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

It’s best to settle for perfection. With that, you have fallen into the perfection trap. You are trapped by a desire to reduce errors and achieve the initial objectives. This desire is stronger than wanting to turn out good products and outcomes. You define your job as not making mistakes.

Knowledge. Did the person know something, some fact, that others didn

Constraints. Daniel Boone knew how to ambush the kidnappers because he knew where they would have to cross the river.

If we want to increase our own insights, we should know about the different paths: the contradiction path, the connection path, and the creative desperation path. Each path calls for its own methods. The contradiction path depends on our being open to surprises and willing to take them seriously even if they violate our beliefs about the ways thing

The notion of going beyond perfection strikes some people as odd because they are used to projects with clearly defined goals. When we move into complex settings and work with wicked problems that don’t have right answers, we have to discover the goals as we pursue them. The notion of perfection doesn’t work in these settings because we don’t want

I call it the VIP Treatment, for an incentive that is visible, immediate, and personal.

garden path scenario, which is a method for setting people up to have a mistaken view of what is going on and then dribbling in cues to let them discover their mistake.

The Chief Innovation Office is the function needed to strengthen the up arrow and encourage insight advocates and storytelling programs.

The more random combinations we produce, the greater the burden to screen out the useless ones. Insight involves making a new discovery without having to consider bad ideas.