…But before we get to Einstein, let’s talk about brains.
For a long time, we’ve been taught to prize a particular kind of thinking: logical, focused, analytical, efficient. It’s the sort of thinking that works well for spreadsheets and precise bullet points.
But as useful as logic and detail are, they’re not the whole picture, because some of the most important intellectual breakthroughs have come from completely different modes of thinking – using curiosity and imagination to loosen the screws of logic.
Playing with ideas allows wildly original new ones to appear.
The psychiatrist and philosopher Iain McGilchrist has spent decades exploring how our two brain hemispheres attend to the world in very different ways. In his classic book The Master and His Emissary, he demonstrates that:
Both approaches are important, but balance is critical. When the left hemisphere dominates too much, the world starts to look like a set of fixed items to be optimised or eliminated.
But when we allow ourselves to be led by right brain thinking, the world can feel alive and bursting with patterns, new possibilities and unexpected connections.
Crucially, play engages our right brain way of thinking. Play is open-ended and allows for uncertainty; it invites the imagination to wander and asks, “What if…?”
Which brings us to a young chap in Bern…
When he was a only a teenager, Albert Einstein found he was nagged by a peculiar question: what would happen if I could ride alongside a beam of light?
According to classical physics, the idea made no sense, but the mental picture stayed with him for years. He kept returning to it, playing with the idea in his imagination and letting it hover, unresolved, at the edge of his thinking. He visualised chasing light through space, keeping pace with it, and watching what happened to waves and motion, even time itself.
Eventually, that playful thought experiment would resurface as a cornerstone of the theory of relativity – a framework that completely transformed our understanding of physics, overturning the idea of absolute space and time and showing instead that they shift depending on speed, gravity and the observer’s point of view.
Einstein himself was clear about where such ideas come from. As he put it: “The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct.”
You might be tempted to read that a genius deploying false modesty, but in fact it was a very precise diagnosis. It was a thought game, not a calculation or lab experiment, that led to one of humankind’s greatest scientific breakthroughs.
Neuroscience shows that when we’re in ‘play mode’ we move away from threat-based, defensive thinking and become more open and flexible – more willing to explore ideas without immediately judging them or dismissing them as irrelevant.
In McGilchrist’s terms, play restores right-hemisphere attention, which sees whole pictures rather than fragments and doesn’t need everything to be in a neat box or a binary relationship.
That means it can make new connections and allow answers and meanings to emerge without being forced: Einstein didn’t force relativity into existence but rather created the conditions for it to appear in his imagination.
Of course, most of us aren’t trying to rewrite the laws of physics, but the principle still holds.
If you’re solving a business problem or trying to see a situation differently, play is not a distraction from serious thinking but very often the doorway to it. Play unlocks ingenuity, creating space for ideas that can prove extremely valuable, even if at first you’re not sure what they’re for.
Overly rigid, hyper-instrumental environments on the other hand tend to produce lots of activity, but very few original ideas.
One important point: there’s a difference between ‘playing with a problem’ and ‘playing, full stop’. Much of the business world is now comfortable with the first: playful workshops, creative thinking sessions, games designed to unlock ideas or solve specific challenges. These can be useful, but they’re still instrumental: play is being used for something.
But Einstein’s breakthrough didn’t come from applying playfulness to a defined problem he knew he had to solve. Instead, it came from cultivating a way of being in the world: being curious, imaginative, tolerant of uncertainty and willing to live with paradox. Play was the condition that made new thinking possible, not a tool to crack a puzzle.
Einstein never lost his childlike curiosity. He kept asking simple, almost naïve questions and it turned out that they mattered. Playful thinking means being open to the world as something alive and surprising, not something to be controlled and flattened.
At Sharky & George, we see this every day. When people are given permission to play they become more connected and more inventive, and the brilliant ideas can flow.
We don’t design “playful solutions”, but we create the conditions in which real play can happen – and in doing so, we help teams and cultures rediscover a vital human capacity that modern working life has often squeezed out. We believe we can all relearn how to play – and in the process, see the world, and each other, differently.
Read more about the serious benefits of play in our free white paper The Transformational Power of Play.
