[DSRP Evidence](https://dsrpevidence.org/)

# The Key to Einstein's Genius

## Details

**Authors** Schwandt, Jamie

**Year** 2017

**Publisher** LifeHack

**Kind of work** press

**Discipline** Education

**Secondary disciplines** Public Policy

**Kind of engagement** public

**Applied** false

[Read it](https://www.lifehack.org/646051/the-key-to-einsteins-genius)

## In authors' words

### What they set out to do (purpose)

To offer DSRP question-building as a way of staying with a question longer, which the article presents as the source of Einstein's productivity, and to show the method at work on the author's own research into the foster care system.

### Who or what was studied (sample)

The article reports a survey of 243 people on their perspectives of the foster care system, whose questions the author says were framed using DSRP; the findings themselves are published elsewhere, in an article on adoption.com.

### How they did it (methods)

A short application essay. It opens on Einstein's remark that he would spend most of an hour finding the right question, introduces DSRP Thinkquiry as a twenty-first-century alternative to the Socratic method, and then gives four or five guiding questions under each of Distinctions, Systems, Relationships and Perspectives, all of them about foster care and its relation to adoption. The author reports using the Cabreras' free mapping tool, Kingfisher, as a systems thinking whiteboard.

### What they found (results)

The author concludes that the Cabreras supplied both a way to stay with a question and a way to build one, and recommends DSRP as a source of insight. He reports that the questions surfaced ideas he had not previously considered, and calls the method his aha generator. He argues that where the Socratic method drives a student toward a black-and-white position, DSRP questions open the shades of grey between.

## Commentary

### In short

Schwandt applies DSRP to question-building, generating four sets of guiding questions about the foster care system, one set per pattern, and reports using them to frame a survey of 243 respondents.

### In more detail

The piece is an application rather than an explainer: Schwandt does not define the four patterns so much as show what each one asks of a topic. Under Distinctions he asks what foster care is and is not, and how it differs from adoption. Under Systems he asks what foster care's parts are, what larger whole it belongs to, and what parts come into view from a foster parent's vantage. Under Relationships he asks which ideas foster care connects to, what the connection between foster care and adoption consists of, and how the parts of one relate to the parts of the other. Under Perspectives he asks what becomes visible when the system's challenges are viewed from several vantages, including a foster child's. The questions are cumulative by design: the author describes each one as a loose Lego block to be connected to others into more complex questions, which is the article's working image for how the patterns combine. He attributes the method to Derek and Laura Cabrera at Cornell, calls the resulting questions the building blocks of cognition, and reports building the resulting map in Kingfisher. The survey's substance is not here; the article carries the method and points to adoption.com for the findings.

### Response

The article is accurate on the generative point, and its Lego image for combining questions is a fair rendering of how the patterns compound rather than sit in separate boxes. Where it narrows the theory is in treating DSRP as a questioning technique. Thinkquiry is one application of DSRP, built from it; the theory's claim is about how information is structured, in mind and in material, and question-building follows from that claim rather than constituting it. A reader who met DSRP here would come away with a protocol and not with the structural claim underneath it. Two smaller matters: the contrast drawn with the Socratic method is the author's own framing and not something DSRP asserts, and the Perspectives section rests on a survey whose results the article never reports, so the one piece of evidence it gestures at cannot be weighed on the page. The article also prints the acronym as DRSP at its first use.

**Patterns it shows** D, S, R, P

**Added** 2026-10-26

**How to cite this** Schwandt, Jamie (2017). The Key to Einstein's Genius. LifeHack.