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 a named operating method with shipped output behind it. The EyeWriter, Project Daniel, Don’s Voice, 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.
- The method is taught, not just described. Through the Not Impossible Institute he runs the Dream, Develop, Deploy workshop with teams at Baker Hughes, Eli Lilly, Fannie Mae, Lockheed Martin, and the Project Management Institute.
- 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.
- What his team builds, it gives away. The EyeWriter was released open source, and the Sudan prosthetics lab was handed to locals trained to keep printing after Not Impossible left.
Biography highlights
- Founder and CEO of Not Impossible, which spans Not Impossible Labs, 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 in the permanent collection of New York’s Museum of Modern Art.
- Named to Fortune’s Top 50 World’s Greatest Leaders and to Ad Age’s Top 50 Most Creative People. Recipient of the Muhammad Ali Humanitarian of the Year Award in 2014. Two-time Tribeca Disruptive Innovation Award honoree, 2017 and 2019.
- Project Daniel won a 2015 SXSW Interactive Innovation Award, the Titanium Cannes Lion with Gold and Bronze Lions in 2014, and Best in Show at The One Show.
- Don’s Voice won Innovation in Connecting People at the 2016 SXSW Interactive Innovation Awards. Fast Company named Music: Not Impossible to Next Big Things in Tech 2024, and Not Impossible Labs to Best Workplaces for Innovators 2026.
- Author of Not Impossible (Atria Books, 2015), published in its current edition as Not Impossible: Do What Can’t Be Done.
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 by five programmers and hackers flown in from Graffiti Research Lab, Free Art and Technology Lab, and openFrameworks. 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 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 EyeWriter design was released open source rather than kept.
The portfolio that followed kept the same shape. Project Daniel produced 3D-printed prosthetic arms for a teenage boy in South Sudan who lost both arms in a bombing, and left a printing lab behind with locals trained to keep making them. Don’s Voice gave an ALS patient a way to tell his wife he loved her for the first time in fifteen years, and won a SXSW Interactive Innovation Award in 2016. Bento began as a text-based system connecting food-insecure Americans with prepaid meals and is now a Medicaid and Medicare covered healthcare model serving more than 50,000 patients. Music: Not Impossible built haptic vests that let deaf and hard-of-hearing audiences feel live music as patterns of vibration. Three of these sit on TIME’s Best Inventions list, a record no other individual holds.
For organisations, the value lies less in the projects than in what they prove. The word impossible is almost always doing more work than it deserves inside a company. Commit, Then Figure It Out comes from Ebeling’s earlier career as a film producer at The Ebeling Group, where clients set the deadline and the budget first and the method was worked out afterwards. Since September 2024 the Not Impossible Institute has taught that sequence directly to teams at Baker Hughes, Eli Lilly, Fannie Mae, and the Project Management Institute, over workshops running from half a day to several days.
Key speaking topics
- Innovation methodology and the psychology of “impossible”
- Commit, Then Figure It Out as an operating sequence
- The Help One, Help Many model
- Radical collaboration across disciplines
- Technology applied to human problems
- 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
- Chief learning officers and L&D leads looking for innovation training with a named method behind it
- Cross-functional teams being asked to deliver outcomes their existing playbook does not cover
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 case for committing to an outcome before the resources, the budget, and the path are in place, built from projects delivered that way.
Key takeaways:
- How to separate the real constraints on a piece of work from the habits and assumptions that only look like constraints
- A sequence that starts with the outcome and the reason for it, then builds the path from what the team already has
- How to prove an idea on one case before scaling it, drawn from the Help One, Help Many model
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
How unlikely combinations of skills produce solutions 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 hands-on programme through the Not Impossible Institute that takes a team through the Dream, Develop, Deploy framework on their own work. Runs from half a day to several days, for cohorts of up to 75, and is commonly paired with the keynote on the same day.
Key takeaways:
- A mapped view of the status quo in the team’s own domain, including the constraints that turn out to be assumptions
- A portfolio of opportunities converted from those constraints, with owners and first steps attached
- Reusable frameworks the team keeps and applies to problems beyond the session
Each talk is shaped around the audience in a pre-event call.