Seeing What Others Don't: The remarkable ways we gain INSIGHTS

during incubation our unconscious mind continues to chew on the problem. A second idea is that incubation may work by letting us recover from mental fatigue. Prolonged concentration may drain our mental energy, and so a period of relaxation may be needed to get us going again. A third explanation is that in a relaxed state we can summon forth remot

Insight advocates could share what they learn by using stories.

five different strategies for gaining insights: connections, coincidences, curiosities, contradictions, and creative desperation.

A checklist mentality is contrary to a playful, exploratory, curiosity-driven mentality.

An organization that rigidly adheres to a doctrine of continual transformation, following the creative desperation path, is different from one that is sensitive to connections, coincidences, curiosities, and contradictions.

In his 2010 book, Where Good Ideas Come From, Steven Johnson recommends ways to increase creative turbulence

we should find ways to increase the density of ideas to which we are exposed

We should foster serendipity—the random collision of ideas.

the Six Sigma experiment turned sour. A 2006 article in Fortune reported that 91 percent of the large companies that adopted Six Sigma had failed to keep pace with the S&P 500 ever since. The reason, according to Fortune, was that Six Sigma got in the way of innovation. Too much energy was spent cutting defects to 3.4 per million, and not enoug

How can we gain more insights? That challenge seems pretty daunting, but we can make it more manageable if we examine each of the insight paths separately. The Triple Path Model of insight suggests the different routes we can take (see diagram).