant financial constraint that they were facing.

So, one of the innovations that came out of that reimagination mindset was the idea of reusable rockets. So for decades, rockets that carried their cargo into orbit couldn't be reused. They would burn up in the atmosphere or plunge into the ocean, requiring an entirely new rocket to be built. Now, imagine doing that for a moment with commercial flights. I'm in Portland right now, I fly to New York City, passenger's deplane, and someone steps up to the plane and just torches it, lights it on fire. Sounds ridiculous, but that's what we did with rockets for decades. And actually, the price of a modern rocket is about the same as a Boeing 737, but commercial flights are so much cheaper than spaceflights because airplanes, unlike rockets, can be reused over and over and over again.

Well, SpaceX, along with Blue Origin, so these two private space companies are on their way to changing that. We now have these reusable rockets that can land back on solid ground after they deliver their cargo into orbit. We have a landing pad next to the launch pad at Kennedy Space Center now, and that's an entirely new thing in rocket science. Simply because these newer companies came along and put a question mark at the end of an assumption that all of these insiders were taking for granted. Rockets cannot be reused. And the simple re-imagination of that outdated assumption led to all of these innovations, reusable rockets being one of them, that are on their way to significantly cutting the cost of spaceflight.

Host: As leaders face uncertainty and disruptions in their field, how can they continue to keep up with a culture of innovation? Sometimes it seems like that's the first thing to go.

Ozan Varol: The premise of this question is worth challenging. It's worth challenging because uncertainty and disruption aren't actually antagonistic to innovation. They are essential to it. So, all progress happens in uncertain conditions.

Certainty is really cheap these days. Answers are cheap. If your job can be boiled down to following a script or a playbook, like do A, and then do B, and then do C, a computer can now do it faster and cheaper and without needing any coffee breaks. And so, the real value is in uncertainty. It's in the ability to navigate ambiguity, to be able to make decisions without a proven playbook, to be able to explore the edges, the uncharted territories that you haven't explored before.

And the same, I think, goes for disruption. Disruption isn't something to fear, it's something to embrace. Uninterrupted success, and this is something that I'll cover in the keynote, uninterrupted success can actually be dangerous. It can be dangerous because it lulls organizations into complacency.

Success can easily become the stop sign to progress, right? Uninterrupted success. Because when people see uninterrupted success, they just assume, "Well, we can keep doing what we've always done. We can simply follow the same process that led to success last year and nothing can go wrong." And that's a really, really dangerous mindset. Disruption is a force that shakes us out of that business-as-usual mindset and compels us to rethink everything, our assumptions, our processes, the way that we create value.

And so, to come back to your question of how do leaders build a culture of innovation in uncertain and disruptive times? Well, they stop clinging to certainty, they stop clinging to the status quo and instead cultivate a mindset that actually sees these uncertain conditions and disruptive conditions as opportunities. They encourage their teams to experiment, to take risks, to question the status quo. They create environments where it's safe to make intelligent failures because failure is a raw material of innovation.

And so, leaders who embrace uncertainty and disruption don't just keep up with innovation, they drive it. And most importantly, they don't wait for the fog to clear before they act, because they know in this day and age that it is always going to be foggy out there. It's always going to be uncertain. And instead of waiting for the fog to clear, which it will never do, they take both steps forward and trust that the path will reveal itself as you take each step forward.

Host: That can be a challenge because like you said, we like certainty, but we have to recognize that things are fluid and that we are fluid so that the challenges and even failures are really opportunities and part of the process.

Ozan Varol: Absolutely.

Host: Ozan Varol, thank you so much for joining us today and sharing your profound insights into innovation and creativity in healthcare leadership.

Ozan Varol: Thank you so much for having me on, Amanda. I'm looking forward to the keynote.

Host: Ozan Varol will be one of the keynote speakers at ACHE's 2025 Congress on Healthcare Leadership, which takes place March 24th through the 27th in Houston. To learn more and register, visit ache.org/congress. Subscribe so you won't miss an episode and stay tuned for our next discussion. This is Healthcare Executive Podcast from the American College of Healthcare Executives.