‘Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world’ — Albert Einstein.
What is more important – What you know, or how you think about what you know? Can an often absent minded theoretical physicist teach us anything practical about making our struggling enterprise a success? Can using Einstein’s thought experiments be a practical tool, contributing to bottom line profitability?
Albert Einstein, born in 1879, was a theoretical physicist who transformed our understanding of space, time, gravity, energy and matter with several revolutionary ideas.
In 1905, his thinking on special relativity showed that space and time are not absolute, they depend on the observer’s motion. E = mc² has become one of the world’s most well known equations, based on the idea that mass and energy are different forms of the same physical quantity.
In 1915, his general relativity thinking defined gravity as not simply a force pulling objects together; it is a result of the curvature of spacetime. He received the 1921 Nobel Prize in physics for his significant contributions to quantum theory, including his explanation of the photoelectric effect.
But Einstein’s importance goes beyond individual discoveries. What stands out is his distinctive way of thinking about reality.
Einstein’s great contribution was not simply the theories of relativity. It was how he thought. Before doing the complicated mathematics, he often used thought experiments; imaginary situations that stripped away distractions and asked: What would actually happen if we changed one fundamental assumption? That way of thinking has surprisingly useful applications in Kenyan business.
Start with an imaginary situation
Einstein famously imagined himself riding alongside a beam of light. Instead of accepting existing assumptions about space and time, he asked what the world would look like from a radically different position? In business we can do the same, instead of asking: ‘How can we improve our sales?’ reframe to ask: ‘Imagine we had to build this business from scratch today. What would we do differently?’ This removes the invisible road blocks created by history and forces one to focus on the key constraint.
Changing your business perspective is an absolute requirement. Einstein’s relativity thinking teaches that observation depends partly on the observer’s frame of reference. What does this problem look like from another observer’s frame? Even within a company how finance, operations, sale and marketing, supply chain or HR look at a problem can be radically different. Try looking at the business through the eyes of customer, new staff member, competitors, or a supplier.
Change just one assumption
Einstein’s thought experiments almost always challenged fundamental assumptions. You are what you do today, not what you say you will do tomorrow. Might be better to shift from an addiction to planning-trying to predict the future- to running a series of tiny low risk business experiments, until the answer emerges.
Einstein’s method was powerful partly because he pushed situations to their logical extreme. Time to ask some deliberately provocative questions. For instance, What if our biggest customer disappeared tomorrow? What if our product had to cost 50 percent less? What if we could not hire another employee for three years? What if customers hate our existing product?
Try extreme thought experiments
Down through history, scientific breakthroughs relied on experiments. Leading edge companies are constantly experimenting, asking difficult questions.
Aim is to create a mental laboratory like aC Lab. Purpose isn’t to predict the future. It is to discover the assumptions that ordinary business planning leaves untouched. Einstein wasn’t interested merely in describing what happened. He wanted to understand the underlying principles producing what happened.
Business systems are often complex where it is just about impossible to know what is going to happen in a particular situation. We get trapped in the symptoms, where the real aim should be to try and understand the rough outlines of how the system works.
What is the fundamental relationship that is producing this pattern? A thought experiment might be: ‘What happens if we stop trying to acquire more customers and instead double purchase frequency among existing customers?’ Imagine removing something fundamental. Think about value addition by subtraction. If we had to drop our current business model, how would we serve the customer?
Thought experiments can expose ‘business relativity’. Catch is, there is an important distinction, physics has laws that can be tested objectively. However, [unfortunately] business does not have universal equations comparable to Einstein’s formulas.
Too many variables at play with human beings responding to incentives, culture, competition, technology and expectations. So business thought experiments don’t produce ‘truth’ in the same way physics does – but they do produce better questions and move into action smart approaches.
Deeper lesson is that Einstein’s method suggests a radically different approach to management: Don’t begin by asking, What should we do? Begin by inquiring: What would have to be true for this problem to look completely different?
That question forces managers out of the existing comfortable frame. It turns the approach from: Let’s improve what we already do into: ‘Let’s investigate whether we are thinking about the problem correctly.’ Imaginative think like Einstein approach to management is — change the frame before trying to solve the problem.