Seeing what other's don't (book by Klein)

Seeing what others don’t

Gary Klein

Seeing What Others Dont

 This book proposes a model for the three basic ways that we get insights into our world. Klein is interested in naturalistic mental processes; he is interested in how people react in real life as opposed to artificial mental tasks. Part of the book is devoted to the conditions that lead to insight creation, but another part of the book describes how we resist insights both as individuals and organizations – especially as organizations.

 

In the early 1900s, Graham Wallas published a book in which he described a four step process that people used to gain insight. In this process, the person undertakes some sort of preparation to solve a problem (step 1) which is followed by an incubation period (step 2). After some incubation period, there is illumination (step 3) where a solution leaps to mind. The final stage is verification where the idea is tested in some way for validity (I think step 4 should be seen not as a test that the idea works as much as a test to see if it is really an idea with potential). Illumination was an unconscious process and could only occur after a period of “distraction” when the mind was free to make associations. As such, the basic mechanism was thought to be “free association”. The model certainly described the development of a number of insights, but it did not describe many other situations where significant insights occurred.

 

The book set out to discover alternate explanations. Klein used a mixture of published accounts and interviews to collect 120 cases which could then be coded into categories. The book then uses particular stories to illustrate differing mechanisms for insight. For example, Martin Chalfie was a biology professor studying nematodes. One day he attended a lunchtime seminar where the speaker briefly discussed the biochemistry of luminescent (think glow in the dark) jellyfish. Chalfie left the seminar with a way to study the inner workings of nerve cells using green fluorescent protein introduced into the nematode cells. This was novel and important enough to earn a Nobel Prize. None of the other attendees had this insight nor did the people in the speaker’s lab. Chalfie made a connection having prepared himself for years through his study of nematode nervous systems. But it is not clear that he was thinking at all about watching the inner workings of these cells or developing biomarkers before he heard this talk – and he does not really remember what else was discussed at the talk. But with a bit of stretching, the model could be made to fit. Other cases are no so clear though.

 

In 1999, Harry Markopolos was asked to match the investment returns that Bernie Madoff was getting. As a fund advisor, he was competing with Madoff for business. He decided to study Madoff’s portfolio and strategy to try to match it. He quickly realized that the numbers did not match up and in fact were impossible. He suddenly understood that Madoff was running a fraudulent scheme and alerted the SEC. Though he did not know how Madoff was creating a fraud, he knew that the results were impossible. He was brushed off by the SEC and despite continuous investigation by Markopolos, it was not until 2008 that the Ponzi scheme was acknowledged by authorities. Markopolos had a background in fraud examination, but there was no deep period of preparation or incubation. Within minutes of seeing the numbers, Markopolos knew there was fraud. Rather than being an insight based on connection, this was an insight based on contradiction. Markopolos knew that the investment strategy could not yield those results - and the contradiction could “only” be resolved if there was fraud.

 

A third kind of insight is shown in the story of Michael Gottlieb, a physician specializing in immunology, who began to see patients who were suffering from fungal lung infections. The first case was odd, but only unusual. Within a few months five more cases appeared and this was too odd. As Gottlieb looked closer, he knew that the patients all had immunological abnormalities and all were gay males. He drew the conclusion that there was a “new” disease spreading in this population and published an announcement that was in effect the discovery of AIDS. This example of insight was the result of a buildup of unexpected results – a kind of creeping discovery rather than an “eureka” moment. If Markopolos discovered the Madoff fraud in an instant, this was the opposite.

 

A fourth kind of insight has its origin in curiosity and coincidence. Jocelyn Bell was an astrophysics graduate student searching for quasars. She had to study 400 feet of chart paper for each target and categorize whether sources were celestial or earthly in origin. There was a ¼” section (0.005%) with a signal that made no sense. At first, she barely noticed the signal but after a while realized it appeared regularly. She modified the experiment to get a better look and discovered the signal was rhythmic. She soon discovered other similar signals in other parts of the sky. She did not dismiss this as coincidence and her later publication announced the discovery of pulsars (a type of star left behind by a supernova). It would be easy to ignore the small signal among all the other signals, but her curiosity drove her forward. It is not clear that there was a eureka moment in this story. Was this signal abnormal in some way? This might one of those examples of insight opportunity being right in front of people but seeming too small to be important – a so-called weak signal.

 

These stories represent shifts in understanding. Klein expresses this shift as moving to a better story about how the world is working, and in each case the new story is a surprise. It is not a logical outcome of the existing understanding being projected into the future; it is a discontinuous shift of understanding. For each of the people, who are described above, this shift changed what they thought, felt and did. This seems to be common when real insights strike. As a friend summarized all these transformations, “Insight is when it happens, everything that happens afterward is different*.” A different expression of the same idea might be “Insight cannot be taken back. You cannot return to the moment you were in before.”

 

But some insights are the result of desperation – and these may be the most difficult to understand. One of the examples that Klein uses to demonstrate a desperation based insight occurred during a forest fire (the Mann Gulch fire). A firefighting crew was parachuted onto a mountain top in Montana in 1949. They were to hike down the mountain and set up a fire break. As they descended the mountain, they realized that the fire had jumped into a space below them and was burning up the hill towards them. The started to run back up hill. Twelve of the fifteen firefighters died on that hillside. Fire can climb hills easily and this fire was driven by a wind. The upper part of the hill was at nearly a 75 degree pitch. There was no way to outrun the fire. Two of the men found rock outcrops to climb onto and escape the fire. One man realized that he could not outrun the fire and had the insight that if he could get rid of the fuel for the fire before the main fire arrived, the fire would burn around him. So he started a fire uphill from his position and then threw himself onto the burned patch as the main fire approached. He shouted this solution out to others in the crew, but they kept running and died. The man who found this solution, Wagner Dodge, was a veteran firefighter but had never been caught in a firestorm before. There was no incubation time and no time to verify the solution. Almost no part of Wallas’ model really applies to this episode. At a minor scale, we have insights of this type all the time. Something comes up and a couple minutes later, we have an idea that solves the problem – usually with less consequence than saving our lives.

 

From stories like these, Klein constructs a 3-path model of insight development. In one path, somebody recognizes a contradiction and finds a weak link in the logic to develop a new understanding. In a second path, somebody notices a coincidence or correlation, perhaps just out of curiosity, and finds more information that is consistent with the initial observation and leads to a new understanding. Finally, somebody is in a desperate situation where every path looks blocked and leaps to a new understanding. The first two paths are similar in that we just notice something and we follow up that observation. The last case is the more deliberate in the sense that we know that there is a problem to be solved and we are not finding a solution. The example of the forest firefighter is extreme in the sense that it was life and death, but this is the model of insight that is most intensely studied. Puzzles like the nine-dot puzzle create a similar logical impasse that requires some leap of understanding, usually in the form of discarding an existing assumption.

 

One of the most common ways that people try to develop insights is to examine assumptions in the hope of finding an assumption that is incorrect and that is blocking a better framing of the situation. Klein suggests that this rarely works and barely applies to the contradiction and coincidence paths of insight. In between the lines, he suggests that such assumption breaking may become part of the story we tell ourselves after the insight is found to explain how it arose – but often we were unaware of the assumption until we are explaining ourselves.

 

Each of these cases describe a single person having a personal insight experience that others did not. It is interesting to consider cases when many people have access to the same information. One interesting case that further highlights the reaction of organizations to insights revolves around the Battle of Taranto. In November of 1940, 24 British bombers took off from a single aircraft carrier in the Mediterranean and attacked the Italian fleet at anchor in Taranto Bay. The Italians assumed that they were safe because the bay was too shallow for a torpedo attack, but the British had modified their torpedoes to land more shallowly. Half the Italian fleet was disabled for half a year. Isoroku Yamamoto, a Japanese admiral, realized that this could be a method for attacking the powerful American fleet at Pearl Harbor. He first proposed a plan in January 1941 and the attack occurred in December of 1941. Harold Stark, Chief of Naval Operations, wrote a memo eleven days after the attack at Taranto Bay saying that, “By far the most profitable object of a sudden attack in Hawaiian waters would be the Fleet units based in that area.” and that it might be desirable “to place torpedo nets within the Harbor itself.” In January 1941, he wrote a memo to the Secretary of War suggesting that a surprise attack at Pearl Harbor might be the first action in a Pacific War. So two admirals had the same insight at about the same time and drew the same conclusion. For the Japanese, the insight represented opportunity and they were willing to act on the opportunity. For the Americans, reacting to the insight was a hassle and a distraction from the everyday activities of the base. Even though, Naval Intelligence knew that the Japanese had developed shallow water torpedoes, local commanders were unaware of this and considered the shallow waters of the harbor sufficient defense.

 

When Klein is asked how organizations (or people) should improve their performance, he proposes two general actions. (1) Make fewer mistakes. (2) Have more insights. Most business organizations have strong processes to minimize mistakes. Programs like Six Sigma, Lean or other quality efforts seek to eliminate mistakes. Few organizations have similar efforts to promote insight. This is not an accident. Most businesses operate best when they can predict future conditions and execute to fulfill that prediction. Insights are disruptive in the minimal sense that they are unpredictable. But an organization that wanted more insight would consider both what it could do to decrease suppression of insights and what it could do to promote development of insights.

 

Klein identifies five broad ways in which we restrict insight building, though it might be better to say that we resist insights than restrict them.

• Stupidity – Sometimes we ignore what somebody shows us even though we want the same thing.
• Wrong “attitude” – Sometimes we believe things too confidently or intensely, and despite our lack of appropriate experience, we think we understand the situation. To change our minds we require concrete facts and logic and we wait passively to be shown contrary information.
• Designed to be dumb – Sometimes we design systems to filter out information and deprive ourselves of unusual information. Simplification and focus remove sources of contradiction and coincidence.
• Seeking certainty – In our personal and public lives, we seek to have control and this requires that things be basically predictable. Taken to an extreme, we seek perfection. This makes it easy to reject ideas that do not contribute to predictability and perfection. This results in tighter standards, more controls, more documentation and review, attention to assumptions, schedules, procedures and checklists. We even attempt to estimate values for our uncertainty. These are mistake suppression activities and implicitly suggest that insights are mistakes because they are not predictable or perfect.
• We try to force it – We set up processes and schedules for people to develop insights then immediately subject them to judgment. We treat insight like other processes that can be organized and steered.

Inverting these five blocks is not that easy because some of these barriers are desirable enablers in another context. Getting ALL of the data can be overwhelming and we do want to suppress most mistakes. As Klein says, eliminating mistakes is one path to improvement and thus not one to be blocked either.

 

Someone who wanted to increase their insight development (not just stop suppressing it) would consider the following strategies.

• Pay more attention to contradictions. Another way to think of a contradiction is as a clash of assumptions. One assumption may be inappropriate under the circumstances. A lot of assumptions about what is true are based entirely on our imagination.
• Promote the swirl. Insights seem to come when we have lots of ideas, facts and information swirling around in our heads. Meeting new people and listening/reading new information can fuel the swirl. Swirl might be the force behind making the connections that drive insight.
• Stop and really think. Critical thinking can be used to suppress insight development by emphasizing a skeptical mindset, or it can be used to think through the small contradictions, coincidences and connections we face. This detailed examination of possibilities creates potential for insight.
• Create a pause. It seems that incubation is frequently linked with insight. After a period of concentration, turning attention elsewhere apparently helps the mind make more distant connections that prove fruitful. There is some scientific evidence to support this concept.
• Ask questions. When you or someone else becomes stuck, begin asking questions. Though simple, asking, “Why?” can help. Similarly, a questioning mindset (meaning questioning to understand) can allow a people to think through a problem.

 

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….People working in organizations face pressure for predictability and perfection (reducing errors and deviations), which motivates managers to specify tasks and timetables as precisely as possible and to view insights as disruptive. In some organizations, the effort to remove error acts as a metaphoric brake on all thinking. Organizations can improve the balance by loosening some of the controls, creating new ways for people to connect and for them to express themselves. Tightly controlled communication, whether by formal of cultural controls restricts to flow of information and insight through an organization. From a performance perspective, it is not just having the insights that matters. They must be acted on. Eastman Kodak invented the digital camera, but could not make the pivot from being a film business to being an image business or ultimately a camera-phone business. Encyclopedia Britannica was stuck in being a book distributor even though they brought out the first encyclopedia on CD. The insight was available, but it conflicted with the internal view of who these companies were. As individuals, we may resist insights that “require” us to change. Part of the problem with insights is that they don’t always fit with the way we frame our problem. We (Kodak) went looking for a new source of revenue and discover an opportunity that spells the end of our century old company.

 

Insights seem to come suddenly – sometimes out of the blue. There are examples in the book where the time between the identification of the problem and recognition of the insight were very short. Insights do not require a lot of time. But across the majority of stories, it is clear that one of the most important ingredients when seeking insights is patience. This is not patience in any passive sense, but more like patience in the persistent sense; that setting out with an open mindset and actively seeking insights has a good probability of yielding an insight. After reading this book, the process of developing an insight is just as mysterious to me, but so is the appreciation that there is not just one way to succeed.

 

 

Observation and comment:

• The subject of preparation is interesting because it is not obvious what preparation consists of. In Klein’s discussion of Chalfie’s work on fluorescent proteins in flatworms, he says that Chalfie did not go into the lunch seminar thinking about a biomarker problem – but I can almost guarantee that the problem was rattling around in his head because that is how cell biologists are trained. The point is that the fact that something is not the focus of preparation does not mean that there is no preparation. Chalfie would be aware of other biomarker work and all of the problems that he had with the methods already in use. Unlike Klein, I would say that he was generally prepared for the insight, even if he was not specifically prepared for this particular insight. I’d even think that he was on a constant search for new methods because he knew that new methods shine new light on problems. Most graduate science degree work has a least a portion of the effort devoted to method development, so Chalfie and his students would be oriented to the potential of a new method. Having said all this, why didn’t others make the same connection from the same information? This is something of a mystery.
• While Klein refers to the emotional impact of a major insight, I think he underplays the emotional shock that accompanies such insights. You do not change your research program or set out to discover and document a Ponzi scheme without some emotional investment. I wonder if this is the link between insight and entrepreneurship. The entrepreneur has some insight and the emotional energy from this event propels them through the effort of starting up a new venture.
• Klein is dismissive of assumption seeking as a path to insight, but I have been part of logical dissections of problems that allowed us to consciously restate an assumption and develop solutions to the problem. Admittedly, these were small problems. Perhaps the real problem, as revealed by numerous other authors, is that we have a lot of assumptions. So many that it would be hard to uncover all of our assumptions in most cases – and easy to get lost in unimportant assumptions. It makes me wonder if this is the role that preparation has in developing an insight. Perhaps preparation is misleading because we translate this to “study” instead of immerse. In the latter, we may seek to understand the situation without absorbing the dogma. This leaves us free to ask “why” and by-pass assumptions.
• Klein discusses the suppressive effect of evaluation on insights. A number of examples show that early expressions of the insight were rejected by knowledgeable peers. In the cases that we tend to focus on, we know that the people persisted in the face of this resistance and were proven correct in time. It is hard to know how many breakthroughs were stillborn because the resistance overwhelmed the individual. Evaluation is a necessity, but I wonder how we might learn to defer this evaluation or to convert this evaluation from something close to judgment to something like co-development. I hear a lot about people wanting to evaluate ideas and “pick the ones to focus on”, but I hear very little discussion of how to make an idea better.
• The book mentions a quote from Mark Twain. “You can’t depend on your eyes, when you imagination is out of focus.”
• The book discusses Einstein’s development of special relativity. This was a big deal, of course, and not the model for our more everyday problems. The element that I want to focus on is that Einstein began imagining riding a light beam when he was 16 years old. Over years of thinking about this situation, he was able to understand some of the contradictions, inconsistencies and coincidences that arose from his imagined rides, Newtonian physics and our common sense perspective on the universe. At age 26, he published his theories. We now know that Einstein was mostly correct. But the key thing that we can take away for ourselves is that Einstein was interested in light, spent time thinking and imagining how light worked, discovered inconsistencies in the common view and then ways to eliminate the inconsistencies. He was persistent and active in trying to solve the problem. It is hard to understand the whole experience, but we can guess that he did not give up easily.
• In recent years, there has been more talk about simplification. For example, there are more and more dashboards used to communicate current status. This is a simplification, but it does create a risk. Weak signals and inconsistencies will disappear even more easily. This is both an analytical problem and an insight potentiation problem. The book contains a number of examples of insight being created by study of the details. It does not take too much reading to realize that part of the success of Apple and Toyota is their willingness to pay attention to details. In fact, the innovative simplification they use is probably only possible by their attention to detail.

 *text in italics is directly quoted from the book