Early in my talk in Basel, I put three words on the screen and nothing else. Then I asked the room a question: who has heard a sentence start like this a million times? Who has said it a million times?
Most of the hands went up. There was laughter, the knowing kind. Everyone in that room had sat through the meeting where an idea is barely out of someone's mouth before somebody else says it.
The problem is…
I told them what I tell my own teams. Never start a sentence with these words.
It is not that problems don't exist. In drug development they are everywhere, and somebody has to find them. But the words do something to us before we have even finished the sentence. They put the mind into a state where it looks only for roadblocks. Once we are there, we stop seeing the openings, and the unusual idea in the room never gets a second look.
Ten minutes, no problem.
So I asked the audience for a small favor. Forget these three words for the next ten minutes. Be open to approaches that might sound unusual, and judge them by one goal: shorter development times, and new therapies that make it all the way to patients.
The approaches themselves were simple to say and hard to do. Give research its own clock. Learn from curing our companion animals. Choose the capital structure before the science. Each one sounds, at first hearing, like the start of a sentence that begins with those three words.
That is exactly the point. An outsider's best tool is the question everyone inside a field has stopped asking: why are you doing it that way? The habit of starting with the problem is how a field stops asking it.
What would it take?
That is the question I ended the talk with, and the one I would rather hear in every meeting. What would it take to shorten this by a year? What would it take to get this to patients? What would it take to cure cancer faster, together?
The problems are still there when you ask it that way. They simply arrive as things to solve, not reasons to stop.
The same few days in Basel opened two new doors for BioFund, which I wrote about in Two Doors, Opened in Basel. I do not think it was a coincidence. Ten minutes without a problem can go a long way.
PDF · 10 slides What the Biology Can't FixTry it at your next meeting. Ten minutes. See what comes up when nobody is allowed to start with a roadblock.
Written for the Family and a few close friends — please keep it among us for now.