Contemplation to make scientific discoveries

While Contemplation on the Adios principles enables you to improve your clarity of thought and peace of mind, the same tool is also used to find deep insights or creative solutions to a problem. While this is true for every discipline, let us specifically talk about science.

Because the world today is extremely noisy and distracting, your research team might tend to focus too much on the outside world - physical and virtual. For science this means that the attention is not inward focused. But to find hidden insights, you must be able to direct a constant stream of attention and think deeply about a problem for long periods of time. It is this crucial step that is generally missing.

A systematic practice of Contemplation fixes this problem, which means it will enable you to find deep insights that you could have found but weren't able to because you were too distracted. When you do it right, you will find them and hence make new discoveries more often.

To gauge the relevance of Contemplation practice for your research team, ask them the following questions and have them reply anonymously with a numerical value in number of hours:

1. How much time do you spend in a day consuming information (listening, reading, watching a video etc.)?
2. How much time do you spend in a day speaking?
3. How much time do you spend in a day doing something (writing an email or a report, conducting an experiment, etc.)
4. How much time do you spend in a day doing nothing but only thinking deeply about a specific problem or question?

For a large number of people today, the answer to Question 4 is Zero hours. This includes pharma, biotech and other such organizations where research is key to their business.

How many organizations do you know who have designated Contemplation Labs, time officially set aside for thinking deeply or an established culture of thinking deeply?

How many scientists and research scholars are commonly found lost in thought or taking solitary walks thinking about a problem on hand?

How many directors ask Question 4 at board meetings as one of the key metrics to measure the efficiency of their R&D initiative?

We seem to have been using two main methods to create innovation or generate creative solutions - group brainstorming and the shower. But there is a problem with these two approaches.

Group brainstorming is necessary but not sufficient, and the shower technique is not reliable and predictable. That's where Contemplation comes in.

Systematic, Repeatable and Predictable Innovation at Will

Contemplation is essentially thinking deeply about matters that matter. When you use Contemplation as an official step in the scientific process, you plug a significant loophole in your journey to discover new scientific insights.

Einstein called it thought experiments. Newton called it long walks in the garden. The essence is the same - the ability to think deeply about a particular matter, without any distraction, for long periods of time. Think of it this way. The solution you need is buried deep into the ground. You need a process to dig constantly in that direction until you get to it.

That discipline of digging into your mind systematically with discipline is conspicuous by its absence in the scientific world today (and everywhere else).

Recently, a senior scientist from Stanford University mentioned two things in our discussion with him:

"Our universities are churning out scientists every day but most of them don't know how to think deeply.

"James Watson (DNA structure) said in one of his lectures - Back in our day, a scientific paper used to be 10% data and 90% thought. Today it is 90% data and 10% thought."

This should tell you something.

The solution is not that difficult - a systematic discipline of Contemplation.

Innovation at Will (InnWill) Training Program

The Adios InnWill Program will train your scientists and research team in a regular habit of Contemplation.

They will go through the main Adios Contemplation Program that enables them to achieve clarity of thought and peace of mind in their personal and professional life. In addition to that, they will also work on an InnWill project where they will take up a specific scientific question they are working on and use Contemplation to find insights about that question over the next few weeks.

The InnWill project team could consist of a single person or 3-5 people. They will use a combination of group brainstorming and systematic individual Contemplation to find insights into their problem.

The InnWill team will document their progress every week and prepare an InnWill Project Report at the end of the program which will detail their findings, techniques and other important details pertaining to their project as well as their Contemplation journey, what worked, what didn't, etc.. This report will become part of your InnWill database and can be used by subsequent InnWill teams to build further on the same project or to use the insights in other projects they might undertake.

Innovation Culture

Once trained in Contemplation, your teams can run InnWill projects every month. Some projects could be more than four weeks too. This will establish an official system of creating innovation at your organization. You will be able to create innovation at will repeatedly, predictably, quarter on quarter.

Imagine the power of this.

Imagine what this could do for your vision.

Imagine what this could do for your organization's success.

Silence and Contemplation are the two technologies you need to create innovation at will. Yes, it sounds a bit unconventional. But does it sound right?

Does this sentence - If you train people to think deeply on a regular basis, that might help us generate deeper insights - sound wrong to you?

If this intrigues you, please book a free call with our founder Tarun here.

Book a 30 free call