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There are people and writings that inspire and influence our work directly – cue ‘The case “against” social capital’ and our St. Chris Stories. And then there are writings that infuse our work in many small but significant ways. Here we highlight those subtle inspirations and review the bits that inspire us.
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‘Insights’ are a bit like a circus show. Their stunts get plenty of attention – see here or here, like the rabbit popping out of the magician’s hat. But how the magician first discovered the trick, and then kept practicing to get the rabbit into the hat, that part tends to get skipped.
So I was in two minds about ‘Seeing What Others Don’t’ (public library) when I opened it for the first time, on the train home from another bitter-sweet ethnography. Bitter, because it had created again such an amount of data points – pages of quotes, snapshots, more questions – that seem to bury any meaning that there might be to them. And only over time with lots of contrasting, segmenting and, what Margo Fryer describes as, ‘maturing’ – periods where action is not the focus and nothing much is happening (on the surface). – the sweet-as moments start to happen when the dots join up and the underlying patterns surface.
But what if this messy, partly sub-conscious process of turning data into meaning and surfacing insights could happen a bit more deliberately? Could this even be possible? Or do insights come by nature unexpectedly?
One of the most common explanations about how insights actually happen was told by Graham Wallas in his 1926 book ‘The Art of Thought’. Anyone interested in understanding the creative process better is likely to come across Wallas’ explanation one way or another. It posits four distinct and linear stages to insights:
Preparation > Incubation > Illumination > Verification
As Klein paraphrases Wallas’ account:
“The insight, ‘the happy idea’, was a train of unconscious associations. These associations had to mature outside of conscious scrutiny until they were ready to surface. […] It is a very satisfying explanation that has a ring of plausibility – until we examine it more closely.”
For his own inductive research, Klein collected 120 cases of people making discoveries. He wanted to understand their backstory, ie. how people frame the events in a situation that lead to their discoveries. He found that most cases actually didn’t have any preparation stage. People got the insight by surprise. Suddenly, it was just there.
It’s here in his ‘stories first, theories second’ approach that Klein’s interest as cognitive psychologist in observing the way people make decisions shines through. He sees insights as unexpected shifts in understanding that come without warning. When people move from a mediocre story of how things work to a new and better story with its own set of beliefs that are more accurate, more comprehensive, and more useful.
So could there be a related but better story about how insights come about – an insight about gaining insights? And if so, are there any practical ways to increase insights?
Mind the anchors
Klein lands not on one unified theory, as Wallas did, but on three intuitive patterns or paths to insights. All paths depend on people being able to spot the few core assumptions or ‘anchors’ they use to make sense of a situation.
On the Contradiction Path the trigger is a inconsistency that people spot and think “That can’t be right!”, often between their own or prevailing wisdom or beliefs and new evidence on the ground. Instead of explaining away the inconsistency, the trick is to name anchors that underpin the belief and test them, one by one, for how plausible they are. The aim is to spot any weak assumptions and modify or replace them with others that are more grounded in the evidence to get to a better story of the situation.
On the Connection/Coincidence/ Curiosity Path, the trigger is a new anchor that people spot seemingly by chance, and add to their existing anchors. The story becomes more refined rather than gets completely replaced as on the contradiction path.
“The connection path is different from the desperation path or the contradiction path. We’re not attacking or building on weak anchors. [Instead,] we first add a new anchor to our beliefs and then work out the implications. Usually the new anchor comes from a new piece of information we receive.”
From “I wonder if…?” on the path to duct tape surfing. But how exactly did they get there?!
Curiosities differ from connections and coincidences in that they are triggered by a single event or observation, whereas connections and curiosities are triggered by the repetition of a pattern.
The Creative Desperation Path is similar to Wallas’ ‘flash of illumination’ that sparks insights unexpectedly. The trigger here is an impasse that makes people are actively searching for a solution outside the box – think intelligence tests in laboratories or chess grandmasters and the last-minute strategies they come up with when they’re cornered. They go through their assumptions until they discover the solution as an entirely new story, rather than steady analysis.
Increasing insights
The book is more of an eye opener than the next silver bullet or killer app for insight hunters, even if its cover image with the thermal binoculars suggests otherwise. Klein suggests that gaining insights comes down to the ability to turn descriptive stories of events into more inductive ones about what causes things to happen until insights start to surface. The triple path model is more of a worked example that shows the reader what to look for, and practice their own insightful storytelling, to add other surprising paths over time.
Speaking of surprises, Klein makes a but essential observation that’s echoes throughout the book:
“When we put too much energy into eliminating mistakes, we’re less likely to gain insights.”
The biggest barrier to gaining insights isn’t a lack of assumptions to add and replace. Even when people make discoveries, their systems can work against them trying to gain insights from a discovery. Six Sigma processes earlier and the heuristics-and-bias movement in behavioural economics now aim to reduce deviances from the norm, and assume that people’s fast intuitive thinking can’t be trusted.
But what if insight is like positive risk? And people with their individual ingenuity actually raise the bar?
Or as Frank Zappa put it: “Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible.”