Loonshots: How To Nurture The Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, And Transform Industries

By: Safi Bahcall
New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2019  |  249 Pp. Hardcover  | ISBN 978-1-250-18596-9

Coming from a background in medical innovation and organizational consulting, Safi Bahcall offers insights into how groups of people innovate. For ministries professionals—whether they are pastors seeking to help a church try something new, judicatory executives seeking to support congregations, or seminary professors seeking to nurture budding leaders—these are common questions: How do we get pastors to be creative? How do we get churches to take risks and try new things? Bahcall’s answer to these questions is to have leaders be on the lookout for “loonshots.” Loonshots are “widely dismissed ideas whose champions are often written off as crazy” (2). With examples that range from the invention of the transistor to the development of Star Wars, Bahcall uses principles from the physics of phase transitions (think water becoming ice) to help leaders understand how to nurture fledgling ideas into reality. He wants to change the structure rather than the culture of organizations in order to support creativity.

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Reviewed by:
Michael Wilson
Donegal Presbytery
Lancaster, Pennsylvania
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