Why did I read this book?
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Gifted book
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Saw people talking about it on my Twitter timeline
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People rave about this book and wanted to see what the fuss was about.
Initial Thoughts
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Entirely all story based from current and historical stories of advances in different fields from politics, history, medicine, police, finance.
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First story of two policemen following a car and noticing the person in the car ahead of them smoke and drop the ash on car floor made an impact but then I wondered where it was going with more stories
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My aha was that you just can’t capture current day insights so he took 120 stories from the past to basically test out his model on it.
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Gary Klein is a research psychologies made famous by his part in naturalistic decision making and author of several books.
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He tried to capture how insights come to us as well as dispel another framework by a guy named Waller.
His premise was that we put too much energy into eliminating mistakes but we need to increase our insights.
We need to become self aware of contradictions and question them. Create a swirl of new connections (but not too many)
Klein acknowledges it is not realistic to get organisations to embrace the pursuit of insight at the expense of uncertainty but to learn about how insights may happen.
An insights is an unpredictable leap into a related or different story – it catches us by surprise not because its a product of deliberate inference.
He calls the shift as discontinuous discovery as it doesn’t naturally evolve from our previous beliefs that anchor our understanding which have to be radically modified or discarded.
His Triple Path model grew out of the 120 cases where he says that there is a trigger of some sort.
- Contradiction – where you find an inconsistency – you find a weak anchor and you have to rebuild a new story
- Connection – coincidence – you spot an implication which means you have to add a new anchor
- Creative disruption – escape an impasse – discard a weak anchor
In order for us to improve the chances of gaining new insights we need to be open to new surprises and be willing to take them seriously even if they violate our beliefs
The connection path is that we should be open to new experiences and ready to speculate about unfamiliar possibilities
Creative desperation we need to critically examine our own assumptions and detect things that are tripping us up.
To Increase insights in organisations we have to diagnose what it wrong and prevent putting too many controls.
He talked about how Six Sigma had reduced errors but was a clincher in companies losing insights because they were focused on errors and mistakes
However to increase insights may be to increase our workload. Are people prepared to do this?
“The projects that fascinated us, the hobbies that consume us, often provide us with gratifying insights” “Having insight is an act of creation” Each insight is the creation of a new idea that didn’t exist before, often in opposition to defectives ideas that formerly prevailed. No one expected this new idea to emerge and other people who possessed the same information were unaware of its existence. No matter how much we unpack insights and demystify them, we shouldn’t;t discard the sense that something unusual has happened, something for which we are thankful. Something we can savour. A story we can tell others”
Here’s the book review:
