What If We're Wrong About What's Possible?

Nine weeks.

That’s the gap between the New York Times declaring powered flight was “1 to 10 million years away” (in 1903), and the Wright brothers proving them wrong. The editors weren’t idiots, they just couldn’t imagine it.

Orville Wright put it well: “If we all worked on the assumption that what is accepted as true is really true, there would be little hope for advance.”

For the Wright Brothers, failure was data and everything else was noise. At Moe & Company, we keep coming back to this story when thinking about where we want to go.

The conversations that excite us most aren’t about efficiency gains or cost savings. They’re the ones where someone says “we’ve always assumed this couldn’t be done differently”, and we get to challenge that together.

Physicist and Sci-Fi writer Arthur C. Clarke captured it well: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

At moe & company, we think about this every day. How to move beyond the 1903 editorial, and towards what’s genuinely possible today.

We’d love to hear your perspective. What’s an assumption in your industry that’s rarely questioned?