Better science by exploring metaphors

Brewing with champagne yeast. Beverage and music production by Mitchell Sipus

Brilliant campaigns and sharp insights are not tied to rational processes. Business schools overlook this. We train young minds in rigorous and highly structured analysis, and yet, the ability to identify the uncanny and seize it is more frequently tied to open dialogue, fast moving conversations, and slow periods of reflection. In the meanwhile, we do not educate our MBAs to meditate or to work through metaphors.

I once read in Ray Kurzweil's How to create a mind, that Einstein wasn't so much a strong mathematician, but had a strong ability to think through metaphors. Kurzweil described Albert Einstein as a man who would read voraciously and daydream, but unlike most of us, would carry the imagined scenario many steps forward into the realms of abstraction. Once he these dreamlike scenarios were far and distant from reality - he would begin to analyze them, reverse engineering them into plausibility. He didn't do better math - he just did better at dreaming.

Over the last five years I have worked on this technique. While working at the EPA, I built rich metaphors for the organization as a car on a race track and as a dust storm on the moon (yeah, I realize, it doesn't have dust storms). I pushed these metaphors hard, imagining scenarios where the wheels fall off or static electricity evolves into a cosmic disturbance. And then I began to work backwards and sideways, repositioning these extended metaphors and translating them into something real. Sometimes it created value. Sometimes it did not. Sometimes it just gave me a headache. But when I injected the outcome of the effort into daily work - it always had repercussions. My colleague Ben Wilman and I did some great work at the EPA, and I suspect this was part of it.

In the video above, I am creating a metaphor. I was brewing hard seltzer at home and started to film the settlement of the yeast as it interacted with diamonnium phosphate,  a yeast nutrient. Through the camera lens, I found the interaction of the champagne yeast and the nutrient somehow romantic and extraterrestrial. I wrote some music and applied it to the imagery.

What is this? I do not know? How will it shape the next steps in the scientific process of alcohol production that I otherwise am constantly measuring and locking away into a database? I do not know. But by and large, databases only enable greatness, they do not create it. Metaphors can unlock new worlds, whereas science can only study them.