Varieties of insight experience

Citation

Grossberg, K.A. (2013), "Varieties of insight experience", Strategy & Leadership, Vol. 41 No. 5. https://doi.org/10.1108/SL-05-2013-0036

Varieties of insight experience

Article Type: The strategist's bookshelf From: Strategy & Leadership, Volume 41, Issue 5

Gary Klein's latest book, Seeing What Others Don't: The Remarkable Ways We Gain Insights (PublicAffairs, 2013) is an examination of how we can use flashes of intuition and imagination to solve problems that initially seem to defy solution. When achieving these leaps of insight, individuals do more than just defy conventional wisdom. By changing the context for the solution they seek they can change the course of an organization and sometimes even history. Klein, a cognitive psychologist, offers a model to explain the different ways in which insights can be grasped from the jumble of information and data we are confronted with at any given time. What, for example, enabled Harry Markopolos to put the finger on Bernie Madoff? How did Dr Michael Gottlieb make the connections between different patients that allowed him to publish the first announcement of the AIDS epidemic? What did Admiral Yamamoto see (and what did the Americans miss) in a 1940 British attack on the Italian fleet that enabled him to develop the strategy of attack at Pearl Harbor? How did Nobel-winner Martin Chalfie come up with a million-dollar idea that enabled researchers to look inside living organisms to watch biological processes in action?

To set the stage for the introduction of his new model, Klein first summarizes the earliest modern description of insight, formulated by Graham Wallas in The Art of Thought (1926). Wallas was one of the founders of the London School of Economics and suggested a four-stage model of insight: preparation, incubation, illumination and verification. He called these the four "stages of control." Klein sets Wallas up as his straw man and then proceeds to show the inadequacy of his model to account for the wide variety of insight experience. For one thing, Klein offers examples to prove that deliberate preparation is neither necessary nor even practical for many insights, demonstrating that many insights are in fact accidental. He also takes Wallas to task for limiting his sample of cases to success stories, not considering situations where people thoroughly prepared but got nowhere. Klein's explanation of how we surmount an impasse and are able to solve a knotty problem with an "Aha!" revelation is his Triple-Path Model (Exhibit 1).

Exhibit 1 The Triple-Path Model

Klein believes there are multiple paths to insight:

1. Insights spring from different motivations. Some arise from wanting to escape from a bad situation while others spring from the need to rethink conventional wisdom.

2. Insights have different triggers. Some occur during the search for a flawed assumption while others emerge after encountering an inconsistency.

3. Insights sometimes are disruptive because they disabuse us of our previously held comfortable beliefs. Klein gives many examples of how we change what we understand, change our ideas about the actions we can take, the way we view a situation or how we feel about it and what resolution we desire.

The Triple-Path Model accommodates connections, coincidences, curiosities, contradictions and creative desperation, and one can forgive Klein for his alliterative use of descriptors all starting with the letter "C" because they do indeed accurately describe the phenomena he is illustrating. This gives us the taxonomy of the origin of insights, but the real meat of the book, and the part that is most likely to stimulate the reader to have insights of one's own, are the many cases and examples from a variety of fields that Klein uses to illustrate the components of his Triple-Path Model.

Cases taken from science, military history, politics, finance, sports and social psychology sprinkled throughout the work are thought-provoking and entertaining. I particularly enjoyed the juxtaposition of two examples involving Admiral Yamamoto, the Japanese naval genius behind the surprise attack on the American naval base at Pearl Harbor in 1941. However, the admiral neglected to see the flaws in Japanese naval strategy a year later, leading to Japan's disastrous defeat at the hands of the Americans at the Battle of Midway – a mistake that irrevocably turned the tide of the Pacific War. Clearly, arriving at a successful insight on one occasion is no guarantee of getting it right a second time under different circumstances.

The first half of Seeing What Others Don't is an elaboration of each of the three main categories of the Triple-Path Model – connections, coincidences, and contradictions – with an additional discussion of how creative desperation can also lead to insights. The second half is divided between elaborating on those things that interfere with the possibility of insights occurring and the ways in which we can foster environments that will stimulate the generation of insights. It is in this second part of the book that Klein first mentions management and business organizations in earnest, and he offers two famous examples of corporate failure that were caused by organizations not following through on the insights that their employees had conveyed to upper management.

Kodak and the Encyclopedia Britannica: willpower vs insight

In the case of Eastman Kodak, the company invented the digital camera in 1975 but was reluctant to give up its highly profitable photographic film business despite the fact that it was quite well aware of how digital technology was going to change the marketplace. For years Kodak, rejected this insight that would have enabled it to get a head start with the new media, but nonetheless it was able to soar to number one in sales of digital cameras by 2005 when it finally got serious about marketing them. But its digital cameras were quickly rendered obsolete by subsequent waves of technological change and by aggressive competition from Japanese camera makers.

The failure to capitalize on a technological insight also explains how Encyclopedia Britannica dropped from record revenues of $650 million in 1990 to half that by 1996, when the company was sold for a mere $135 million. But how did this fall from grace happen so quickly? In 1985 EB turned down an offer from Microsoft to put its encyclopedia on a CD-ROM, fearing that it could cannibalize their very profitable and overpriced print edition. At the core of their organization, the Britannica sales force was protective of its commissions which would inevitably shrink if the business model changed to one that relied on a cheaper version without the need for the hard copy set of heavy tomes. Klein emphasizes that the company possessed the insight about the future potential of CD-ROM formats, and in 1989 they even offered one of the first multimedia encyclopedias on a CD-ROM, but it was their less respected Compton's Encyclopedia, which they then released in 1991 in PC and Mac versions. The company then proceeded to market this digital product sloppily, offering it free to customers who bought the print edition of the Britannica and charging others $895, a price at which there were few takers. In 1993 Microsoft offered Encarta, its own CD-ROM encyclopedia for free as part of its Windows suite and charged others only $100. The Britannica did finally offer a CD-ROM version, but could not compete with Encarta and by 1996 was forced to drop their price to $200.

Klein summaries the Kodak and Britannica failures as follows: "Neither lacked insight. What they lacked was willpower […] Both companies became trapped in business models that had previously worked so well. Kodak's photographic print division resisted any shift to the lower-profit digital cameras, and EB's sales force refused to put its product on a disk […] Neither company really belonged in the information technology business […] I don't see how either company could have staved off its demise, but I still have to fault their leaders for resisting change for so long" (pp. 214-216).

Klein makes another point relevant to these two cases in questioning the oft-stated need for corporations to continually reinvent themselves. Klein expresses concern about the confusion and coordination breakdowns that result from excessive reorganizations and their "endless visioning retreats." At bottom, he fears that the doctrine of continual transformation runs counter to the emergence of insights. In his words, "An insight about a goal isn't about being flexible and adapting plans in order to reach the original goal. It's about changing the goal itself" (p. 217).

Several chapters focus on what interferes with insights, and although only one chapter was devoted specifically to how organizations obstruct insights, all the chapters in Part II deal with the mental and groupthink obstacles to achieving insights. The fourth part of the book, "How Can We Foster Insights?" is perhaps the most problematic part of the work, because Klein himself seems to understand that it is in the nature of organizations to impose controls and procedures to eliminate errors, and this quest for perfection inevitably smothers the disruptive activities that can lead to useful insights. Klein nevertheless gamely tries to help organizations increase insights even as he admits that "an insight is a leap, an unpredictable leap, to a related but different story. It catches us by surprise because it isn't the product of conscious, deliberate, deductive, or statistical inferences. Typically, the people around us don't gain the insight even if they have access to the same information we do" (p. 245).

And Klein's final warning is that "insights help us escape the confinements of perfection, which traps us in a compulsion to avoid errors and in a fixation on the original plan or vision" (p. 247). Written in a breezy yet informative conversational style, Seeing What Others Don't is a good read and helps to stimulate our own thinking about how insights occur. At the very least it can sensitize us to guard against overreliance on kaizen and Six Sigma-type perfectionist thinking in all of our problem-solving. Accidents happen, and sometimes those accidents are the good fortune that leads us to our greatest insights.

Kenneth Alan Grossberg
Professor of Marketing and Strategy and Director of the Waseda Marketing Forum, Waseda University, Tokyo (kengross@waseda.jp)