Friends,
I hope that all is well with you and yours.
When I was young, which now seems a past so distant as to long have vanished from sight, my then best friend’s mother used to have a sign on her desk that said “people claim that those with a messy desk have a messy mind, but what does that say about the mind of those who have an empty desk?”. The fable of the creative genius is often such; in the midst of self-enforced chaos, they thrive, able to generate brilliance and find joie de vivre with ease.
Or so the story goes, usually told by those who love to label themselves bohemian. I have never experienced it myself. Granted, I am neither a genius nor particularly creative, instead a man who habitually finds himself being the only speaker in a suit. Living in the complete disorder of the cardboard mansion has thus, entirely unsurprisingly, turned out to be rather detrimental to my productivity and, if I am to be perfectly honest, mental well-being.
Fortunately, we are heading toward the final inning, and on the way there I will be spending four days in Marathon, just outside of Athens, Greece, for WPP Stream. In fact, by the time you are reading this, the event will already have started. I hope that it will both clear my head and fill it with new ideas, as we are about to conclude one theme (insights) and move onto another (innovation).
And so, without further ado, let us begin.
A different route
In Seeing What Other’s Don’t, the brilliant work by Gary Klein upon which we have built our reasoning of late, the overarching reason why individuals and organizations alike fail to come up with insights is, the author argues, stupidity. Oftentimes, the information needed to generate the insight is all around us yet, as we demonstrated a couple of weeks back by means of a FedEx logo, we do not make the connections until we do. Stupid.
Stupidity, in a manner of speaking, can thus be seen as one bookend on a continuum towards insight, with normal alertness in between.
But – and this is an important but – my experience tells me that stupidity is typically taken to infer a lack of intelligence.
Although it should be clear that Klein does not intend for such an interpretation, nor that employees who fail to generate insights should at any point be labelled “dumb”, I have unfortunately witnessed it happening first-hand. We humans have a strong tendency to fall victim to halo effects and hindsight biases, forgetting that lost in “you should have known” is often that others should have too – but did not. A failure to gain a critical insight, for whatever reason, can easily turn into an exercise in scapegoating after the fact.
So rather than discuss stupidity, I thought that we would instead conclude our deep dive into insights by looking at what one might do to gain more of them.
The Triple Path model in action
As we have established previously, there are three main pathways to insights:
Given their fundamentally different nature, it stands to reason that what one might do to increase the likelihood of each trigger varies.
Firstly, one might make better use of what Klein calls the power of contradictions by taking advantage of the Tilt! effect. Whenever we encounter new information that fails to fit into our old model of the world, our intuitive reaction is to dismiss it as erroneous. However, such inconsistencies and discrepancies can be the origins of new insights and should consequently provoke further investigation. (One might also observe that this echoes Steven Johnson’s notion of error and Thomas Khun’s argument regarding the role of error in scientific advancement.)
The connection path, meanwhile, thrives from having a plethora of ideas “swirling around”. As Klein puts it, the more swirl and turbulence, the greater the chance for discovery; by increasing the opportunity for accidental linkages, we improve the odds of discovering insights. To Johnson’s point in Where Good Ideas Come From, this can be done by, for example, reading broadly (exposing us to novel ideas) or engaging with creative people.
Organizations, on their part, can increase swirl by ensuring that their knowledge workers have to work, or at least converse with, employees from varying specialty areas; team design and management will matter greatly. Those that sell professional services, such as consultancies or agencies, might also want to consider limiting utilization rates to no more than 75%, freeing up the remaining 25% to be used on upskilling, creative activities, and so on.
The third path, creative desperation, requires what Klein calls “a different stance”, as it comes out of being cornered, trapped in our own minds, by an unwarranted assumption. To make matters worse, merely listing all assumptions (as many firms and their strategists argue for) does not solve the problem; for one, many will have been made subconsciously. But even among those that are possible to identify, establishing which ones are weak can easily become an impossible task in the non-linearity of complexity.
Instead – and stop me if you have heard this one before – we should employ critical thinking. As long-time readers will know, this is a pet topic of mine. I consider critical thinking to be one of the most important skills that a strategist can master; in Strategy in Polemy (which one can purchase by becoming a premium subscriber; hint, hint, nudge, nudge), I devoted a couple of subchapters to it precisely for this reason.
For the purposes of the present conversation, critical thinking can be seen as a process of questioning reasoning. Instead of asking employees to explicitly list any assumptions that they may have made, one requests that they provide evidence for their hypothesis or conclusion. Not only does this force contemplation, but it has the added benefit of also increasing coherence.
And there you have it.
Next week will be a premium subscriber exclusive newsletter, as I discuss my thoughts on strategy as a discipline and the state of the industry. After that, we will all begin our next deep dive: innovation.
Up first? The lone genius myth.
Until then, have the loveliest of weekends.
Onwards and upwards,
JP
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