Johnnie's Insight

The old is new again. Thanks to Johnnie for the pointer: Insight.

Jonah Lehrer has a good article in the New Yorker, The Eureak Hunt (pdf), looking at research on what happens inside our heads when we come up with sudden insights. It seems to suggest it's ok to try, but best not to try too much.

Which is why so many people (Watson and Crick for example) find the answers to their intellectual problems in their sleep.

Focus, concentrate, hit the wall, forget it and wait for the associations to form.

This is why brain storming and "innovation processes" are a crock, creativity is, by definition, making something out of nothing, that's why the Christians begin the bible with "in the beginning there was nothing" rather than, "in the beginning there was a brainstroming session where nothing was too stupid to go on the table".

I have an idea however.

Why not set up a situation where you put a problem on the table and, instead of trying to be "creative" or "innovative" or even positive, you drive all the participants into the wall, showing in the most elaborate detail why this problem is insoluble from every single angle.

They are not there to "solve" the problem but to engineer it as insoluble as possible, find every single detail that will make it impregnable, in other words get to know it intimately and completely as a problem.

Then thank them for their efforts, take them out for a beer and lunch, talk about anything and everything BUT the problem for a couple of hours and send all the participants away, tell them to forget it, release them from responsibility for any solution.

But make sure everyone knows that if there is anything further they can add to the problem definition, you are always eager and ready to listen to them in person and individually.

Wait.

Comments

[Jon Husband]

What I know is that a majority of the ideas I have had that I believe are useful or good or valuable have come to me suddenly in the middle (about an hour or so into) a long swim .. or when I am wandering about far removed from detailed concentration on a problem.

For example, I have been known to drive for several kilometres in the slow lane of a highway while scribbling an idea on whatever scrap of paper I could find close to hand just because that's when the idea came and I knew that if I didn't note it there was a decent chance I would lose it, or "discover" the resolution to something I had been wondering about in the middle of a classical music concert.

I have also recognized that many of these ideas would not have come to me without the ten or twenty years of curiosity, reading, etc. that had gone before.