5 Roads to Creative Insight
“Intuition is the use of patterns they’ve already learned, whereas insight is the discovery of new patterns.”
We are gonna go a bit more in-depth on creative insights and how we reach them. This is an extension of the creativity article, I highly suggest that you read it before this one in order to have a better context (Click here to read it).
How we set up our creative problem puts us on the right path towards discovery, but even after all our preparation work, we need a little help from fate. Some random little accident that will help us break our frame of mind and hints us in the right direction. The form in which this happy accident arrives can differ from case to case, which can then influence the type of insight we have and the road we take to get there. These are some of those roads to insight:
Connections: this type of insight is made possible by the connection between two or more unusual pieces of the puzzle. These pieces can be actual material elements as well as intellectual pieces of knowledge. In this case, the novelty does not stand from the elements themselves (which can be already common and banal), but in how these elements are put together to create something new. In other words: the kind of connection or creative link we build between them is the important part.
Coincidences and Curiosities: a coincidence is a form of pattern we notice in what seems to be apparent randomness. Although still centered on a connection between elements, coincidences are a bit different from connection insights. In the ladder, we are the ones forming the connection, but when we spot a coincidence, we are merely observing an already present connection where we weren’t expecting to find it. Coincidences and curiosities are similar in the sense that they are both outliers, they stand out in our eyes and grab our attention. They might not lead to immediate insight, but they are remarkable enough that they send us down the path of exploration.
Contradictions: contradictions are the opposite side of coincidences. Wherewith coincidences we find a structure where we expected randomness, in contradictions, we find randomness where we expected linearity and structure. Or rather we might classify the information as random until we have an explanation that includes it in our mental model of the world. Like coincidences, this anomaly can grab our attention and lead our investigation down the path to creative insight (as an example of contradiction insight, think of Pasteur and the group of survived chickens).
Creative Desperation: this road to insight is quite different from the others. To begin with, this is a more conscious and active process, we don’t just stumble into it as we would with coincidences, contradictions, and connections. Creative desperation comes at the moment we are put in the corner and our life (literally or metaphorically) is on the line. In these situations, when we are stuck, we directly drop our assumptions and decent thinking, we might be willing to try a more crazy idea that we wouldn’t have risked or thought of otherwise. Contrary to the previous point where we focus on a new element to break our framework, here we tend to directly remove our frame of thinking in order to open ourselves up to more possibilities.
The roads to insight in the real world are, of course, not as well defined. They usually come as a blend of these and other ways. There is also not a single road that works for everybody and every situation. Even in this case, you see how some of these points contradict, or are opposite to each other, as it is the case in most of the creative realm.
Sometimes just asking the right question can help you remove the framework you are stuck in. I’ll leave you with what I think is a good example of creative desperation:
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All the best
Bibliography
Klein, Gary. Seeing What Others Don’t, the remarkable ways we gain insights. Published: 2013.