Before you get to work, it’s worth deciding which hat you’re being asked to wear… pursuing the possible or optimizing the certain.
Let’s start with a funeral. Not to be morbid, but to make a point.
In the summer of 2017, the Indian Railways—that 170-year-old behemoth of British-era engineering—did something unthinkable. They cancelled 500 trains. Not because of a strike, not because of a monsoon fury, but because they were choosing to.
For decades, the mandate was simple: Run on time. Optimize the coal, optimize the tracks, optimize the schedules. The Indian Railways wore the “Optimizer’s Hat” so well that it became synonymous with the organization itself. But in 2017, they realized that to make way for the “Possible”—high-speed corridors, dedicated freight lines, a future that didn’t look like 1853—they had to burn the old timetable.
They temporarily stopped optimizing the certain to start pursuing the possible.
Most of us don’t have the luxury of cancelling 500 trains. But every single morning, when we walk into that office, open that laptop, or take that call, we face the same dilemma. And tragically, 99% of us reach for the wrong hat.
Pursuing the possible. Or optimizing the certain?
These are not the same game. Not even close cousins. They are fundamentally different species of thinking — and confusing one for the other is how brilliant people spend six months perfecting something that should never have existed in the first place.
Some Food For Torque
Most execs are hat-blind, mistaking motion for momentum. You’re in a huddle, handed a “disrupt supply chain” brief. Is it possible pursuit—like Elon Musk’s 2008 Tesla gamble, Starman-ing a roadster into space to mock Detroit’s dinosaurs? Or certain optimization, like Indra Nooyi at PepsiCo, who recalibrated Frito-Lay’s salt grams to dodge obesity lawsuits while juicing margins 20%? Wrong hat, and your “innovation” flops into mediocrity.
Rarefied Air: The Global & The Desi
Look at Spotify. They don’t just throw engineers into a room. They formalize the madness with their “Squad” model. But more importantly, they have a concept of “Missionaries” (Possibilists) versus “Mercenaries” (Optimizers). Mercenaries build what they’re told; missionaries pursue a vision. When Spotify decides to disrupt the podcast industry, they don’t ask their payment gateway team (Optimizers) to do it. They create a separate tribe of Possibilists. They separate the hats.
Closer home, look at Zoho. While the SaaS world was busy optimizing the “growth at all costs” model (chasing valuation certainties), Sridhar Vembu was pursuing the possible in rural Tenkasi. He took off the hat of the “Global CEO” and put on the hat of the “Rural Innovation Evangelist.” He is optimizing for sustainability and talent distribution, not just quarterly profits. It looks inefficient to the Optimizer. It looks like the future to the Possibilist.
Before you get to work, it’s worth deciding which hat you’re being asked to wear
The Optimizer is a beautiful creature. Precise. Efficient. Ruthlessly good at squeezing the last drop of performance from what already works. Maruti Suzuki did this for decades — not by reinventing the car, but by making the affordable car so absurdly reliable that an entire nation trusted it with their lives and their salaries. Hat: Optimization. Mission accomplished.
The Explorer is a different beast entirely. Messy. Comfortable with being wrong. Willing to burn a map that’s no longer useful. Sonam Wangchuk — the real-world inspiration behind 3 Idiots — didn’t optimize education in Ladakh. He blew the premise up. He asked: what if learning wasn’t the problem, but the location of learning was? Result: SECMOL, a school powered by the sun, built by students, and run on radical curiosity. Hat: Possibility. Category created.
The catastrophe happens when you hand an Explorer’s brief to an Optimizer — or worse, when nobody tells the room which hat is on the table.
The Kodak (Un)moment
Eastman Kodak had 140,000 employees and invented the digital camera. They then handed it to optimizers. “How does this help us sell more film?” Wrong hat. Wrong game. Bankruptcy filed: 2012.
Meanwhile, out of the IIT Madras incubation cell in Chennai, KLN Sai Prasanth and his co-founders at Muse Wearables weren’t optimizing wearables — they were asking whether Indian bodies, with different health concerns and contexts, needed entirely different biosensors and form factors. Explorer hat. The result: the world’s first payment-enabled hybrid smartwatch, now selling across 70 countries — backed, delightfully, by none other than SS Rajamouli.
Offering a Diagnostic
If your meeting begins with: “Let’s improve conversion by 2%”
You’re optimizing the certain.
If it begins with: “What if our category didn’t exist?”
You’re pursuing the possible.
One is compound interest. The other is quantum leap.
The ‘Provoke’ Framework: The Hat Check
So, how do you decide which hat to wear before the daily grind seduces you into the wrong one? You need a “Hat Check.”
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The Morning Compass: Before you open your emails (the Optimizer’s favorite drug), ask: “What is the one problem today that, if solved, would make every other decision irrelevant?” If that problem is about efficiency, wear the Optimizer’s cap. If it’s about relevance or reinvention, grab the Possibilist’s fedora.
- The 80/20 Flip: Devote 80% of your energy to your job description (Optimizing the certain). But fiercely guard 20% of your time for your “Future Description” (Pursuing the possible). Google famously tried this with 20% time. It failed when they started optimizing that time. Protect it with your life.
3.The Funeral Test: Imagine your role or company died today. Would the obituary read, “It ran perfectly, on time, until the very end”? Or would it read, “It dared to go where nothing was certain”?
The Final Act
The Indian Railways tracks are clear again. The optimized trains are running. But they carved out space for the possible. That is the art.
You can’t wear both hats at once. They sit differently. One squeezes the brain for dopamine hits of checking boxes. The other expands it with the anxiety of the unknown.
Today, before you “get to work,” pause at the door. Look at the rack. Are you being paid to turn the crank, or are you being paid to imagine a new machine? Choose wisely. The world has plenty of optimizers. It’s starving for possibilists.
PS: On a completely different note, I am delighted to share that my other blog SOHB(State Of The Heart Branding) Story is now a Podcast as well. You can access it on these links below:
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/