Bullets before Cannonballs

Bullets before Cannonballs

If you’re still gathering information, don’t get overinvested in just one option. Keep useful options open by taking small, low-risk steps before making a major commitment.

Look for tests that can tell you something useful without consuming the resources you would need for a full commitment. In Great by Choice, Morten Hansen and Jim Collins call this approach shooting bullets before cannonballs:2

Picture yourself at sea, a hostile ship bearing down on you. You have a limited amount of gunpowder. You take all your gunpowder and use it to fire a big cannonball. The cannonball flies out over the ocean … and misses the target, off by 40 degrees. You turn to your stockpile and discover that you’re out of gunpowder. You die.

But suppose instead that when you see the ship bearing down, you take a little bit of gunpowder and fire a bullet. It misses by 40 degrees. You make another bullet and fire. It misses by 30 degrees. You make a third bullet and fire, missing by only 10 degrees. The next bullet hits—ping!—the hull of the oncoming ship. Now, you take all the remaining gunpowder and fire a big cannonball along the same line of sight, which sinks the enemy ship. You live.3

Here’s an example of bullets before cannonballs that I witnessed in real life. A client of mine—we’ll call him Solomon—was looking to hire someone to run his manufacturing business so he could step down and pursue other opportunities. He tried twice to choose a CEO to replace him. But each time, while the candidate looked great on paper, they didn’t work out in practice.

I recommended that instead of investing heavily in one candidate and turning down others, he should have two or three candidates perform a small test project lasting a couple weeks. These small simultaneous tests would maintain his optionality, and seeing the candidates perform in real life could reveal things that interviews and résumés had missed.

The two candidates were paid well for their time and tasked with a project that required them to work with the team to understand the problem, gather information, and chart a course forward.

The plan worked, and it yielded a surprising result: the candidate with the less impressive résumé was far and away the best with the team and made recommendations that ended up saving Solomon’s company more than they’d paid for the project. More importantly, if neither of the candidates had worked out, the company wasn’t saddled with an expensive exit cost.

Performing small, low-risk experiments on multiple options—in other words, shooting bullets and calibrating—keeps your options open before you commit the bulk of your resources to shooting a cannonball. Thinking about medical school? Shadow a doctor or a resident for a day. Take the MCAT and see what you score, or apply to colleges and see where you’re accepted. Thinking about a new career? Try doing it freelance a few nights per week first. Thinking about launching a new product? See if people are willing to pay for it before you build it.

Preserving options carries a cost and can make you feel like you’re missing out. It’s hard watching others take action sometimes, even when those actions don’t make sense for you. Don’t be fooled! This is the social default at work. It tempts you to feel like it’s okay to fail so long as you’re part of the crowd.

While some people are quick to join the crowd, others prefer to be correct. Preserving optionality can make you look stupid in the short term, which means that from time to time you’ll have to tolerate people treating you like you’re a fool. Waiting can attract criticism even when keeping your options open makes sense.

Warren Buffett sat out most of the dot-com craze of the late ’90s, and appeared to miss the stampeding bull market that came with it. People began chattering that he’d lost his touch. He may have looked stupid to some speculators for a few years—until the tech bubble burst and he still had tremendous cash reserves.