In "We need critical thinkers and creative thinkers!" I wrote about Gary Klein’s observation that for great strategy we should not only counteract the biases that distort our decision making, but we need great insights too. He summarized this neatly as “performance improvements = error reduction + insight generation”. In this article, I cover Klein’s findings on sources of insights [1] with my own, admittedly liberal, interpretation.

Klein explains that the Wallas model for creative thinking [2], which is the commonly accepted model for how we generate insights, does not explain most of the insights that Klein studied. Klein found that many insights came unexpectedly, without the preparation stage that Wallas’ model demands.

Klein defines insights as “unexpected shifts in the way we understand things that ultimately provides more useful information”. He also explains how insights are different from intuition in that insights generate new patterns, while intuitions draw on existing patterns. For more on this, see "Instinct, Intuition and Insight."

The shift that Klein refers to is a shift in mental model. A mental model is a story we tell ourselves about how things work. For instance, back in 1959, Xerox had the mental model that their office equipment, e.g. copiers, needed to be sold to their business customers. This mental model was proving unsuccessful as customers found the copiers too expensive for what they perceived as a low volume need. Their business was failing. Driven by desperation, they had a shift in mental model that they could make more profits, not by selling machines, but by selling copies. The “pay-per-copy” business model was born and Xerox became a cultural phenomenon where the words “Xerox” and “copy” became interchangeable.

The Xerox story is an example of what Klein calls “creative desperation”. It is one of the three ways Klein found that results in insight generation.

A second way is to build new connections. In the early 2000s the computer gaming market was intensely competitive with Sony (PlayStation), Microsoft (Xbox) and Nintendo (GameCube) vying for market share. These companies were competing on graphics and computing power. Nintendo chose a different path. From an interview with Nintendo game designer Shigeru Miyamoto: "The consensus was that power isn't everything for a console. Too many powerful consoles can't coexist. It's like having only ferocious dinosaurs. They might fight and hasten their own extinction” [3]. Miyamoto also said: “Our goal was to come up with a machine that moms would want”. Nintendo shifted their mental model of gaming from competing on power and targeting the teenage gamer to providing a new experience that could appeal to everyone. It achieved this without introducing new technology, rather by stitching together untapped customer segments and existing technologies (e.g. accelerometers) into a new gaming experience.

The third way is to explore anomalies. It is quite typical when we observe a pattern in a data set we also see data points that are clear outliers. And often we discard these outliers, right? In this third way of generating insights, Klein encourages us to look more carefully at those outliers. Might there be an unrealized customer need hiding in the outliers, and we are not seeing it because we are asking the wrong questions? A firm example of this is a drug that started life as plain old UK-92480, a new treatment for angina, a heart condition that constricts the vessels that supply the heart with blood. The drug company Pfizer was looking for something that would relax these blood vessels, however its trials in people were disappointing. Pfizer were about to abandon further trials when the trial middle-aged male volunteers started coming back and reporting an unusual side effect - lots of erections. Instead of ignoring this anomalous information, Pfizer investigated, gained FDA approval, and UK-92480, now branded as Viagra, went on to become the best-selling drug of all time.

Fittingly, I close with the last paragraph in Klein’s “Seeing What Other’s Don’t”: “The magic of insights stems from the force for noticing connections, coincidences, and curiosities; the force for detecting contradictions; and the force of creativity unleashed by desperation. The magic lives inside us, stirring restlessly.”

References:

[1] “Seeing What Other’s Don’t: The Remarkable Ways We Gain Insights”, Gary Klein

[2] “The Art of Thought”, Graham Wallas

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wii