The world is a competitive place. Species perish, organisations fail, and stuff kills folks. On the upside, some people excel, some firms flourish, and societies make permanent advancements. Examining part of how the latter side happens is the quest of Gary Klein, a research psychologist. Performance improvements can be thought of via dry algebra: the solution to the problem of minimizing errors and maximizing insights. Much focus in life is on the first term, due to prevalent risk aversion, and to the relative ease of reaction compared to action. Not only does this neglect the maximand term, it actively suppresses it, because the two things conflict with each other to an important extent, such that the progress of each of them turns out to be negatively correlated (the more you control errors, the less likelihood you have of increasing insights). So Klein has delivered a book on insights, to tip the scales, and perhaps to shrink the negative correlation.
Klein’s pathway is through stories rather than scientific enquiry. Mostly, it seems, because scientific enquiry has a rather low hit-rate in navigating the territory. Insights apparently arise at all stages in the scientific method except that of its central plank—of testing hypotheses under controlled experiments. So that’s out, then. This makes some sense from the perspective of the author’s definition of insight which makes its way into the text around half way: an unexpected shift in the central beliefs or anchors of the story that we use to make sense of events. That is, a shift to a better story, which transforms the understanding into something better, and thereby changes how we act, see, feel, and can change our goals.Insights share common but unique aspects. They are disorderly (and this does not necessarily mean they come from nowhere). They are also coherent and unambiguous upon arrival—rather than being a best choice from a list of competing alternative ideas/answers. This property conjures the eureka notion to mind.
What processes bring about this shift of “anchor”? The author collected and curated a set of 120 insight stories over several years and coded them according to three suspected paths, all of which begin with the letter C. One is connections, coindicences and curiosities (so sort of three-in-one actually). Connections are akin to finding a missing piece of a jigsaw to complete a new picture. Charles Darwin connected Thomas Malthus’ 1838 writing on population growth and ensuing competition for resources to his own theory of blind variation to come up with the natural selection that drives evolution. Nobel prizewinner Martin Chalfie discovered green fluorescent protein thanks to a chance attendance at a lecture outside his field of research that touched on bioluminescence, at a time when he was studying transparent worms. This connecting of dots appears to rely on chance, but maximizing the possibility for chance connections would also bring in noise (“non-dots”), so a strategy to boost insights via this path seems elusive. Coincidences require repetition, they are chance occurrences that would be ignored otherwise. This is how Michael Gottlieb discovered AIDS observing that a number of patients presenting with unexplainable similar symptoms were all gay. Jocelyn Burnell (another Nobel laureate) identified pulsars from repeating mystery activity on radio-astronomy traces when she was looking for something else. Curiosities don’t require repetition; just something intriguing enough to start the protagonist along the road to new understanding—this characterizes Alexander Fleming’s investigation of mold on a petri dish that led to penicillin. What each of connections, coincidences and curiosities do is add a new anchor to one’s existing set of beliefs, which builds superior understanding.
The second path is contradictions, which trigger what the author calls a “tilt!” reflex (after a pinball machine if a player rams into it)—an observation that doesn’t make sense triggers a search for a different explanation. Harry Markopolous did this with Bernie Madoff’s investment returns (and nobody else did, indeed the Securities and Exchange Commission showed him the door because he was a nerd). John Snow couldn’t make sense of the miasma theory behind Britain’s cholera epidemic because it didn’t fit the pattern of infections, and his skeptical enquiry unearthed the true cause of contaminated water. Lieutenant Columbo made extensive use of contradictions each week on TV over ten seasons spanning many more years. This contradiction path focuses attention on a weak belief—generally one that the subject thinks is less plausible than everyone else does—and rebuilds it. Consternation gives way to curiosity (rather than dismissal), so curious types may do it more.
The third path to insight, creative desperation, is the one tested in most lab experiments about this subject. What happens here is that, faced with certainty about its uselessness, one has to fully jettison an anchor, belief, approach, and in the successful instance, manages to fathom a new one. A mundane example is the puzzle to connect a square pattern of nine dots using four straight lines drawn without lifting pencil off paper (you extend three of the lines outside the grid of dots). A rather more action-packed one is Wagner Dodge who escaped a forest fire (that killed his colleagues) by starting another one in his escape path, which burned a clear space for him to shelter from the approaching flames. Another is Aron (“127 Hours”) Ralston who, having seemingly exhausted all options to free his trapped arm from between two rocks in the middle of nowhere, realized at the last moment that he could, and should use the grip of the rocks to snap it off, so that the rest of him survived.
Klein’s triple-path model resembles a painting more than a formula. And he maintains that far from being the last word on insight it is maybe the next word. The problem with it is that it does not suggest clear cut techniques to increase insight in general. “Swirling”, or increasing chance encounters or randomizing one’s daily experience, increases noise more than signal for example. A skeptical mind is useful for discarding a flawed theory, but has negative utility in respect of trusting flawed data. Creative desperation would appear to benefit mostly from prior experience of itself. What does seem to follow more robustly from Klein’s model is that it points to ways in which insight capability is squashed. And this ties in with the desire to reduce errors. In organisations, other strutures also help kill it off, such as rigid goals (this really doesn’t help when the goals need to shift), reliance on data and filtering out outliers (Google has a bad influence on your insight life here), monitoring progress, tightening controls, precision schedules, and so on. Organisational repression results in reluctance to speculate (curiosities), repression of anomalies (contradictions), and treats disruptions (creative desperation) as threats. Hence the failure of the FBI to act on the “Phoenix memo” in which an agent warned of coincidental and contradictory insights prior to 9/11.
Dialling back the “war on error” is unpalatable and difficult, but it seems greater tolerance is to be recommended. Not editing things to death/sterility. Not suppressing what seem like silly ideas and even encouraging those who have them to also have the willpower to act on them. And not—actually—being overly critical of heuristics and biases (these do not invariably get us into trouble, or they would not be there—they are a feature of survival and success, not a bug in its program). Probably a greater mindset of being unconvinced, yet unopposed. On the positive side, the author remarks that humans have a magical thirst for insights, born of (evolution-honed) desire to understand how the world works and to understand how it works better.
The reader will be disappointed if looking for a gold mine of self, or organizational help. Rather, Klein sets out a large haystack with a lot of gold needles in it. This reviewer certainly appreciated this book as the “next word” on insight—and she hopes to hear more.
Klein’s pathway is through stories rather than scientific enquiry. Mostly, it seems, because scientific enquiry has a rather low hit-rate in navigating the territory. Insights apparently arise at all stages in the scientific method except that of its central plank—of testing hypotheses under controlled experiments. So that’s out, then. This makes some sense from the perspective of the author’s definition of insight which makes its way into the text around half way: an unexpected shift in the central beliefs or anchors of the story that we use to make sense of events. That is, a shift to a better story, which transforms the understanding into something better, and thereby changes how we act, see, feel, and can change our goals.Insights share common but unique aspects. They are disorderly (and this does not necessarily mean they come from nowhere). They are also coherent and unambiguous upon arrival—rather than being a best choice from a list of competing alternative ideas/answers. This property conjures the eureka notion to mind.
What processes bring about this shift of “anchor”? The author collected and curated a set of 120 insight stories over several years and coded them according to three suspected paths, all of which begin with the letter C. One is connections, coindicences and curiosities (so sort of three-in-one actually). Connections are akin to finding a missing piece of a jigsaw to complete a new picture. Charles Darwin connected Thomas Malthus’ 1838 writing on population growth and ensuing competition for resources to his own theory of blind variation to come up with the natural selection that drives evolution. Nobel prizewinner Martin Chalfie discovered green fluorescent protein thanks to a chance attendance at a lecture outside his field of research that touched on bioluminescence, at a time when he was studying transparent worms. This connecting of dots appears to rely on chance, but maximizing the possibility for chance connections would also bring in noise (“non-dots”), so a strategy to boost insights via this path seems elusive. Coincidences require repetition, they are chance occurrences that would be ignored otherwise. This is how Michael Gottlieb discovered AIDS observing that a number of patients presenting with unexplainable similar symptoms were all gay. Jocelyn Burnell (another Nobel laureate) identified pulsars from repeating mystery activity on radio-astronomy traces when she was looking for something else. Curiosities don’t require repetition; just something intriguing enough to start the protagonist along the road to new understanding—this characterizes Alexander Fleming’s investigation of mold on a petri dish that led to penicillin. What each of connections, coincidences and curiosities do is add a new anchor to one’s existing set of beliefs, which builds superior understanding.
The second path is contradictions, which trigger what the author calls a “tilt!” reflex (after a pinball machine if a player rams into it)—an observation that doesn’t make sense triggers a search for a different explanation. Harry Markopolous did this with Bernie Madoff’s investment returns (and nobody else did, indeed the Securities and Exchange Commission showed him the door because he was a nerd). John Snow couldn’t make sense of the miasma theory behind Britain’s cholera epidemic because it didn’t fit the pattern of infections, and his skeptical enquiry unearthed the true cause of contaminated water. Lieutenant Columbo made extensive use of contradictions each week on TV over ten seasons spanning many more years. This contradiction path focuses attention on a weak belief—generally one that the subject thinks is less plausible than everyone else does—and rebuilds it. Consternation gives way to curiosity (rather than dismissal), so curious types may do it more.
The third path to insight, creative desperation, is the one tested in most lab experiments about this subject. What happens here is that, faced with certainty about its uselessness, one has to fully jettison an anchor, belief, approach, and in the successful instance, manages to fathom a new one. A mundane example is the puzzle to connect a square pattern of nine dots using four straight lines drawn without lifting pencil off paper (you extend three of the lines outside the grid of dots). A rather more action-packed one is Wagner Dodge who escaped a forest fire (that killed his colleagues) by starting another one in his escape path, which burned a clear space for him to shelter from the approaching flames. Another is Aron (“127 Hours”) Ralston who, having seemingly exhausted all options to free his trapped arm from between two rocks in the middle of nowhere, realized at the last moment that he could, and should use the grip of the rocks to snap it off, so that the rest of him survived.
Klein’s triple-path model resembles a painting more than a formula. And he maintains that far from being the last word on insight it is maybe the next word. The problem with it is that it does not suggest clear cut techniques to increase insight in general. “Swirling”, or increasing chance encounters or randomizing one’s daily experience, increases noise more than signal for example. A skeptical mind is useful for discarding a flawed theory, but has negative utility in respect of trusting flawed data. Creative desperation would appear to benefit mostly from prior experience of itself. What does seem to follow more robustly from Klein’s model is that it points to ways in which insight capability is squashed. And this ties in with the desire to reduce errors. In organisations, other strutures also help kill it off, such as rigid goals (this really doesn’t help when the goals need to shift), reliance on data and filtering out outliers (Google has a bad influence on your insight life here), monitoring progress, tightening controls, precision schedules, and so on. Organisational repression results in reluctance to speculate (curiosities), repression of anomalies (contradictions), and treats disruptions (creative desperation) as threats. Hence the failure of the FBI to act on the “Phoenix memo” in which an agent warned of coincidental and contradictory insights prior to 9/11.
Dialling back the “war on error” is unpalatable and difficult, but it seems greater tolerance is to be recommended. Not editing things to death/sterility. Not suppressing what seem like silly ideas and even encouraging those who have them to also have the willpower to act on them. And not—actually—being overly critical of heuristics and biases (these do not invariably get us into trouble, or they would not be there—they are a feature of survival and success, not a bug in its program). Probably a greater mindset of being unconvinced, yet unopposed. On the positive side, the author remarks that humans have a magical thirst for insights, born of (evolution-honed) desire to understand how the world works and to understand how it works better.
The reader will be disappointed if looking for a gold mine of self, or organizational help. Rather, Klein sets out a large haystack with a lot of gold needles in it. This reviewer certainly appreciated this book as the “next word” on insight—and she hopes to hear more.