Come on… This Isn't Rocket Science!

Years ago, during the dot-com boom, I had an opportunity to leave the building products industry and join an emerging technology company as a product manager.

At the time, I had responsibility for several product lines and was approving significant investments in new technology, website improvements, online customer tools, digital inquiry forms, and all kinds of new capabilities that were beginning to emerge.

There was one problem:

Whenever I approved one of those investments, I kept asking myself the same question I often challenged our engineering and manufacturing teams with:

"What's the ROI?"

If leadership had asked me to justify those technology investments, I honestly didn't have a good answer. Not even a strategically optimistic one. That made me pretty uneasy.

I loved the building materials industry, but I realized I needed to become much more effective with technology if I wanted to lead businesses into the future. So, I made a decision that surprised a lot of people, including me. I left.

My plan seemed pretty simple:

Immerse myself in technology for a few years, learn everything I could, and someday bring that experience back to the industries I knew and liked best. I’m pretty sure I wasn't the obvious candidate but pushed forward.

If I had been the hiring manager, I would have considered me a stretch.

Fortunately, someone else saw something different.

Surprisingly they hired me.  I found myself leading the development of a new software platform. The work itself wasn't that different from what I had effectively done. We established milestones, met every couple of days, solved problems, removed obstacles, and kept moving the project forward.

The difference was the people around the table.

These were experienced developers, coders, user interface designers, and database experts. They spoke a language I barely understood.

Like many managers, I had a favorite phrase whenever discussions started moving toward why something couldn't be done.

"Come on...this isn't rocket science!"

I'd used that line for years, with many eyerolls and strange looks in response.

Whenever I heard, "That really can't be done," or "From an engineering standpoint, that's not possible," and “We can’t manufacture that”

I’d get even more excited (OK, jacked up) and throw it right back at them.

"Come on...this isn't rocket science!"

After a few meetings, I noticed something. Every time I used that phrase, three developers on the team would get unusually quiet. They didn't argue. They didn't react. They didn’t push back. They didn’t even respond. They just seemed to disengage.

After one meeting, I asked another member of the team if I had somehow offended them.

He looked at me and said, "It wouldn't surprise me, Ron."

Confused, I asked why? He sarcastically laughed and explained that the previous project those three developers had worked on was writing the production software for Boeing's new rocket engine manufacturing line.

"So... they’re actually rocket scientists!"

"Yep."  That was a reality check for sure.

I apologized to the team, and thankfully they laughed it off. Then I walked into the president's office and asked the question that had been eating at me.

"Why did you hire me? There were plenty of people with far more technology experience."

His answer has stuck with me ever since.

He said there were certainly candidates who knew more about technology than I did.

But experience can also create boundaries and as fast as technology is moving and evolving, we can’t have any boundaries. People naturally begin to define what's possible by what they've already seen and experienced.

He believed I brought something different.

Because I didn't know all the reasons something couldn't be done (OK, a bit clueless), I kept asking if there might be another way.

That conversation changed how I think about learning.

Today, AI has us all feeling a little like I did at that technology company years ago. Many of us are stepping into something unfamiliar. Some people are intimidated by it. Others are convinced they already know what it can, or can't do.

I'm not sure either approach serves us well.

The more I experiment with AI, the more I'm reminded of that unique work experience.

Learning has always mattered more than knowing.

Experience is valuable, but it can also become a set of invisible guardrails if we're not careful.

Maybe the biggest opportunity isn't becoming an AI expert.

Maybe it's simply staying curious enough to keep asking, "What else might be possible?"