I once worked with a leader—we’ll call him Nick—who was about to fire his entire team. He had tried everything he could think of to get his team members to innovate. But each time they came up with a great idea, they failed to execute. He was at his wit’s end.
I once worked with a leader—we’ll call him Nick—who was about to fire his entire team. He had tried everything he could think of to get his team members to innovate. But each time they came up with a great idea, they failed to execute. He was at his wit’s end.
It turns out it wasn’t the team that had an issue. It was Nick.
After some serious digging, we discovered that the team was stuck at the starting line because Nick had not addressed the broader issues of risk and failure. His team members were more than capable of executing on what was working, but when it came to new ideas, they were worried because they didn’t know what the outcome of those innovations would be.
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Using this newfound insight, Nick was able to have intentional conversations about risk and create an environment where his team members felt like they could act on their innovative ideas with confidence. That’s the power of tapping into insight.
Insight is a sudden understanding of a stimulus, situation, or event that produces a non-obvious or non-dominant interpretation. It looks at the root of the problem you’re trying to address and at the patterns that either cause the problem or reveal an unconventional but targeted solution. Insight is different from standard problem-solving methods because it doesn’t just address the symptoms or surface-level issues.
Mark Beeman, a neuroscientist who studies insight at Northwestern University, found that there are differences in the ability to solve issues with insight (internal) versus analysis (external). An insight is often a long-forgotten memory or a combination of memories. To access these, the brain needs to be able to quiet down and remove all distractions. Our natural tendency is to want to fill time by checking our email or perusing social media. However, when we quiet the brain and let it float, it can access those memories.
After all, Albert Einstein created the theory of relativity while daydreaming about chasing a sunbeam to the edge of the universe. Isaac Newton developed the theory of gravity after he happened to see an apple fall from a tree. And one study found that people returning to difficult tasks after taking a break with an easy task can boost their performance by about 40%.
Today many of us are always working, stressed, and tethered to tech. As a result, we have fewer insights and can’t maximize the full potential of our brains. So we have to decide whether we’re going to let our environment control us or utilize our emotional intelligence to design our environment in a way that optimizes our brain’s potential.
There are three strategies you can use to tap into your own insights to solve problems differently:
These practices pull our thinking away from the concrete thinking of “How will we do this?” to the abstract thinking of “Why are we doing this?” Don’t fall behind because you’re distracted by everything around you—tap into insight to focus your attention and solve the problems that really matter.
Kerry Goyette is the president of Aperio Consulting Group.
