Thinking Space

In my last post How do we gain insight? I described the Wallace model. In this post I look to explore another approach which comes from research psychologist Gary Klein’s study of numerous cases of insights.

In his study, Gary came with five different strategies for gaining insights. Depending upon the situation you might pursue one or the other or in some cases a combination of more than one strategy could be used.

Here is a brief summary:

Connections – Connecting the dots to see the insight. How different ideas fit together to form a new insight.

Coincidences – Spotting the events that seems related to each other even though they don’t seem to have any obvious casual link.

Curiosities – Curiosities provoke us to investigate further. The initial ‘What’s going on here?’ reaction starts us on the road to gaining insights.

Contradictions – Contradiction signals us that there is something seriously wrong with the story we are currently telling ourselves. Curiosity makes us wonder ‘what’s going here?’, whereas, contradiction makes us doubt ‘that can’t be right!’.

Creative desperation – It suggests us finding a way out of a trap that seems inescapable. Solutions coming in ‘flash’, come into this category. In his research on chess grand masters the Dutch psychologist Adriaan de Groot used the term ‘creative desperation’ to describe some of the brilliant strategies that players invented when they got into the trouble. When in complex situation when none of the plausible move worked they found an unorthodox line of play which saved them.

Though some of these strategies might overlap with Wallace model, but these are quite useful in your tool set of gaining insights.