I’m reminded of a time when I was called to Dubliners Pub at Winsland House. Recently opened, its extensive out-door seating was seeing poor beer sales and nothing could shift sales. So I visited, sat and observed. I saw lots of large pints sit unfinished and few staff venturing out of the cool air-con into the happy-hour heat. As a pint-drinker myself I found the second half of my drink became rather warm rather quickly , but there was no way I was going to throw it away neither would I order a replacement until the rapidly warming beer was drunk. Returning inside I saw half-pints were omitted from happy hour and priced almost a third more than pints and the glasses looked puny in size.
By bringing in taller slimmer glasses, pricing half-pints the same as pints and bringing them into happy-hour and encouraging staff to go outside to take orders … sales outside rose exponentially.
This, for me, is a great example of simple insight.
Recently reading a post that tries to identify key writers that will still influence in thirty years I was reminded of an insightful book on “insight”. When Gary Klein I n Seeing What Others Don’t looks at our automatic thought processes, unlike other writers he sees the potential for insight, not flaws and biases.
Also unlike traditional Writers, rather than start with theories of how insights happen, Klein starts with a collection of important insights he has read about. He sorts his collection to see what patterns emerge. Most current accounts of insights repeat the well-worn idea that they always arise from the clash of contradictions from different peoples experiences where disparate thoughts meet. But this certainly didn’t happen to me at Dubliners. This idea underlies the oft-reproduced heuristic that only collaboration is a valuable source of innovation. Klein agrees that interaction is certainly one source but concludes that there are at least a couple of other very different sources.
One of these, seen in our last six-months, is when we face a desperate situation that makes innovation absolutely necessary.
Another is when we observe curiously contradictory phenomena as I did way-back-when.
I believe the most important implication is that some critical kinds of insights can be achieved by individuals, not crowds.
Klein’s perspective is based on what has been my professional practice for almost three decades: searching for ways to improve performance. Klein says that performance improvement is a combination of reducing errors & uncertainty (getting staff out of the aircon to take orders) PLUS increasing insights (you don’t throw away warm beer… neither do you drink it; beer needs “manly” glasses: address pricing disparities forcing drinkers to buy bigger sizes). Too often in our organizations, we focus only on error reduction (such as the overemphasis on Six-sigma or incremental process-improvement) to enhance performance. Here, Klein suggests, insight generation is also a critical component.
In examining 120 cases, Klein found that there are three main paths that insight can follow. Klein’s Insight Model (see below) neatly describes the phenomena of creating insight. I am interested in teaching insight creation- and that’s tougher than teaching calculus. If we explore what Klein postulates, that gaining insight is about changing our mental models that we use to explain why we do things. These can be good anchors that give us the right perspective on a situation or they can weigh us down and stop us from gaining insight. For example, in Dubliners selling more beer was the aim so giving a price advantage to pints fit the mental model. By slightly changing the model to how can we encourage drinkers to drink more would have enabled the team to pay attention to the contradictions they had created, that they could have gained insight.
Here’s Klein’s insight model…
How did I use it… I saw a contradiction between the desire to sell more and customer behaviour… then identified the anchors creating that behaviour and tweaked them (avoid price discrimination to drive consumption; create a more suitable drinking behaviour)
Klein has some advice on how to improve insight. He sees stories exploring our mental models of the world as a strong way of sharing insight. Loosening the filters through which information and knowledge are discarded or ignored in the organization is another suggestion (Eg Buying more must always be cheaper). He also says that organizations need to increase their willpower to act on insight; the willpower to try new ideas to test them. This takes a shift in the corporate mind-set.
Klein then goes on to counter some of the current insights into insight in the research community. By focussing primarily on heuristics-and-biases, Researchers have provided us with a biased stream of studies only showing how our mental models can be used against us and that make us look stupid and irrational. They don’t offer a balanced set of studies of how these habits enable us to make more insightful discoveries.
By refocusing away from biases to positive Insight creation we add new ways to escape the compulsion to focus on error rectification in performance improvement.
I strongly recommend Seeing What Others Don’t, which will provide you with new perspectives for a wide range of disciplines and practices.
You can read more about the ideas in this book on Gary Klein’s blog posts at Psychology Today