The relativity of time

 

I don’t know that Einstein was aware that time is also relative to culture.

In Germany, a 9:00am meeting will start at 8:55. In England at 9:10. In France at 9:15 and in Italy at 9:20. In Brazil it will be 9:45 or 9:50. Uniquely, in my experience, the meeting starts at 9 o’clock sharp in the Netherlands.

All of these are in reality on-time meetings. So getting upset when “my time” isn’t happening often means that you’re working with foreigners.

Running a workshop in Sao Paolo, the German client came to me on day two to apologise for the tardiness of her Brazilian colleagues. “I’m sure they will be here on time,” I responded. And they were.

Not just Higgs, Boson too

In the past week or so, with the success of the experiments with the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in finding the Higgs-Boson particle, we’ve all had the opportunity to become familiar with Professor Peter Higgs.

It prompted my friend Raj Marwah to post this note on FaceBook:

“Sure, Peter Higgs gave his name to the Higgs boson 'god’ particle, but in fact ALL bosons are actually named after an INDIAN physicist called Satyendra Nath Bose, best known for his early 1920s work in quantum mechanics, providing the foundation for Bose–Einstein statistics and the theory of the Bose–Einstein condensate. This entire class of particles (that obey Bose-Einstein statistics), ie bosons, was named after Bose by Paul Dirac (surprisingly, an Englishman: he held the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at Cambridge around that time).
Settle down, now. I'm just SAYIN …”

Satyendra Nath Bose was born in Bengal in 1898. He took his BSc and then MSc at the University of Calcutta, his marks in the latter being a record yet to be surpassed. In 1919 he was the first to translate Einstein’s papers on special and general relativity into English. His own work was seminal in creating the field of quantum statistics – he sent a paper on the subject to Einstein, who returned Bose’s favour by translating it into German. Having done his work mostly at the University of Calcutta, in 1926 he became head of the Department of Physics at Dhaka University, where he was to teach for three decades.

It was during a lecture at Dhaka that Bose made an error that subsequently became the basis of his new hypothesis, which in time supplanted Planck’s work and laid the foundations for modern quantum physics.

Good to know you. Thanks, Raj.

Einstein: Master of the One-Liner

Not content with being voted the most important human being of the twentieth century, Einstein was also the greatest master of the insightful quote about the business of creativity. I’ve written about several of them previously here and I expect to use more in the future.

"Imagination is more important than knowledge."

"The only really valuable thing is intuition."

“If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it.”

“A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new.”

“Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.”

"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler."

“If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough.”

"Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen."

“I think and think for months and years. Ninety-nine times, the conclusion is false. The hundredth time I am right.”

"Problems cannot be solved by thinking within the framework in which the problems were created." 

“Information is not knowledge.”

“It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education.”

“Curiosity has its own reason for existing."

“I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious.”

"Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts." (Sign hanging in Einstein's office at Princeton)

So many of them turn “common sense” on its head. Which is the MOST important, yet LEAST understood?

Learning to be more creative

I haven’t yet read Jonah Lehrer’s new best-selling book on creativity, Imagine: How Creativity Works, but I have read his extended article in last week’s Wall Street Journal, and I’m not impressed.

He starts from the proposition that “there’s no such thing as a creative type” and that “anyone can be learn to be creative”. It is not an encouraging thesis.

Basically it’s an extension of Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hours insight. And while it’s true that everyone can improve their connection-making skill (this being at the heart of all creativity), nevertheless it’s quite observable that some amongst us have creative skills of a quite different order.

Think Shakespeare, Mozart, Einstein, Edison, Turing… To be frank, even with a million hours of skill-building, I’m unlikely to achieve their level of, well, genius. And to deny this strikes me as, well, blind.

I have been training people in creative thinking over several decades now, and I notice consistently that the students who have lost their creativity (or suppressed it or never seemed to have had much anyway) can indeed up their game substantially. However they never catch up with the ones who have real self-confidence in their connection-making capabilities.

The latter make massive progress in a structured training session, because they are enabled to hone skills that already exist, taking them up to a whole new level. Whether the basis for their special talent is nature or nurture seems to me to be of secondary importance.

Individuals or teams for breakthrough creativity?

For years I believed that the best ideas emerged collaboratively. As international managing partner of Synectics for many years, a leading proponent of team creativity, that’s what you’d expect.

I’m not so sure any more.

It’s gradually become clearer to me that real ground-breaking ideas are more often hatched in the brains of highly creative individuals. Think Galileo, Harrison, Einstein, Edison.

Certainly Edison’s biggest breakthrough ideas were conceived in solitude – but he was also superb in organising his innovation project teams to work systematically towards implementation once he’d made that initial imaginative leap.

In my experience team creativity is generally better for more day-to-day creativity, for problem-solving, for the creation of strategy and for getting the team fully on board.

Galileo and university silos

A genius with the widest of interests, Galileo Galilei was so much more than an astronomer.

Musician, philosopher, inventor, artist, engineer, mathematician, physicist, designer and superb writer. The ultimate polymath. Einstein described him as the father of modern science. A total “renaissance man” (as they say nowadays).

The question is: what might Galileo have studied in today’s siloed university system, where narrow specialisation is the norm? A handful of universities, including City in London, now offer some exciting interdisciplinary courses, but it’s mostly the students who get the benefit of these, not really the teaching staff. There seems to be minimal communication - even between disciplines that appear to be adjacent to each other, like music and musicology.

Would he have been accepted in the first place? And if he had been, and had gone on to pursue a postgraduate path, would he have produced a quarter of what he eventually achieved?

“Six impossible things before breakfast”

The Queen remarked: “Now I'll give you something to believe. I’m just a hundred and one, five months and a day.”
“I can’t believe that!” said Alice.
“Can’t you?” the Queen said in a pitying tone. “Try again: draw a long breath, and shut your eyes.”
Alice laughed. “There’s no use trying,” she said: one can’t believe impossible things.”
“I dare say you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

Is the pre-breakfast time best for new ideas? I like it myself.

Is deep breathing and shutting the eyes useful?

Is practice important in developing creative skills? I’m sure it is.

But how about impossibility?

Einstein wrote: “If at first the idea is not absurd, there’s no hope for it.” Everything that exists, all knowledge, was once invented or discovered. And quite usually the new idea or discovery can seem impossible (or absurd) to existing “experts” in the field.

Stravinsky the bank manager

Do highly creative individuals look different?

In my experience some do, some don’t.

There’s no doubt with Albert Einstein. The amazing breakthrough thinking matches up precisely with the visual image of the wild-haired, wild-eyed maverick.

But consider Igor Stravinsky. The Rite of Spring ballet that he composed for Diaghilev was so shocking when it was first performed in 1913 that there were riots in the streets of Paris. And composers are still dealing with and responding to the savagery of his musical vision.

Yet Stravinsky presented himself more like a bank manager than a revolutionary artist. And so did one of the greatest and most radical of twentieth century poets, TS Eliot.

In my own working experience, I learned over time not to trust the packaging as an accurate guide to the contents when dealing with “creatives” in an ad agency. Some of the greatest copywriters I worked with dressed and behaved conservatively, while some of the least talented presented themselves as geniuses.

But how are we to tell the difference?

Einstein and “Common Sense”

What people call “common sense” seems highly prized. I’m never quite sure what it means beyond “what I think”, “what my experience tells me”, “conventional wisdom says”.

As such, it can be very useful in dealing with the existing.

But, when dealing with creative ideas, it can become really dangerous. New ideas can be fatally damaged at an early stage by the application of too much common sense.

A much better process is first to find and articulate the intrigue in the new idea. Then to establish what’s valuable about it. Then to identify any issues – problems that come with the idea. Critically, then to do some rigorous problem-solving so that the new idea can be made to work in practice in real life.

As an approach, it’s not quite as simple as “common sense”, but it’s a whole lot more likely to get you past go.

As Einstein put it: “Problems cannot be solved by thinking within the framework in which the problems were created.”

Have you been on the receiving end of someone else’s common sense recently? Or… have you dished it out?

“If at first the idea is not absurd, there is no hope for it.”

An innovation manager in a major multinational said to me today that there were two camps in his company: those who think that significant growth will come primarily from breakthrough ideas and those who think that it will come from a continuous stream of incremental ideas.

Of course, in reality it needs to come from both. But how to tell the difference when you’re confronted with a new idea?

One test is quite simple: does the idea seem somewhat (or even completely) absurd? If it does, odds are it’s not an incremental idea. But does that mean it’s a breakthrough? Maybe. Maybe not.

The thing about absurdity that Einstein was identifying in his famous line is that those who are experts in any particular field necessarily build up a series of boundaries and ground rules. By definition breakthrough ideas confront and in some way overturn one or more of those givens. So “experts” are often the very ones who reject breakthrough ideas.

That’s why so many organisations appear to be organised around the rejection of absurdity – and in the process jettison new concepts that might radically change their growth trajectory.

“Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?” asked Harry Warner of Warner Brothers, one of the greatest of the Hollywood movie moguls, in 1927. That was exactly the moment that talkies were to move from mere possibility to overwhelming success. Was he stupid? Not really. He was just an expert confronted with what seemed to him absurd.