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Seeing What Others Don't: The Remarkable Ways We Gain Insights Hardcover – June 25, 2013

by Gary Klein (Author)

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Insights—like Darwin's understanding of the way evolution actually works, and Watson and Crick's breakthrough discoveries about the structure of DNA—can change the world. We also need insights into the everyday things that frustrate and confuse us so that we can more effectively solve problems and get things done. Yet we know very little about when, why, or how insights are formed—or what blocks them. In Seeing What Others Don't, renowned cognitive psychologist Gary Klein unravels the mystery.

Klein is a keen observer of people in their natural settings—scientists, businesspeople, firefighters, police officers, soldiers, family members, friends, himself—and uses a marvelous variety of stories to illuminate his research into what insights are and how they happen. What, for example, enabled Harry Markopolos to put the finger on Bernie Madoff? How did Dr. Michael Gottlieb make the connections between different patients that allowed him to publish the first announcement of the AIDS epidemic? What did Admiral Yamamoto see (and what did the Americans miss) in a 1940 British attack on the Italian fleet that enabled him to develop the strategy of attack at Pearl Harbor? How did a “smokejumper” see that setting another fire would save his life, while those who ignored his insight perished? How did Martin Chalfie come up with a million-dollar idea (and a Nobel Prize) for a natural flashlight that enabled researchers to look inside living organisms to watch biological processes in action?

Klein also dissects impediments to insight, such as when organizations claim to value employee creativity and to encourage breakthroughs but in reality block disruptive ideas and prioritize avoidance of mistakes. Or when information technology systems are “dumb by design” and block potential discoveries.

Both scientifically sophisticated and fun to read, Seeing What Others Don't shows that insight is not just a “eureka!” moment but a whole new way of understanding.

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Editorial Reviews

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“Gary Klein pins down what until now has been the elusive topic of insight in his best and most personal work yet. The examples are memorable and Klein translates them into subtle and powerful lessons for practitioners and academics alike.” —Karl Weick, Rensis Likert Distinguished University Professor, Emeritus, University of Michigan

“Gary Klein's brilliant book is a superb analysis of why and how some people are able to understand things others do not. As one of Gary's students and disciples I can attest to the exceptional value his insights have added to my own leadership and decision making ability. This new book is a must read for all leaders and should be added to his other works as the definitive collection on how decisions are, and should be, made.” —General Anthony C. Zinni USMC (Retired)

“Brilliant discourse on a fascinating subject. It's written in a crisp, fluent, Gladwellish way and the pages flit by.”—Management Today

“His analysis of how Google searches and corporate culture inhibit insight is intriguing, while suggestions for improving the chances of having a breakthrough are practical and useful for many facets of life.” —Publishers Weekly

“No one has taught me more about the complexities and mysteries of human decision-making than Gary Klein.” —Malcolm Gladwell

"Intriguing findings that should play a transformative role, not only in the field of psychology, but also in corporate boardrooms."—Kirkus Reviews

"A valuable resource for business professionals to return to over again.”—Library Journal

“Written in a breezy yet informative conversational style, Seeing What Others Don't is a good read and helps to stimulate our own thinking about how insights occur.”—Strategy & Leadership

About the Author

Gary Klein, PhD, a senior scientist at MacroCognition LLC, was instrumental in founding the field of naturalistic decision making. Dr. Klein received his PhD in experimental psychology from the University of Pittsburgh in 1969. He spent the first phase of his career in academia and the second phase working for the government as a research psychologist for the U.S. Air Force. The third phase, in private industry, started in 1978 when he founded Klein Associates, a research and development company that had grown to thirty-seven employees by the time he sold it in 2005. He is the author of Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions; The Power of Intuition; Working Minds: A Practitioner's Guide to Cognitive Task Analysis (with Beth Crandall and Robert Hoffman); and Streetlights and Shadows: Searching for the Keys to Adaptive Decision Making. Dr. Klein lives in Yellow Springs, Ohio.

Hardcover: 304 pages
Publisher: PublicAffairs; 1st Edition edition (June 25, 2013)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1610392515
ISBN-13: 978-1610392518
Product Dimensions: 6.5 x 1.2 x 9.5 inches
Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
Average Customer Review: 106 customer reviews

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John M. Ford

From the Trench

November 24, 2014

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

Inspired by Martin Seligman and other positive psychologists, Gary Klein turned away from studying errors in decision making and focused on how experts like firefighters solve problems successfully. He is most interested in how we have and use insights. "When we put too much energy into eliminating mistakes, we're less likely to gain insights. Having insights is a different matter from preventing mistakes."

Klein began by observing instances of creative problem solving that did not fit the accepted four-stage model of creativity consisting of preparation, incubation, illumination, and verification (from economist Graham Wallas' 1926 The Art of Thought). He also saw important differences between the lab experiments and unfamiliar problems used to study problem solving and the real-life insights of experienced professionals working in their areas of expertise. Klein started from scratch, collecting his own set of critical incidents and examining them for patterns. He was careful to include instances of failed insight as well as instances of success.

Klein concluded that we achieve insights by reorganizing our thinking into a new story about the problem we are trying to solve. His model highlights the importance of five factors in achieving insights. "Eventually I was able to sort these 120 cases into five different strategies for gaining insights: connections, coincidences, curiosities, contradictions, and creative desperation. Did the incident rely on a person making a connection? Did the person notice a coincidence as a trigger for the insight? Was the insight triggered by some curiosity-- an odd fact or event? Did it depend on seeing a contradiction? Or was the person stuck, desperately seeking some way out of an impasse?"

The first section of the book describes Klein's research methods and how each of the five factors was identified. It also debunks common beliefs about problem solving. For example, an incubation period is unnecessary for creative insight, reasoning by analogy is productive when it involves an expert applying analogies from previously-solved problems, and computational models of searching a problems space to choose between possible solutions do not match how human experts think.

The final two sections describe how insights are often blocked and what can be done to facilitate insightful problem solving. Most interesting is Chapter 12: How Organizations Obstruct Insights." It discusses how the high value many organizations place on predictability and reduction of errors discourages risk-taking and pursuing new strategies. "Insight is the opposite of predictable. Insights are disruptive. They come without warning, take forms that are unexpected, and open up unimagined opportunities. Insights get in the way of progress reviews because they reshape tasks and even revise goals. They carry risks-- unseen complications and pitfalls that can get you in trouble. So insights make you work harder." Another nugget is Klein's tongue-in-cheek list of methods to block insight. If you have a distaste for arbitrary deadlines and other organizational nonsense, you will find it enjoyable as well as useful.

This is a useful discussion of the nature of insight and how to recognize and foster it. It strikes a good balance between research depth and practical application. Researchers will also find it useful for Klein's candid discussion of this methods and the value of a naturalistic approach to studying decision making. Readers who enjoy Klein's approach might also take a look at Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions,Working Minds: A Practitioner's Guide to Cognitive Task Analysis, and The Power of Intuition: How to Use Your Gut Feelings to Make Better Decisions at Work.

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Chris

Seeing What Others Don't ... in context of Gary Klein's valuable contributions to understanding decision making

March 1, 2015

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

Created this summary for a friend shortly after the book was released. Thought I should post it for benefit of anyone considering the books. Rather than a review only of "Seeing ... ", it offers a perspective on all Klein's books, more detail on one. Page down to the end for "Seeing ... "

Gary Klein is a social psychologist who has studied how people make decisions. Klein’s insights arise from exploring people’s stories on events. He does not stipulate or study how people should think, or how someone wants them to think, is open minded about the decision process, observing how it functioned in practice and whether the result was success or failure. To gain a sense of the significance of Klein’s work, read the book jacket comments by respected senior leaders. Klein’s work is academically rigorous; it is not academic. His research is directed at real world situations, real applications.

Klein’s first book “Sources of Power” is a breakthrough in understanding real decision making in the face of challenge and adversity. “Sources” was the nucleus for the popular book “Blink” and Malcolm Gladwell praises Klein … “No one has taught me more about the complexities and mysteries of human decision-making than Gary Klein.” What makes the book powerful are insights from documented real life stories of decisions that illustrate learnings. “Sources of Power” is adapted from consulting studies, readable for the attentive. In the book Klein develops a workable theory behind intuition and how it is applied in practice to formulating real time rapid decisions. His method is to explore the stories … from firefighters, marine combat units, naval submarines, etc. and use them to understand the underlying thinking, developing the theory, and illustrating how this theory is generally applicable. His generalized mental model “Recognition Primed Decision Model” has widespread application. Simply put it involves comparing the current situation with previous experiences, recognizing how this is similar, analogous or different, spotting leverage points, and developing an accurate mental model (mental simulations as needed) for actions. There are process diagrams to help explain. Given the number of times we have seen “rational decisions” be adjusted by biases after the fact (flawed), looking at decision making through a different lens is refreshing. This is not a theory book; real stories tell the story. In reading the book I had two reactions: loved the stories and learned from them, loved the models to explain; the task was mine to translate this into more than a change in mindset to applying. Per Amazon score 5*.

The second book “Intuition at Work” (softcover as “The Power of Intuition”) is a handbook of applications and decision tools for people involved in business decisions. It is a stand alone volume and serves as a useful guide for managers involved in strategic and tactical decisions. Rather than summarize, I offer an insert of the most useful tools (apologies for not condensing, written in 2008). 5*

Thinking Tools (ref The Power of Intuition by Klein)
not applicable in all situations or all forums

Integrating Intuition (inductive) and Analysis (deductive)
• Make a starting mental shift to intuition, a source knowledge from experience.
• Accept there is zone of indifference when a fast or executable decision may be preferred over a perfect choice taking more time.
• Map strengths / weaknesses of options without numbers or weights.
• Use mental simulation to evaluate the options … how would/could these play out? Imagine worst case scenarios. If you have trouble, you lack sufficient experience or need more information. Use the PreMortem Exercise.
(Method to help anticipate problems, worst cases, vulnerabilities for an option through mental simulation.)
1. Preparation – familiarize with situation, relax, get ready to write.
2. Tell people to imagine a reported total failure of plan/action.
3. Generate reasons the failure could have occurred, 3-5 minutes.
4. Consolidate lists - go around with each person stating an item until all new items are recorded. This reveals each person’s concerns.
5. Revisit the plan or action proposed. Address top 2-3 items of greatest concern or if using this for a decision, apply ‘face off’.
6. Periodically review the list to re-sensitize people to problems that may be emerging.
• Simplify comparisons by ‘facing off’ one option to another to filter.
• Bring in outside intuition to check analyses and test.
• Don’t replace intuition with procedures. Intuition is not accidental; it represents experience and a system of procedures is not a substitute (even though procedures are essential given circumstances).

Directed Creativity
• 3 components exercised – goals, leverage points (means of achieving), connections (between goals and leverage points).
• Process steps (improvement over brainstorming)
1. Present the dilemma – what is known/believed, conflicts, tradeoffs, actions tried, barriers.
2. Team members work alone – generate ideas, possible solutions, identify leverage points – fixed limited time alone, no distractions (not too long since needs to be periodic clarification of goals with cycles of generating options, learning, generating more options; ideally stretch over 2 days to assist subconscious).
3. Present ideas – bring group together, record goal refinements, take turns. Benefit is in team discussion bringing together different types of expertise and knowledge.
4. Integrate ideas – team leader/facilitator examines ho0w ideas fit together to help reframe the problem and the nature of the goal.
5. Conduct additional rounds to improve description of goal and to generate more solutions.
6. Converge on a solution – best performed or led by group or project leader.

Managing Uncertainty
• Five sources of uncertainty
- missing information (don’t have it or can’t access it),
- unreliable information (can’t trust it, erroneous, outdated),
- conflicting information (inconsistent with other sources),
- noisy information (buried in irrelevant information), and
- confusing information (cannot interpret).
• Ways to manage uncertainty
➢ Delay – until situation resolves itself or more information is likely to be available. Trick is to apply intuition to gauge when to seek more information and whether new information could be valuable and is likely to arrive in time to make a difference.
➢ Increase attention – step up active monitoring.
➢ Fill the gaps with assumptions, checking as possible. Sounds good but there are no shortages of assumptions in any analysis, making intuition more useful.
➢ Build an interpretation – construct explanations, categorize situations to correct interpretations.
➢ Press on – despite preference for 100% information (Colin Powell … ‘don’t need more than 70% for a decision’).
➢ Shake the tree – take action to perturbate the system to get experience.
➢ Decision scenarios – use only a few scenarios to avoid confusion and difficulty of tracking. Objective is to develop a richer understanding by exploring dilemmas and tradeoffs.
➢ Simplify the plan – Could make the plan more modular so tasks stand on their own. Contrast is highly interactive plan where everything depends on everything else, adding huge complexity from interdependency leading to brittleness (something going wrong ‘breaks’ everything) and high risk.
➢ Use incremental decisions – take small steps, test, experiment. Drawback is signal of lack of commitment and sunk cost trap.
➢ Embrace uncertainty and use it for advantage – use ability to thrive in uncertainty as a way to avoid linear or deterministic thinking.

Klein’s next book with 2 colleagues was “Working Minds”, cognitive task analysis (CTA). It is a book centered on nitty gritty cognitive processes, valuable reading as a complement, a handbook for analysis with tools for the user. 3* for non-practitioners, 5* if you are in the CTA game.

“Streetlights and Shadows: Searching for the Keys to Adaptive Decision Making” is about combining theory from stories and observations to the world of uncertainty in decision making. This book was published prior to Daniel Kahneman’s “Thinking, Fast and Slow” with the same topical material. However, Streetlights is more balanced as to intuition vs. rational classical decision making than “Thinking …”. Kahneman laments ‘thinking fast’; Klein puts it in perspective and explains when each type of thought process has value … thinking fast (intuition) best applying to many real world situations (esp when time a factor). Streetlights is a tighter ‘weave’ than “Thinking Fast” which is filled with observations from academic type studies. It is broader than Klein’s previous books that were focused primarily on intuition, applied further to real life situations than “The Power of Intuition”. Kahneman and Tversky studied real people doing real things in quasi controlled conditions and laboratory situations. “Thinking Fast” is a wonderful academic survey (also “Nudge”, Thaler and Sunstein). Klein studies real people doing real things through their stories from real decision situations. His interest is in determining what/how they thought and made decisions (effectively) to avoid failure or catastrophe … or to achieve success in critical situations. The “Streetlights” name refers to how we see … in ‘bright light’ vs ‘shadows’, i.e. when all is known vs. uncertainties and unknowns. In the absence of information or in cloudy situations, we revert (arguably must) to intuition, finding context within a reference grid of past experiences. The often labeled “biases” that result are not distortions in reality but are reflective of thinking in light of experience. More importantly, the book places intuition into the context of broad cognitive processes and ways people think. Klein shows that constructed laboratory or academic research many times leads to errors because scenarios are artificial. Another issue related to applying intuition is collecting too much information … unhelpful/confusing or prompts overconfidence. Fundamental questions of need, purpose, use … many times don’t come into play. This book can be read on its own but reading “Sources” or “The Power of Intuition” first is of benefit. My recommendation … read “Sources”, skip “Working Minds”. 4-5*

“Seeing What Others Don’t: The Remarkable Ways We Gain Insights” is a volume just published. It was an ‘afterthought’, as Klein acknowledges, from collecting 120 stories of “aha” insights. The idea behind the book is organizations spend inordinate time and effort to eliminate errors and make corrections (Six Sigma) but little effort to encourage, enable, nurture and boost insights to lead to growth (improving performance by reducing the ‘down arrow’ instead of improving practices related to the ‘up arrow’). This book is an attempt to help with the ‘up arrow’ by using stories to provide insights on what works.

Klein starts with a quick survey of previous studies. He moves to summarizing themes from 120 collected stories – connections, coincidences and curiosities, contradictions, and creative desperation. From themes he creates the “triple path model”: contradiction path, connection path, creative desperation path (coincidences included) with 3 steps … trigger, activity, outcome. The contradiction path involves seeing an inconsistency, using a weak anchor to rebuild the story, leading to a change in understanding. The connection/coincidence/curiosity path involves spotting an implication, adding a new anchor, leading to enhanced understanding. Creative desperation is triggered by escape from an impasse, discarding a weak anchor, and achieving a new understanding.

The 2nd part of the book is about what interferes, what shuts down insights including how organizations obstruct insights, and how NOT to hunt for them.

Up until this point the reader has read interesting stories, reviewed a mental model, read stories of how not to do it. The question is how does this come together in a methodological fashion to help. Part III is about how to foster insights, help yourself, help others, organizations, and tips for becoming a hunter of insights. There is a continued heavy reliance on stories (some recycle) to illustrate points. The reality is creativity and germination/development of insights is a complex and difficult process. Klein freely admits he had no intention of writing the book, a story he needed to tell as best he could. As such, the book lacks the tight structure of previous volumes but it is an easy read, worth reading. It offers ideas and insights leaders and practitioners of organization improvement can use. Do they come in recipe form, or with tools? … NO. This is a book that requires the reader to absorb and connect the dots for themselves. 4*

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Francis O Walker

A guide to discovery

August 26, 2018

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

While trying to recall an incident from Gary Klein's prior work: Sources of Power, it was with considerable delight that I located it on a shelf in my office, having read it many years ago. It described how a pediatric ICU nurse recognized incipient sepsis in a premature infant leading to antibiotics that were, in this case lifesaving. Now, in preparation for a future project, I found this later work of his on insight. In it he summarizes his descriptive observations on this valuable but oft underrated human activity. Readers who liked the Geography of Genius, will find this work equally compelling. It raises a number of fascinating questions, offers helpful suggestions, and helps pave the way for future research. I especially liked his brief description of the deflation of "Six Sigma", one of many organizational fads that had to be survived. Discovery is always in demand, and the better we can think about it, the better we will be able to promote it.

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Seeing What Others Don't: The Remarkable Ways We Gain Insights Hardcover – June 25, 2013

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