SpaceX and the Creation of a Future Focused Company

Next week, SpaceX will go public in what is expected to be the largest IPO in history. When the company was founded back in 2002, its ambition was to make space travel dramatically cheaper and more reliable—and eventually support human life beyond Earth. Twenty-four years later, the company has become the primary provider of crewed flights to the International Space Station. It’s built reusable rockets that land upright. And it’s created Starlink, a global network of satellites that is one of the most important communications platforms in existence.

Along the way, the company made getting to space far more accessible to a new generation of pioneers. When SpaceX started, launching a kilogram into orbit could cost well over $10,000. Today, Falcon 9 launches are closer to $3,000 per kilogram. That price is expected to fall even further over the coming years. If you’re an entrepreneur thinking about helium-3 mining on the moon or orbital data centers, SpaceX is making your dream a reality.

Much of SpaceX’s story focuses on its founder, Elon Musk. That’s understandable. SpaceX bears the imprint of his appetite for impossible goals. Musk talks about living on Mars with the casual intensity that other executives reserve for launching a new line of potato chips. He keeps putting capital, attention, and reputational risk behind ideas that look irrational until they don’t. A rocket landing on a drone ship once looked like science fiction. Now it looks like Tuesday.

To be sure, Musk is an incredibly polarizing figure. His forays into social media and politics have mirrored the revival of fascist movements around the world. And yet, even detractors like myself are forced to concede that Elon Musk is one of the most future-focused leaders of our generation.

But SpaceX is more than one man with a launchpad. It’s a company of over 20,000 people. Engineers, supply chain experts, launch crews, and countless others have spent years solving problems that no single person could solve alone. Rockets don’t design themselves. Satellites don’t deploy themselves. Launch systems don’t become reliable just because one ketamine-addled founder has a dream.

That’s what makes SpaceX so interesting. It isn’t just a story about a future-focused founder. It’s a story about a future-focused company. Every day, thousands of people inside SpaceX make decisions about systems whose full payoff may not arrive for years to come. They work on capabilities that are expensive before they become profitable, strange before they become obvious, and fragile before they become reliable. They are, in a very literal sense, spending their days building a future that does not yet exist.

Which raises a more useful question than whether Elon Musk is a visionary: in a world where the average American worker stays with an employer for less than four years, how do you get 20,000 people to stay focused on the future?

The 16% Problem

Companies get into trouble when the world changes around them. A business can execute beautifully and still get blindsided by a shift that started somewhere outside its field of view. That kind of threat usually doesn’t announce itself. It shows up first as a small shift in customer behavior, a fringe new technology, or a seemingly insignificant competitor.

That’s why companies need to be future focused. Leaders need to look beyond the demands of the present and ask what might be changing on the horizon. It doesn’t mean predicting the future with certainty. It means paying attention to signals others dismiss and making changes before the need becomes urgent.

Most of us aren’t wired this way. Research on people’s time orientation suggests that only a small percentage of us are truly future focused. These are the people whose worldview is fundamentally shaped by what might happen next, not just what’s happening now. Only 16% of us are future focused in our outlook. The vast majority, approximately 70% of us, are present focused.

That’s not a character flaw. It’s how human beings survived this long. Our brains evolved to prioritize immediate threats and opportunities. Growing up on the African veldt, the lion in front of you deserved more attention than next year’s gazelle migrations. Nowadays, the angry email from your boss feels more real than the long-term strategic challenge facing your company. And that’s how companies get blindsided.

But there’s hope. The time horizon we focus on need not be fixed. It may be something people can learn. It turns out that the human brain possesses a trait called neuroplasticity. And neuroplasticity is a beautiful thing.

For years, we thought the brain was like the body’s other organs. Your heart may get stronger or weaker, but it doesn’t fundamentally reorganize itself. Your bones may thicken or thin, but they don’t constantly redesign their operating model. Our brains are different. Decades of research have shown that the brain reshapes itself in response to experience, strengthening some connections and pruning others. London taxi drivers who spend years memorizing the city’s streets develop enlarged regions of the brain associated with spatial navigation. Musicians who practice for decades devote more neural real estate to controlling their fingers.

What we practice doesn’t just change what we do. It changes who we are. This has profound implications for leaders who need to become more future focused. You can change how you think. You can change how you act. And you can change how you lead. You just have to do it in the right order.

The Wires Work Both Ways

In 1988, Fritz Strack set out to run a deceptively simple experiment. A social psychologist at the University of Mannheim, Strack wanted to understand whether facial expressions merely reflect how people feel, or whether they might also shape those feelings.

He asked test subjects to hold a pen in their mouths for a few minutes. He asked half the participants to hold the pen widthwise between their teeth like a riding bit. He asked the other half to hold the pen lengthwise between their lips like a lollipop.

While they had the pen in their mouth, each participant was asked to read a series of cartoons and rate how funny they thought they were. The results were striking. People who held the pen widthwise found the cartoons a lot funnier than a control group with no pen in their mouth. People who held the pen lengthwise found the cartoons to be a lot less funny than the control group. What was going on?

It turns out that when you hold a pen widthwise with your teeth, you’re subtly activating many of the same muscles associated with smiling. And when you hold a pen lengthwise between your lips, you’re activating a lot of the muscles associated with frowning. People who were unknowingly asked to smile found the cartoons funnier. They hadn’t been told to feel happier. They hadn’t been asked to adopt a positive mindset. They had simply moved their faces in a particular way, and their experience shifted.

Strack’s experiment had profound implications. Feeling happy makes you smile. But smiling makes you feel happy, too. The wires work in both directions. That idea was so simple and so surprising that it raised the skepticism of the psychology community, which was already in the throes of a movement to reassess long held observations. And yet, when researchers reran the experiment under the same conditions, the finding held.

Harvard psychologist Amy Cuddy found a similar insight with so-called “power poses.” When participants were asked to spend a few minutes standing with their chests out and their arms akimbo like a superhero, they reported feeling far more confident. That was true even though objective measures of stress like their cortisol levels stayed the same. People just felt different.

Studies like Strack’s and Cuddy’s offer a powerful reframe for the rest of us. We tend to believe thought comes first and action follows. Sometimes that’s true. But often the wires work both ways. Your brain controls your muscles. But your muscles change your brain. That’s a huge insight for anyone trying to become future focused.

It’s far easier to act yourself into a new way of thinking than to think yourself into a new way of acting.

Most organizational change efforts are built on the opposite assumption. Leaders try to explain people into a new mindset. They hold town halls. They create slide decks. Then they wait for behavior to change. But if the psychology is right, that may be backward. The fastest way to change how people think may be to change what they repeatedly do. And if that’s true for individuals, it may be true for organizations as well.

When Behavior Becomes Culture

One of the most common mistakes in psychology is the fundamental attribution error. We see someone behave a certain way and assume the behavior comes from personality rather than context. Someone acts impatiently, and we decide they are an impatient person. Someone takes a risk, and we decide they are naturally bold. We tend to ignore the importance of the situation that person is in.

Business leaders make the same mistake with companies. We look at SpaceX and assume it must be filled with future-focused people. We look at Apple and assume its people must naturally think differently. That explanation is comforting because it turns culture into a hiring problem. Find different people and you’ll get different behavior.

But if future-focused people are relatively rare, then these companies can’t possibly be succeeding by hiring only them. There simply aren’t enough of them out there. Something else must be going on. These companies must be creating the conditions that help ordinary, present-focused people to behave in more future-focused ways. They don’t wait for people to think differently. They ask people to behave differently, again and again, until their behavior begins to reshape their thinking.

At Apple, leaders are known for obsessive discussions about possible futures and how products might fit into them. The company doesn’t simply ask whether a product works today. It asks how a technology might evolve, how customer expectations might shift, and how experiences might connect across devices and services over time. People learn to come prepared with scenarios, not just status updates. They learn that the conversation is rarely only about what’s happening right now.

At Amazon, Jeff Bezos famously expected leaders to explain where they would be in seven years, three years, and one year before discussing their immediate plans. That requirement changed the conversation. You couldn’t walk into the room with only a short-term plan and expect to be taken seriously. In essence, Bezos was forcing leaders to act themselves into a new way of thinking. He wasn’t waiting for people to become future focused. He was asking them to behave as though they already were.

Over time, behavior becomes habit. Habit becomes mindset. Mindset becomes culture. That’s the part leaders often miss. Culture isn’t simply a set of beliefs that produce behavior. Culture is also a set of behaviors that, repeated often enough, produce beliefs. People become what they practice. And companies do, too.

The Context You’re Creating

People respond to context more than we’d like to admit. Present-focused companies are made up of people responding rationally to the systems around them. If a company rewards quarterly performance above everything else, its people will optimize for this quarter. Future-focused companies don’t necessarily have better people. They operate in a context that makes it easier to see what’s coming next. That’s the real job of leadership: to design those conditions deliberately. What gets discussed? What gets rewarded? What gets measured? We shape the conversation.

Not every company needs to build rockets or colonize Mars. But every company can create the conditions where people spend their days acting as though the future matters. And after a while, they do more than act that way. They start to think that way. Are you creating a company where people spend their days fighting fires? Or one where they act themselves into building a remarkable future?