Strategygram: The Leap of Insights and Ideas

Of the two—insights and ideas—one is the eye catcher, the applause hatcher, the prize snatcher. But both are born from the same process. Rudyard Kipling might as well have been describing them metaphorically:

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In an insight, you perceive elements in their present pattern.

In an idea, you place elements in their potential pattern.

At their core, both insights and ideas are about a leap to a new understanding of the relationship—present or potential—between elements in a pattern.

As part of the Strategygram series, insights and ideas are explored from several angles and this Strategygram addresses the question: where does the leap for insights and ideas originate?

It begins at the humble level of that oft-disdained activity—observation—without which we get nada: no insight, no idea, no innovation.

“The genius of Sherlock Holmes manifested itself in shifting his attention to minute clues which poor Watson found too obvious to be relevant, and so easy to ignore,” says Arthur Koestler in The Act of Creation.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Holmes is forthright about his modus operandi, informing Dr. Watson—we conflate his utterances here—“You see but you do not observe.…You know my method. It is founded upon the observation of trifles.…There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.…It is a capital mistake to theorise before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to facts.”

Let’s say your boss asks you to venture out of the office—“A desk is a dangerous place from which to watch the world” (John le Carré)—and observe customers not in focus groups but in their habitat—after all, if you wanted to understand the behaviour of tigers, would you go to a jungle or the zoo?—but you are apprehensive about returning with only observations, fearing the backlash of: “You spent all that time merely observing! Where is the ‘why’! What is the insight!”

So then? Do you go out with a hypothesis? Do you go out with budding thoughts? Do you go out with a checklist? No, no, no. You do no such thing.

You go out with a ‘beginner’s mind’, a cup drained of learning and labels, limitations and lore.

You go as a tabula rasa, a force gauge, a multimeter. You notice what attracts your attention. That’s it. The ‘what does it mean and where might it lead to’ reflection comes later. You separate the observation from the interpretation.

In a speeded-up world, you make haste slowly.

You observe people’s movement through the stages of an activity; the questions they ask and how they seem to feel about the answers; the energy they invest in the activity; whether their behaviour is opportunistic or planned, leisurely or hurried; if they are frustrated or disappointed; their trade-offs, workarounds, and coping behaviour; how they exit the situation.

Whatever catches your eye does so because it represents an anomaly for your mind’s pattern-recognition repertoire. Something is off, something doesn’t fit, something is signalling to you.

That is what an anomaly does—point you towards the real pattern which is buried so deep it has escaped the eye of all those others beguiled by the shiny ersatz pattern at the surface.

When you are back from your observation expedition and have laid out your treasure hoard of all that has pushed and pulled your attention—the tell-tale gesture and the giveaway remark, the illuminating detail and the revealing clue—you try out alternative ways in which these pieces fit to form a new configuration of meaning, setting you on your way to decode the hidden narrative (your insight) and encode a new narrative (your idea).

The nucleus of your epiphany will always be your observation.

Consider the Slinky, a simple toy that’s sold over 300 million units, is featured in Time magazine’s list of All-Time 100 Greatest Toys, and is in MoMA’s Architecture and Design collection.

In 1943, Richard James, a marine engineer, was working at a Philadelphia shipyard to keep fragile shipboard equipment stable from shocks and vibrations, when he accidentally knocked over a new type of metal coil. To James’s amazement, the coil, instead of falling on the ground and staying still, started ‘walking’ across the floor. That’s how James came by the idea for this hugely successful toy: through alert observation.

“Now, was he thinking about toys before that?” asks Dr. John Kounios, a pioneer in the study of the neural and cognitive bases of creativity, insight, and problem solving. “I doubt it. There’s no evidence of that. It’s just, he saw this, it sparked this idea in his head, and it wasn’t as if he had been incubating or struggling with this problem for a long time, it was just a great idea that was a solution to a problem he didn’t know he had. Again, so insight, creativity can be spontaneous, it doesn’t have to be triggered by a problem, it could just happen.”

Chance favours the prepared mind (as Louis Pasteur noted), but it also favours the perceptive mind.

In a novel set in the Cold War days, a Western spy living under deep cover in East Berlin is ordered to do a perilous cross-over to West Berlin for a rendezvous with his handler who is travelling all the way from Langley. The spy knows he would never have been told to risk blowing his cover for a meeting that wasn’t vital and yet, once the meeting is over—it lasts for less than five minutes—the spy wonders why an in-person session, with all its attendant hazards, was necessary.

The spy: “You travelled all the way here just to ask me that? You could have asked me that over the phone!”

The handler: “I didn’t travel all the way here to ask you that. I travelled all the way here to see your eyes when I asked you that.”

You never outsource your senses. Your senses absorb all those tacit nuances of a personal encounter: body language, ambience, subtext.

That is how you get the observations that others don’t.

That is how you get to say the modern-day equivalent of that line in The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle: “My name is Sherlock Holmes. It is my business to know what other people do not know.”

Sattar Khan

This Strategygram titled ‘The Leap of Insights and Ideas’ is part of the series I’ve created where each Strategygram condenses one strategic thought into one image.

The series is a visual guide to strategic thinking and provides handy image prompts for brand strategy workouts. ?

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