By Hiran de Silva
There is a very specific idea behind my Mission Impossible series.
It is not simply about solving difficult Excel problems.
It is not even about solving very difficult Excel problems.
The starting point has to be stronger than that.
The mission begins when we have something that people believe cannot be done.
Not merely difficult.
Not merely inconvenient.
Impossible.
And that distinction matters.
Because if we can establish that something is widely regarded as impossible, and then demonstrate that it is possible, something much more interesting happens than simply finding a clever solution.
We change the mental model.
And that is where the idea of the Black Swan event comes into this.
First, Draw a Thick Line
Imagine a business requirement that would create enormous value if it could be achieved.
Perhaps it would remove an expensive problem.
Perhaps it would eliminate an inefficient process.
Perhaps it would allow hundreds or thousands of people to collaborate in a way that currently appears impossible.
Everybody would like it.
Everybody can see the value.
But everybody also agrees:
It can’t be done.
That is Step One.
And I want to make that moment explicit in every Mission Impossible episode.
Draw a great big thick line underneath it.
CAN’T BE DONE.
Ideally, we don’t merely have people saying that it can’t be done.
We have experts explaining why it can’t be done.
They may say:
“Spreadsheets aren’t designed for that.”
“Excel can’t scale to that.”
“You can’t do that with spreadsheets.”
“You need a proper system.”
Excellent.
Because now we have established the starting point.
We have our impossible mission.
Step Two: Somebody Does It
Then something happens.
Somebody does it.
Not theoretically.
Not with a PowerPoint presentation.
Not by claiming that it could perhaps be done under the right circumstances.
They actually do it.
There it is.
Working.
You can see it.
You can touch it.
You can test it.
The thing that everybody agreed was impossible has been demonstrated in front of them.
That creates a fascinating moment.
Because reality has now collided with the established mental model.
And reality has won.
The Egg of Columbus
There is an old story attributed to Christopher Columbus.
Whether the incident really happened is questionable, but the story survives because it illustrates the point beautifully.
After Columbus’s voyage, supposedly some of his contemporaries dismissed his achievement.
They effectively said:
“Anyone could have done that.”
So Columbus gave them another challenge.
Stand an egg upright on its end.
They tried.
They couldn’t do it.
Eventually they gave up.
Columbus then took the egg, tapped one end against the table so that it flattened slightly, and stood it upright.
Immediately the reaction was:
“Well, we could have done that!”
Of course.
Once you have seen somebody else do it.
That is precisely the point.
The solution looks obvious after somebody has shown it to you.
But before that happened, everybody around the table had already demonstrated that they couldn’t see it.
That distinction is extremely important to the Mission Impossible idea.
The Four-Minute Mile
There is another example that is much more powerful because the achievement itself is real.
The four-minute mile.
For years, runners had approached the four-minute barrier without breaking it.
The idea became surrounded by a psychological barrier.
Perhaps this was simply the limit of human performance.
Then, in 1954, Roger Bannister did it.
The apparently impossible barrier was broken.
And something remarkable happened afterwards.
Other runners broke it too.
The important lesson isn’t simply that Bannister was an extraordinary athlete.
Something else had changed.
The mental barrier had been broken.
Before Bannister, the four-minute mile represented a boundary.
After Bannister, it represented a target.
That is an enormous change.
The physical distance hadn’t changed.
A mile was still a mile.
The clock hadn’t changed.
Human physiology hadn’t suddenly been redesigned.
What had changed was people’s understanding of what was possible.
And that is the transformation I am interested in.
Now Bring This Into Excel
This is where my Mission Impossible series comes in.
Each mission starts with a business problem.
Sometimes I take a familiar Excel scenario and scale it dramatically.
Perhaps somebody has demonstrated something involving one workbook, two tables and one user.
Fine.
Now let’s make it:
100 users.
1,000 users.
10,000 users.
Different offices.
Different cities.
Different countries.
People contributing data simultaneously.
People retrieving consolidated information.
Security.
Audit trails.
Continuous operation.
No emailing workbooks around.
No manual consolidation.
No army of people copying and pasting spreadsheets together.
Suddenly the conventional solution starts to break down.
Alternatively, I start with a requirement that people already believe simply cannot be achieved with spreadsheets.
Either way, the first job of the Mission Impossible team is not to start building anything.
The first job is to understand:
Why does everybody believe this is impossible?
Understand Why They Can’t See the Solution
This is crucial.
If intelligent, experienced people are saying something cannot be done, we need to understand why.
What route are they taking through the problem?
What assumptions are they making?
What architecture are they imagining?
What does the word spreadsheet mean inside their heads?
Because very often the obstacle isn’t Excel.
The obstacle is the mental model of Excel.
Suppose somebody imagines 500 people collaborating with spreadsheets.
Immediately they may picture files.
Attachments.
SharePoint folders.
Copies of workbooks.
Version control.
Consolidation.
Broken links.
People overwriting each other’s changes.
Of course the resulting architecture looks horrible.
And if that is your mental model of how spreadsheets have to work, your conclusion is perfectly understandable:
Don’t do it.
Get a proper system.
But Mission Impossible asks another question.
What happens if we stop thinking about the problem that way?
The Penny-Drop Moment
This is the moment I particularly want each episode to contain.
The penny drops.
Somebody looks at the problem from a completely different angle.
And suddenly:
Oh!
There it is.
Sometimes the change in thinking can be almost embarrassingly simple.
That is what makes it powerful.
You look back at the original problem and wonder:
“Why didn’t I see that?”
Exactly.
Why didn’t we see it?
That is the interesting question.
Because once the alternative mental model has appeared, the apparently impossible problem may cease to look particularly difficult.
There is a wonderful distinction here.
The breakthrough isn’t necessarily a complicated new technology.
It may simply be a different way of thinking about the technology we already have.
Then the rest is implementation.
Once we can see where the pot of gold is, the engineering question becomes:
How do we get from here to there?
This Is More Than an Excel Party Trick
In a commercial environment, this becomes much more serious.
Suppose the accepted wisdom inside a large organisation is:
This cannot be done with Excel.
The implication may then be:
We need a proper enterprise system.
That may mean millions of pounds.
It may mean consultants.
It may mean a major implementation programme.
It may mean six months before anything useful appears.
It may mean two years.
And everybody involved may regard that as perfectly reasonable because the alternative has already been ruled out.
“You can’t do this with spreadsheets.”
There is our thick line again.
Now imagine somebody comes along and demonstrates the supposedly impossible requirement using technology the organisation already owns.
Not in two years.
Perhaps in weeks.
Sometimes in days.
And the decision makers can actually use it.
Now the significance of the demonstration is no longer technical.
It is commercial.
The original “can’t be done” statement may have been influencing a multi-million-pound decision.
That is why establishing the starting point matters so much.
Mission Impossible
This is also why the Mission Impossible framing fits so beautifully.
The Impossible Missions Force isn’t called when somebody has a routine job that needs doing.
The premise is that conventional approaches have failed.
The situation appears impossible.
That is when the tape arrives.
Good morning, Jim…
Here is the problem.
Here is what has to happen.
Here is why everybody believes it cannot happen.
Your mission, should you choose to accept it…
And that is exactly how I want these Excel missions to work.
The team receives the requirement.
First, they understand the problem.
Then they understand why conventional thinking fails.
Only then do they start questioning the assumptions behind that thinking.
And somewhere in that discussion comes the moment when somebody sees it.
The Columbus egg.
The four-minute mile.
The apparently ridiculous little change in perspective that suddenly makes the impossible look possible.
Then they build it.
Step Three May Be the Most Interesting Part
But there is another stage.
What happens to the people who originally said it couldn’t be done?
There are several possibilities.
The best response is the Roger Bannister response.
The barrier disappears.
People say:
So it CAN be done.
Fantastic.
Now they build on it.
Improve it.
Repeat it.
Teach it.
Take it further.
The breakthrough changes everybody’s understanding of what is possible.
But there is another response.
“Well, obviously you can do that.”
“We always knew that.”
“Anyone could have done that.”
That is the Columbus egg response.
There is an even more interesting response.
Deny that the achievement happened at all.
You didn’t really run a four-minute mile.
The stopwatch must be wrong.
The course wasn’t really a mile.
You cheated.
Translated into the spreadsheet world:
“That’s not really Excel.”
“That’s not a spreadsheet.”
“Nobody would do it that way.”
“That isn’t a real enterprise system.”
“It doesn’t count.”
The demonstration is no longer being examined to discover what can be learned from it.
It is being examined to find a reason why the original mental model does not need to change.
That reaction is fascinating.
And commercially, it can be extremely important.
The Mission Impossible Test
So every Mission Impossible episode should begin with a test.
Can we establish the impossible position?
Can we find competent people who genuinely believe the requirement cannot be achieved?
Better still, can we understand exactly why they believe it?
Then we have something worth investigating.
Because the purpose isn’t to humiliate somebody who got the answer wrong.
The interesting question is:
What were they looking at that prevented them from seeing the answer?
And then:
What happens if we look at exactly the same problem differently?
That is where genuine learning takes place.
It is also where innovation takes place.
The Black Swan Moment
And this is the sense in which I am using the idea of the Black Swan event in Mission Impossible.
There is an established reality.
Everybody understands the rules.
Everybody knows the limitations.
Everybody knows what can and cannot be done.
Until somebody does the thing that supposedly cannot be done.
Suddenly the map has to be redrawn.
The important thing isn’t merely that one problem has been solved.
It is that an entire category of other problems may now look different.
If this can be done, what else have we incorrectly classified as impossible?
What other expensive business problems are being approached through the wrong mental model?
What other organisations are preparing to spend millions solving problems that could be solved differently?
What other capabilities of Excel have effectively disappeared from professional consciousness because everybody has been taught to think of a spreadsheet as a file rather than as a client in a much larger system?
Those are much bigger questions.
And that is what I want Mission Impossible to explore.
Every episode begins on one side of that thick line:
CAN’T BE DONE.
The team investigates.
They challenge the assumptions.
They think differently.
The penny drops.
They build it.
And eventually we cross the line.
The supposedly impossible thing is sitting there in front of us.
Working.
At that point, the most important question is no longer:
Can it be done?
We’ve answered that.
The question becomes:
What else have we been told is impossible simply because nobody thought to tap the egg on the table?
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