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

Some people become impatient with speculation. They see the playful exploration of ideas as a sign of immaturity. They want closure, and they roll their eyes when a member of the group starts going off on tangents. They are concrete thinkers who just want to work with the facts, not with flights of fancy. This concrete reasoning style wouldn’t leav

The first reason we miss insights is that we are gripped by a flawed belief.

Intuition is the use of patterns they’ve already learned, whereas insight is the discovery of new patterns.

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

the insight doesn’t land on the final story; it transforms away from the initial story toward the resolution.

find an assumption that was trapping him and could be overturned.

Researchers call this type of effect “automaticity” because people reach a point where they don’t do any thinking anymore.

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.

HELPING ORGANIZATIONS GAIN MORE INSIGHTS means breaking the tyranny of the down arrow in the performance equation. It means dialing back the War on Error. We’ll need to restore a better balance between the arrows, between trying to reduce errors and deviations on the one hand, and increasing insights on the other (see diagram).