This is Vega. One star. It is the only thing in the photograph.
I took it last night with a Celestron CPC, a 15 mm Plössl eyepiece, and an iPhone held to the glass. Amateur equipment, amateur behind it. No observatory would look twice. I need to buy a real camera — but notice the order. The test came first. The investment comes second, and only because the test told me it was worth making.
The caption is where the argument lives: a stack of the best 30% of 1,921 frames.
I did not take one photograph. I took one thousand nine hundred and twenty-one, and discarded roughly one thousand three hundred and forty of them.
It is called lucky imaging. Between the telescope and the star sits a column of turbulent air that smears everything into a wobbling blur. You cannot calm it. You cannot schedule it. You cannot put it in a Gantt chart. What you can do is expose again and again, knowing that occasionally the air will steady for a fraction of a second — and then keep only those moments.
Nobody can tell you in advance which frames those will be. That is the entire point. If you could identify the good frames beforehand, you would only need one.
And note what made 1,921 attempts possible: not skill, not budget, not a plan. Cheapness. The most underrated variable in the whole of innovation management is the unit cost of one attempt. Drive it low enough and you no longer need to be right in advance — you only need to be willing to look, and honest about what you throw away.
Every organisation I have watched fail at uncertainty made the same move: it raised the cost of a single attempt until it could only afford one, then spent all its intelligence defending that one. It bought the camera first, and then had to prove the purchase was correct.
The right sequence is the opposite, and it is not a compromise — it is how you earn the right to spend. Test cheaply, learn what is actually there, and let the investment case be written by evidence you already hold rather than by a forecast you hope survives contact with reality. In Innovation by Design this sits at the heart of the 5i Framework: iterate, incubate, intensify — and only then institutionalize, when the discounted cash flow and internal rate of return are calculated on something you have measured rather than something you have imagined.
Where this begins
When Christer Fuglesang wrote the foreword to our third volume, Innovation by Design — written with my co-author Gerry Purcell — he did not open with rockets. He opened with the telescope.
He describes Galileo building one of the first telescopes in 1609, pointing it upward, and finding four moons circling Jupiter. An amazing discovery, as Christer puts it. And then the line that has stayed with me: “With innovation we learn, and by learning we can innovate even more.”
Now sit with what Galileo actually did.
He could not have written a business case for the moons of Jupiter. He did not know they were there. There was no budget line, no timetable, no projected return, no risk register. There was an instrument, a direction, and the willingness to look at something nobody had looked at properly before.
Had Galileo been required to justify the expenditure in advance, with a defined deliverable and a completion date, he would have found nothing. You cannot forecast a discovery. The requirement to forecast it is precisely what prevents it.
Four hundred and seventeen years later I pointed a telescope at Vega and got 1,921 frames. Same instrument category. Same posture. Same refusal to know beforehand.
The trap
You cannot ask for a budget or a timetable for something genuinely uncertain. Yet the budget and the timetable are demanded anyway. So the organisation proceeds only with what is already known — the business case, the business plan, the strategy, the project plan. One carefully justified exposure, everything staked on it.
Too little. Too late. Far too high a cost.
This is how a company declines. It is how a kingdom declines. It is how a society declines.
We open Innovation by Design with a claim that some readers found uncomfortable: the past can no longer be a predictor of the future. Not because history stopped mattering, but because the forces reshaping the world now move faster than the base rates your forecasts are built on. In the book we group the conditions this creates under the shorthand UPACS — uncertainty, paradoxes, ambiguity, complexity, and speed. Our 5i Framework exists precisely for environments carrying enormous amounts of uncertainty, where the honest answer is that you must iterate, incubate, and intensify before you can responsibly commit.
Which is lucky imaging, wearing a suit.
What else is in this frame
Vega is not simply a bright star. For roughly a century and a half it served as the baseline for the entire photometric brightness scale — one of the stars used to define the zero point of the UBV system. Every other star’s brightness was measured against it. Wikipedia
Two things then happened. Refined modern definitions moved Vega slightly off zero, to magnitude +0.03. And Vega turned out to be a variable star. Its brightness fluctuates. SedsWikipedia
The reference point drifted. The reference point flickers.
If you have ever built a strategy on a fixed benchmark — a market definition, a competitor set, a cost baseline, a regulatory regime — you already know what this means and have probably declined to act on it.
There is more. Vega spins at 274 kilometres per second at its equator, which bulges it outward and leaves its poles considerably hotter than its equator. From Earth we happen to be looking almost straight down one of those poles. For a long time it therefore presented as an unremarkable star. It was not. Our vantage point was concealing what it actually was. AstroPixels
Every organisation has a pole-on problem: something fundamental about the market, the customer, or its own capability that looks ordinary purely because of where it is standing.
Even the cross of light in the image is worth noticing. Those spikes are not out there. They are an artefact of the instrument. The apparatus signs its name on everything it observes — worth remembering the next time someone hands you a dashboard.
The people who look up
This is not a solitary interest. My friend Cecilia Hertz, the space designer behind Umbilical Design, has spent a career carrying the discipline of the spacecraft back down to Earth, and has been unfailingly supportive of this work. She shares the appetite for the unknown — which is rarer in business than it sounds, and is the actual prerequisite for everything else.
At Expo 2020 in Dubai we hosted Space Week together around the Blue Marble Vision, alongside astronauts including Christer and NASA’s Jessica Meir. The logic of the spacecraft is unforgiving and clarifying at once: nothing is wasted, and every single human on board is accounted for. Nobody planning a mission pretends the unknown can be costed away. They plan for it — margin, redundancy, reversibility. The unknown is a design parameter, not an embarrassment to be smoothed over in a spreadsheet. Innovation360
Christer ends his foreword by looking further out still. He notes that we wrote of a coming Fifth Industrial Revolution without claiming to know its shape — and then makes what he himself calls a bold statement: that it will happen on Mars. He closes with a line I keep returning to: “…enjoy the ever-brighter future, here on Earth—and in space.”
Ever-brighter. Not fully mapped. Not de-risked. Brighter is what you get from 1,921 exposures and the discipline to discard 1,340 of them.
Mastering Uncertainty
There is a Swedish saying I grew up with, and which opens the acknowledgments of Innovation by Design: “Den som alltid vet bäst lär sig aldrig något.” Those who always know best never learn anything.
I have spent thirty-seven years on this, since my twentieth birthday. Methods running from three thousand years ago, through the Middle Ages, through twentieth-century thinking, to ten Nobel laureates who each worked out something about deciding without knowing — from Kahneman on ambiguity aversion, through the randomised trials of Banerjee, Duflo and Kremer and the natural experiments of Card, Angrist and Imbens, to the complex-systems physics of Manabe, Hasselmann and Parisi. Only now have I been able to assemble the whole thing in one place.
It is called Mastering Uncertainty: Think like a Nobel Prize winner, and it is now a course:
https://app.my360.global/Learning/Course/556a1b99-ad7a-43fe-902b-8b7c6cc6fd84
It will not teach you to predict better. Prediction is the wrong instrument, and more analysis can never substitute for testing. It teaches you to replace dates with thresholds — we proceed if… — to hunt the killer assumption first, to stage every commitment like an option with capped downside and open upside, and to lead so that uncertain work is small, cheap, reversible, and celebrated.
Which is to say: it teaches you to afford 1,921 exposures.
Innovation by Design: Innovation Management Systems for Global Impact (Volume 3 of The Complete Guide to Business Innovation), by Magnus Penker and Gerry Purcell, with a foreword by Christer Fuglesang and a preface by Jack Roberts, is available here: https://us.amazon.com/Innovation-Design-Management-Complete-Business/dp/B0DDV222Q4
I still need a real camera. But I know that now, which I did not know last night — and it cost me nothing to find out. That is the whole method in one sentence.
The light in this photograph left Vega twenty-five years ago. You are never looking at the present state of anything.
You cannot know. You can still decide well.
What’s your threshold?
