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.

True Innovation Makes No Sense Yet Changes Everything

Over the decades I have spent countless hours with executives who seek to bring innovation to their IT systems or their businesses. They say they want dramatic changes. They are 110% convinced that certain technologies can make it possible.  But what they really want is to increase profits, increase efficiency, improve communications, and have greater control over their company.  Those are all good things and quite often, they want proven conventional methods to satisfy many of those needs. Innovation, however, consists of introducing an unknown variable into the mix, so that one cannot entirely predict the outcome. At first, no one likes that idea. 

In the photo above I am soaking pieces of an apple tree and a lemon in a sanitized bucket of distilled water. After a few days I will boil this water and add sugar. I will then filter out the items, cool it down, and bottle it with a chosen yeast to make a hard seltzer, approximately 4.5% ABV and 100 calories. Everything about this process is standard... except the infusion of apple wood and lemon.  I have only a vague idea what this might taste like, based on my experience of smoking meat with apple wood, the smell of the wood, and my familiarity with lemons. Perhaps this infusion won't work at all, it will make zero perceivable difference, or perhaps it will yield a disgusting result.  

To manage the risks, I am only creating one gallon of alcohol. Furthermore, everything I am doing is based on previous experiences and data, with the exception of the wood and fruit. If the outcome is terrible the cost was low. If it is only "a little" terrible, then I can try another version. Maybe apple wood and no lemon? Maybe pieces of oak under pressure - like this Cleveland-based company that uses a similar approach to age bourbon in merely one week?

The process I just described is not innovation. Soaking some wood in the water is somewhat novel, but thats about it. The overall process is more akin to the scientific method as a structured approach to incremental learning. This is one way, the most common way, to manage innovation. The innovation part is leveraging absurdity. Apple wood is a high risk, untested,  and by all means reckless ingredient that is likely to sabotage my brewed product. Have you ever seen an apple wood flavored beer on the shelf? Is this because it is a proven bad concept,  or did no one ever make the leap to try it, then try enough to succeed?  The only insight to hedge the risk, again, is my personal subjective experience with the wood which I used in a smoker, and that isn't very reliable. 

The risk to take a nonsensical action, and to persist in the nonsense, is at the heart of innovation, art, and insanity. The incredible opportunity is the small, yet viable probability that my reckless action will generate massive returns if all goes well. If it doesn't - well, then we could. have trouble. Creating a process to manage innovation is essential to keeping your company afloat by keeping the risks small.  But this still isn't innovation.

Yet what if, somehow, maybe this apple wood seltzer introduces a new idea about beverages. What if it surges in popularity, so much that it will generate an entirely new market of organic wood infused beverages, demanding an increase in new forestry growth and sustainable forestry practices. Maybe this demand will be high enough that it leads to new kinds of job creation,  and inspires other markets that enhance taking care of the earth. Just maybe, I soak some wood in a bucket, and with constant dedication and determination, transform the entire way beverage ingredients are sourced to stimulate new growth in the rain forests and stimulate new economic models.

This is all possible. Before Uber or Lyft, most people would never have jumped into a stranger's car. Before Starbucks, no one in their right mind would have spent seven dollars on a coffee. And before I started brewing beer in my basement, I never thought about the taste of a tree.

When irrational action meets profound vision to inspire a chain of consequences that forever change the lives of people, businesses, and communities – then you truly innovated.  If you are good at it, you don't need a 10 million dollar team of technicians to start, you just need a 5 gallon bucket and a few small logs.