"As God as my witness, I thought turkeys could fly"

I saw a post a week or so ago on my Linked In news feed that caught my attention.  The story claimed that there is a poster hanging at the NASA Space Center that says:

"The aerodynamic body of bumblebees is not fit to fly, but it's good that the bumblebee doesn't know about it."

I think that the poster is suggesting that the scientists and engineers at NASA could learn a thing or two from nature in that sometimes, what seems impossible according to the laws of physics is actually possible.

I don't know if there is actually a poster hanging at the NASA Space Science Center about bumblebees or not.  I am not even sure that there is such a thing called the NASA Space Science Center (I looked it up on the Internet and it isn't listed among the different NASA Centers and Facilities).  And I certainly have never pondered how a bumblebee flies through the air.  I was interested in researching this a little more, so I decided to look to see what I could find on the science of bumblebee flight.

As it turns out, scientists have been interested in how bumblebees can fly since at least the 1930's.  Apparently, a French scientist named Antoine Magnan wrote a book in 1934 called Le Vol des Insectes (meaning "Insect Flight") in which he suggested that the laws of physics could not explain how insects fly.  He wrote, "First prompted by what is done in aviation, I applied the laws of air resistance to insects, and I arrived, with Mr. Sainte-Laguë, at this conclusion that their flight is impossible" (Mr. Sainte-Laguë was another engineer and scientist working with him).  Their analysis was wrongly based on the assumption (probably a reasonable one at the time) that a bumblebee's wings were smooth and flat.  They are not.  The myth that bumblebees can't possibly fly (despite a number of everyday observations to the contrary - I just watched a bumblebee flying yesterday), has persisted to this day.

Scientists have studied how bumblebees seemingly defy the laws of physics to actually fly through the air.  The trick is that bumblebees do not actually flap their wings like a bird, but instead they flap their wings back and forth and create a mini-hurricane around their wings that creates lift.  In very simple terms that even I can understand, "bees fly by rotating their wings, which creates pockets of low air pressure, which in turn create small eddies above the bee’s wing which lift it into the air and, thus, grant it the ability to fly."

All of this reminds me of one of my favorite television episodes from the 1970's sitcom "WKRP in Cincinnati" - the famous Thanksgiving Turkey Drop episode from 1978.  The radio station ran a promotion on Thanksgiving Day in which 40 live turkeys were dropped from a helicopter to a unsuspecting crowd at a local shopping mall.  As you would expect, the promotion ended badly.  The episode ends with the station manager, Arthur "Big Guy" Carlson claiming, "As God as my witness, I thought turkeys could fly."

Okay, so what is the takeaway from all of this?  What can we, as leaders, learn from bumblebees and turkeys?  First, always test your assumptions.  Clearly Magnan and Sainte-Laguë made an assumption that proved to be incorrect.  Once they tested their assumption, their original hypothesis proved incorrect.  Second, always test someone else's assumptions.  You certainly can't believe everything that you read on the Internet (or in the scientific literature for that matter).  Science moves forward because scientists are skeptics at heart - they always test another scientist's assumptions before they make their own conclusion.  Third, and this probably relates to the underlying premise of the purported NASA poster, innovation occurs when we adopt a growth mindset and try to achieve what previously seemed impossible.  As the actress Audrey Hepburn once said, "Nothing is impossible, the word itself says I'm possible."