Mick Ebeling
Most organisations declare innovation a priority, then quietly file the hardest ideas under impossible. Teams learn the difference between problems they are allowed to attempt and problems they should not raise. The result is a culture that produces incremental work and tells itself it is being ambitious.
Mick Ebeling, founder of Not Impossible Labs, helps organisations turn problems they have written off as impossible into solutions they have actually shipped.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Mick Ebeling
- “Commit, then figure it out” is an operating method with shipped output behind it. The EyeWriter, Project Daniel, Bento, and Music: Not Impossible all began as problems that engineers and clinicians had filed under impossible.
- Three TIME Best Inventions across thirteen years: the EyeWriter (2010), Bento (2021), Music: Not Impossible (2023). No other individual has matched that benchmark.
- He frames innovation around what his team calls “absurdities”, unmet needs attached to named individuals. That vocabulary travels into executive conversations where abstract innovation language usually fails.
- A career as a film producer shapes how he tells the case studies. Audiences see the working details of each project, including how it got built and where the friction lived.
Biography highlights
- Founder and CEO of Not Impossible, the studio that grew out of Not Impossible Labs and now spans the lab, the Not Impossible Institute, and the Not Impossible Foundation. Spin-out companies include Bento and Music: Not Impossible.
- Only individual to have three inventions named to TIME Magazine’s Best Inventions list: the EyeWriter (2010), Bento (2021), and Music: Not Impossible (2023). The EyeWriter is part of the permanent collection of New York’s Museum of Modern Art.
- Named to Fortune’s Top 50 World’s Greatest Leaders. Recipient of the Muhammad Ali Humanitarian of the Year Award.
- Two-time SXSW Innovation of the Year winner; Cannes Lions Titanium Lion winner for Project Daniel; nominated for Design of the Year by London’s Design Museum; WIRED Agent of Change.
- Author of “Not Impossible: The Art and Joy of Doing What Couldn’t Be Done”, Simon & Schuster, 2015.
- Founder of The Ebeling Group (2001), a commercial film and animation production company whose credits include Stranger Than Fiction, The Kite Runner, and Quantum of Solace.
Biography
In April 2009, a graffiti artist named Tony “Tempt” Quan drew his first new piece of art in seven years, using only the movement of his eyes. He had been silenced by ALS since 2003. The technology that made it possible, the EyeWriter, was assembled in a Los Angeles living room. Mick Ebeling had flown in five programmers and hackers from Graffiti Research Lab, Free Art and Technology Lab, and openFrameworks to attempt it. The device is now part of the permanent collection of New York’s Museum of Modern Art.
That episode established the working method behind everything Ebeling has built since. Not Impossible Labs identifies what the team calls “absurdities”: specific human problems that today’s technology should be able to solve and has not. The model is to commit to one named individual, build a working solution, then scale it. The team calls this “Help One. Help Many.”
The portfolio that followed kept the same shape. Project Daniel produced 3D-printed prosthetic arms for a teenage boy in South Sudan after a bombing severed his hands. The project was nominated for Design of the Year by London’s Design Museum and won the Cannes Lions Titanium Lion. Bento, a text-based system that connects food-insecure Americans with prepaid meals from local restaurants and grocery stores, started life as Hunger: Not Impossible. It has since spun off into its own company and been named a Fast Company World Changing Ideas honoree. Music: Not Impossible built haptic vests that let deaf and hard-of-hearing audiences feel live music as patterns of vibration. Three of these inventions sit on TIME Magazine’s Best Inventions list, a record no other individual holds.
For organisations, the value lies less in the projects themselves than in what they prove. The word impossible is almost always doing more work than it deserves inside a company. Ebeling’s method, “commit, then figure it out”, comes from his earlier career as a film producer at The Ebeling Group, where impossible delivery dates were structural to the business. Audiences leave with a test for the word “impossible” they can run on their own organisation. They also leave with named cases they can cite the next time a hard idea gets that label.
Key speaking topics
- Innovation methodology and the psychology of “impossible”
- Purpose-driven culture and organisational mission
- Radical collaboration across disciplines
- Technology applied to human problems
- The “Help One. Help Many.” model
- Storytelling as an innovation discipline
Ideal for
- Innovation and R&D leaders stuck on problems they have classified as too hard to solve
- CEOs and executive teams trying to translate purpose statements into operating culture
- Innovation and transformation conferences seeking a credentialed keynote with a named methodology
- Cross-functional teams being asked to deliver outcomes their existing playbook does not cover
- Audiences in healthcare, pharma, technology, finance, and professional services, where ambitious problems are routinely filed as too hard to solve
Audience outcomes
- A working vocabulary for separating ideas that are genuinely infeasible from ideas that are simply unattempted
- A set of named case studies they can cite when defending innovation budgets and ambition inside their organisation
- A different criterion for committing resources to a hard problem, modelled on a method that has shipped working technology repeatedly
- A more honest read on the gap between an organisation’s stated purpose and how that purpose shows up in daily decisions
Talks
A working session on how the label “impossible” gets applied inside organisations and how to dismantle it without abandoning rigour.
Key takeaways:
- The psychological and cultural mechanisms that make organisations pre-classify ideas as impossible
- A method for separating ideas that are genuinely infeasible from ideas that are simply unattempted
- Practices for building a culture where ambitious problems get committed to, then solved
An argument for why purpose, properly built into operating culture, produces engagement and innovation more reliably than satisfaction or retention programmes.
Key takeaways:
- Why purpose has to be operationalised, not just declared in a values statement
- How shared mission shapes engagement and innovation outcomes
- How to identify the people on a team who can carry purpose into daily decisions
A look at how unlikely combinations of skills produce solutions that conventional teams cannot, drawn from the staffing of Not Impossible Labs projects.
Key takeaways:
- What makes someone a high-value collaborator on hard problems
- How to assemble teams across disciplines without losing coherence
- How to handle the friction that cross-functional teams reliably produce
A view of the technological and cultural shifts that have lowered the cost of building, and what that lower cost makes possible for organisations.
Key takeaways:
- How the maker movement and open networks have changed who can build what
- The factors driving the current wave of social and technical innovation
- Where organisations should be looking for opportunities created by these shifts