Einstein once wrote “The gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing positive knowledge.” This he believed because he knew that knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution.
Think of how Einstein changed our understanding of time and space by imagining people going to the center of time in order to freeze their lovers or their children in century-long embraces. This space he imagined is clearly reminiscent of a black hole, where, theoretically, gravity would stop time. Einstein also imagined a woman’s heart leaping and falling in love two weeks before she has met the man she loves, which led him to the understanding of acausality, a feature of quantum mechanics. And still another time he imagined a blind beetle crawling around a sphere thinking it was crawling in a straight line
Imagination gives us the impertinence to imagine making the impossible possible. Your brain is a dynamic system that evolves its patterns of activity rather than computes them like a computer. It thrives on the creative energy of feedback from experiences real or fictional. You can synthesize experience; literally create it in your own imagination. The human brain cannot tell the difference between an “actual” experience and a fantasy imagined vividly and in detail. This discovery is what enabled Albert Einstein to create his thought experiments with imaginary scenarios that led to his revolutionary ideas.
To encourage this thinking process of synthesizing fantasy with reality, I will sometime ask clients to “Think of something that is impossible to do, but if it were possible to do, would change the nature of your business forever?” Then try to come up with ideas that take you as close as possible to make that impossibility a reality.
EXAMPLE: A book publisher wanted to publish books that were unconventionally unique and that would educate and inspire young readers about the need for ecologically responsible behavior. They were asked to fantasize for ideas that were not possible to do. The group had much fun discussing their various absurd and crazy ideas.
One idea that excited the group was suppose we could scientifically determine a book’s DNA. Then suppose we could differentiate books by their DNA (fiction, nonfiction, poetry, textbook, reference book, biographies and so on. Then suppose we can create seeds for the different species of books based on their DNA and then plant them on farms. The books would grow like plants and when harvested the could be distributed to schools, libraries and bookstores. The great ecological value would be the number of trees in the world that would be saved. Instead of destroying trees to make books, books are grown and harvested on farms like plants.
Stretching your imagination by trying to make impossible things possible with concrete thoughts and actions is a mirror reversal of dreaming. Whereas a dream represents abstract ideas as concrete actions and images, this creative process works in the opposite direction, using concrete ideas (a seed that becomes a book) to gain insight on a conscious level to reveal disguised thoughts (books becoming plants) as creative imagery.
In this case, the impossibility of growing books as plants revealed the interesting thought of planting books as seeds for trees. Imagine the joy of children as they realize the ecological importance of contributing to the welfare of the planet by planting a book after they have finished reading it and watch it become a tree. They will nurture the tree and watch it grow over the years of their childhood.
IDEA: The project the publisher decided to pursue is to create storybooks that can be planted, and will grow back into trees. Hand stitched copies of children’s storybooks are made from recycled acid-free paper and biodegradable inks and the cover is embedded with native tree seeds. The books are aimed at children aged 6-12 who, after reading, can plant the book and watch and nurture the tree as it grows. Each copy comes with planting instructions. The publisher is also planning to have the book displayed in bookshops, where it can be seen germinating.
Thought is a process of fitting new situations into existing slots and pigeonholes in the mind. Just as you cannot put a physical thing into more than one physical pigeonhole at once, the processes of thought prevent you from putting a mental construct into more than one mental category at once. This is because the mind has a basic intolerance for ambiguity, and its first function is to reduce the complexity of its experiences. This is how we are taught to think and why we automatically exclude everything that is not relevant to our problem. Instead of looking for possibilities, we spend our mental energy judging and excluding possibilities as irrelevant instead of exploring them. This is why we continually come up the same old ideas time after time.
When you come up with crazy or fantastical ideas, you step outside your cone of expectations and intentions and allow yourself to think inclusively. Inclusive thinking is considering every idea no matter how irrelevant as a possibility.
A supervisor at a manufacturer of dinner plates told me a story about a problem they had at work. The problem was a packaging problem. The plates were wrapped in old newspapers and packed in boxes. Every packer would eventually slow down to read the papers and look at the pictures. Most employees would drop to about 30 percent efficiency after a few weeks on the job.
The manufacturer tried using other material for packing, but that proved too expensive; the newspapers had been free. They tried using newspapers in different languages, but these were hard to obtain. They even offered incentives to workers to increase the number of plates wrapped, but without great success. Finally, one day in a meeting an exasperated supervisor said they should tape the packer’s eyes shut when they report for work so they couldn’t read. This absurd comment created a lot of laughter as the others came up with silly ideas. One suggested having a packaging room with no windows or lights of any kind making it pitch black. Another wanted to make the room so bright you had to squint to see making it difficult to read. The CEO of the company joked along with the employees when suddenly he had an “Aha!” moment: he got the idea to hire blind people to do the packing. He contacted the Association of the Blind and worked with them to hire blind people. The company not only greatly increased its packing efficiency but also received huge tax benefits for hiring the disabled.
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