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May 02, 2008

In Radio, Business, and Life, Remember Einstein

You know when you've heard something before but it never fully caught you? This happened recently when I re-heard an Einstein quote (which has a few versions) that goes:

"You cannot solve problems with the same level of consciousness that created them."

Now I see its implications nearly everywhere. The latest was this morning when I read Mark Ramsey's post.

By "level of consciousness", Einstein meant the same thought processes, the same assumptions, mental models, or approaches to the issues.

It's one of those quotes that's almost immediately self-evidently true.

Obviously it applies to solving problems. The world's biggest, even - and we can all look around and see how the same approach has produced little progress and some (or a lot of) backwards movement.

Applying this to radio advertising, this explains why certain products and services are most successful over the long run, and it certainly provides reasoning for why "me too" products, services, and ads don't work.

However, if we expand beyond radio advertising to look at all businesses, all organizations, there are more profound implications of this idea, if we take the time to look into it further.

Look at it more on a daily basis, inside your organization. And replace "problems" with "challenges". Every organization, it seems, wants to "grow" - grow revenues, grow profits, grow in reputation, grow membership... But how does the organization do that? How do you "deliver the results" that produce this desired outcome, "growth"?

According to Einstein, it takes a new level of consciousness - i.e. new thinking. Which means what?

In one sense it means looking with fresh eyes - to peel away the assumptions and mental models that have been practiced, and which resulted both in a level of success and also in the current set of challenges. These are challenges that might be recurring, and toward which progress might be slow or limited - in spite of a lot of focus or dedication.

And then from that place of fresh eyes, again as Einstein suggested, it becomes possible to look anew, with a play-like approach that's now unburdened. It's perhaps a "radical" new perspective. Radical is the only way to innovation.

In radio advertising, you could say we work between two extremes. On the one end is "the way it's done" - the fundamental approaches and tactics that "work" and "don't work". If you create a radio ad purely from this view, it will sound formulaic and flat. At the other end of the continuum is the "creative" approach. If you create a radio ad from purely this perspective, you end up with unique sounding, entertaining ads... that don't produce profitable results. The "new level of consciousness" applied to creating radio ads is one that holds both of these views together as co-conspirators to the final outcome.

In another sense, Einstein's quote leads to the idea that each individual involved in the organization must expand his or her own personal horizons. How else will it be possible to approach today's challenges with a new "level of consciousness"? This is taking a "systems" perspective, and it's easy to see how an organization is a system of interdependence. There is a need for each person to know their "blind spots" where seeking out personal learning can help both the individual and the company.

The point here is that to achieve the "outer" results in any area of the business (growth), it's necessary to first make "inner" movement (new level of consciousness). And there seems to be two ingredients to producing inner movement. One is becoming aware of our own mental blocks to seeing things anew. The other is the act of developing through appropriate learning experiences. If either is missing in the organization, the company's growth (or any success metric) is impacted negatively. When we see this from the systems perspective, we note that only through constant inner movement is it possible to make consistent outer progress.

Contrast this with the approach of trying harder or working harder or buckling down, digging in, pumping ourselves up to go at it with more gusto, determination and dedication. Doing more of the same with more gusto will only get the organization so far, whereas with the approach implicated by Einstein's quote... there is no limit.

The punchline here is that ... it's difficult to do this. It's very difficult to shed mental models and assumptions to see with fresh eyes. And it's very hard to see personal blind spots and to apply personal effort to learn and grow on an ongoing basis.

But in one very real sense, figuring out how to do this, and doing it, is what every organization is here to do.

Einstein might say it this way: that the key to enduring success for any orgainzation is figuring out how to produce a new level of consciousness on an ongoing basis.

Something to think about, for sure.

Posted by Brett Astor at 09:33 AM | Permalink