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

We should encourage group and network collaboration as opposed to individual efforts.

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

A fourth view is that incubation may let us build on chance events. After working hard on a problem, we are primed to notice implications in all kinds of places. Even though we aren’t deliberately working on the problem, we are in a state of heightened sensitivity about it.

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

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

The downside of checklists is that they intentionally induce mindlessness. We just have to follow the steps and not think about them. The important thinking has already been done by the checklist designers. When we follow checklists and procedure manuals, we disengage our active thinking processes, just the reverse of the inquiring mind-set that ge

using confusions, contradictions, and conflicts as springboards to insights. Usually we feel frustrated when we run into these kinds of disruptions, but they represent openings for making discoveries. We just have to replace our feelings of consternation with curiosity.

“Insight is when it happens, everything that happens afterward is different.

The connection path thrives on having lots of ideas swirling around and on making accidental linkages. The more swirl and turbulence, the greater the chance for a discovery.