Key Quote:
“In many cases, organizations are preventing insights by imposing too many controls and procedures in order to reduce or eliminate errors. Organizations value predictability and abhor mistakes. That’s why they impose management controls that stifle insights. If organizations truly want to foster innovation and increase discoveries, their best strategy is to cut back on the practices that interfere with insights.” — Gary Klein
Key Points and Concepts
Defining Insights
“Insight is when it happens, everything that happens afterward is different” (p. 24).
The common perception is that insights are ‘aha’ moments, but many of the cases Klein studied were gradual. For example, coincidences mount as a gradual swelling of suspicion. There’s no single event that makes someone recognize the pattern. Even with the ‘aha,’ – the actual moment when everything finally snaps into place is what marks the culmination of the insight process, rather than the insight itself.
Connections
We can increase insights by exposing ourselves to many different ideas that might help us form new connections, but the difficulty lies in knowing which dots to connect and which to ignore (p. 41).
Case example: After the Battle of Taranto during WWII – the first battle that proved how battleships were vulnerable to airplanes when launched from carriers – two men on opposite sides of the war realized the weakness in America’s naval fleet stationed at Pearl Harbor. In December 1941, Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto submitted his blueprint of attack. Admiral Harold Stark, the Chief of Naval Operations for the United States, wrote a memo to place torpedo nets within the Harbor in November 1940, and followed up with that memo for months afterwards. Unfortunately, the Americans thought the warning was implausible and lost track of it due to short-term, daily emergencies (pp. 33-36).
“[Yamamoto and Stark] both anticipated the coming war between their countries. They both knew that the U.S. Navy had superior forces. And then this news about Taranto. Mapping the Battle of Taranto onto the Pacific, Yamamoto and Stark recognized that it was an analogue for what the Japanese might be able to do to the U.S. fleet in Pearl Harbor” (p. 36).
“We shouldn’t be too quick to conclude that insights are simply about making connections” (p. 43). Insights are about changing the way you think, and knowing what is relevant and what is not.
Coincidences
“Coincidences are chance concurrences that should be ignored except that every so often they provide us with an early warning about a new pattern” (p. 45).
Relying on coincidences to discover insights is dangerous, because they can be highly misleading. Ideally you want to test coincidences before giving them credence, but even our tests may be misleading (p. 52). “We shouldn’t take the ridiculous position of believing in coincidences regardless of the evidence, but we shouldn’t automatically believe the evidence either. Evidence can be tainted by variables that we are not aware of” (p. 59).
Case example: Michael Gottlieb, MD, published the first announcement of the AIDS epidemic. He was working as a professor in UCLA and met a patient with symptoms and results he’d never encountered before. A few months later, Gottlieb examined two more patients in Los Angeles with similar symptoms. He noted a coincidence: all three men were gay. After his fifth patient (and within five months of the first), Gottlieb published an article about the new epidemic (p. 13). Michael Gottlieb didn’t believe his patients had anything to do with each other. But the coincidence in their symptoms, and their lifestyles, seemed important (p. 45).
Coincidence insights are different from connection insights: In the latter, the new pieces of information provide important details, and the details count. In contrast, what matters for coincidence insights is repetition. “If Gottlieb’s first patient had been a no-show, the second and third and fourth patients would have been enough to illustrate the pattern… The details of any one patient didn’t matter” (p. 49).
Curiosities
“Curiosities provoke people to investigate further, just as coincidences do. The initial ‘What’s going on here?’ reaction doesn’t contain the insight, but it starts the person on the road to gaining the insight. Curiosities differ from coincidences in one way: They are sparked by a single event or observation rather than by the repetition of a pattern” (p. 50).
Case example: “In the early 1940s, Russell Ohl, an engineer at Bell Labs, tried using silicon to get better radio reception. One day, something strange happened when he inadvertently used a piece of silicon that had a crack in it. When the silicon was exposed to light, the current flowing between the two sides of the crack jumped significantly. That aroused Ohl’s curiosity. He found that the crack was a dividing line between two impurities in the silicon. Ohl performed additional research showing that the impurities changed how much each section resisted electrical flow. Ohl’s discovery led to transistors and to all forms of diodes” (p. 51).
Unlike coincidences, curiosities are unlikely to mislead us. The worst result in examining a curiosity that doesn’t lead anywhere is wasted time (p. 51).
Contradictions
“Contradiction insights spark the emotional reaction ‘No way!’” (p. 61). They send us on the road to a better story by signaling that there’s something very wrong with the story we’re currently telling ourselves.
Case example: Two cops were stuck in traffic on routine patrol, and not much was going on that morning. The older cop was driving. As they waited for the light to change, the younger cop glanced at the fancy new BMW in front of them. The driver took a long drag on his cigarette, took it out of his mouth, and flicked the ashes onto the upholstery. The younger cop was shocked: who would ash his cigarette in a brand new car? Not the owner of the car, not even a friend to the owner. Almost immediately he recognized this was a stolen car (p. 4).
“Contradictions are different from curiosity insights. Curiosities make us wonder what’s going on, whereas contradictions make us doubt – ‘That can’t be right’” (p. 61). Many times, in contradictions the person recognizes the flaw in the story even without identifying the right answer first.
Creative Desperation
Many of the examples in the other strategies are accidental, the result of unplanned happenstance or of being in the right place at the right time. Creative desperation is deliberate. It occurs when people are stuck and need some sort of breakthrough. “The clock would be winding down, they’d be in a tough situation, none of the plausible moves worked, and then, out of desperation, they would find an unorthodox line of play that would save them, gambling on some leverage they might never have tried to use if any of the acceptable moves had looked promising” (p. 79).
“Creative desperation requires finding a way out of a trap that seems inescapable” (p. 80).
Case example: In May 2003, Aron Ralston, an American mountain climber, was hiking through canyons in Utah. He fell into a crevice and his right arm was pinned by a boulder. He used his pocketknife to carve away at the rock to free his arm, but with no success. All he did was dull the blade, which now prevented him from amputating his arm. After several days and tantrums, he realized he could bend his arm to snap his bones and use his knife to cut through the tissue (p. 86).
“Notice that creative desperation is more conscious and deliberate than spotting connections, coincidences, curiosities, and contradictions. People aren’t accidentally stumbling onto insights. They are actively searching for them” (p. 87).
Triple Path Model
Some of the five strategies work in opposite directions. For example, “when faced with creative desperation, we try to find a weak belief that is trapping us. We want to jettison this belief, so that we can escape from fixation and from impasse. In contrast, when using a contradiction strategy, we center on the weak belief. We take it seriously instead of explaining it away or trying to jettison it. We use it to rebuild our story” (p. 101).
Despite the incongruity, Klein found a common pattern: We must modify the core beliefs that anchor our understanding (p. 103).
Ultimately, Klein designed the Triple Path Model. The model identifies three paths (Contradiction Path, Connection / Coincidence / Curiosity Path, and Creative Desperation Path) which trigger an activity (use a weak anchor to rebuild story, add a new anchor, or discard a weak anchor), all of which lead to a change in how we understand the situation (p. 104).
Why We Miss Insights
When studying why people missed insights, Klein used a “contrasting twin,” –someone who had all the same information as someone else but did not come to any insight. He discovered four reasons for the impediment (p. 122):
• Gripped by Flawed Beliefs: Core beliefs anchor our understanding, and the more central the belief is to our thinking, the harder it is to give it up (p. 125).
• Lack of Experience: The twin either did not have the necessary knowledge or did not know how to use that knowledge to tune their attention to notice anything (p. 126).
• Passive Stance: The twin went through the necessary tasks but was not actively scanning for new developments and opportunities. He stopped thinking (p. 127).
• Concrete Reasoning: This is a personality trait. Some people become impatient with speculation and want concrete thinkers who will stick to the facts (p. 129).
Almost worse than missing an insight is forming an insight and not doing anything with it, as in the Pearl Harbor example. “Insights don’t count for much if we can’t translate them into action” (p. 36).
Looking for Patterns
Looking for insights is about finding patterns. Klein started this project by noticing sets of patterns in different stories he was collecting: “I would come across an article describing how someone made an unusual discovery, and I’d add it to a stack on mydesk… I [started to] wonder if I could learn anything useful by studying the way people form insights in natural settings (pp. 3-6).
“Naturalistic methods can be a bit nerve-wracking because you never know what you are looking for. You sift through the stories, on the lookout for patterns that might be meaningful…You can’t define in advance how you are going to analyze your data because you don’t know what patterns might emerge” (p. 99).
Klein advocates a step away from conventional research methods when looking for abstract patterns or ideas. This applies to his research and for actual insights themselves. “The purpose of science is to learn more about the world, including the world of insights… We shouldn’t, however, become so fixated on the methods that we lose sight of the object of our inquiry. We shouldn’t evolve a set of methods that don’t fully capture the phenomenon we want to understand” (p. 178).
You need to track and archive insights to get better at recognizing them, and then you search for how and why someone formed the insight (p. 225).
Klein, Gary. (2015). Seeing What Others Don’t: The Remarkable Ways We Gain Insights. New York: Public Affairs.
“Contradiction insights spark the emotional reaction ‘No way!’” They send us on the road to a better story by signaling that there’s something very wrong with the story we’re currently telling ourselves.
Klein designed the Triple Path Model. The model identifies three paths (Contradiction Path, Connection / Coincidence / Curiosity Path, and Creative Desperation Path) which trigger an activity (use a weak anchor to rebuild story, add a new anchor, or discard a weak anchor), all of which lead to a change in how we understand the situation.
“Naturalistic methods can be a bit nerve-wracking because you never know what you are looking for. You sift through the stories, on the lookout for patterns that might be meaningful…You can’t define in advance how you are going to analyze your data because you don’t know what patterns might emerge.”