CHAPTER 6
The Art of Insight in Organizations

Anything we’ve discussed in previous chapters can easily be put to use at the office. Now we are going to focus specifically on teams and larger groups. TAOI can be added to virtually any existing organization process or procedure with great benefit since few things don’t benefit from looking and listening for insight and a good feeling. Sometimes it’s best to lace an existing procedure with short applications of these methods. Other times it might make sense to completely revise a procedure and base it on insight.

Our aim in this chapter is to give you a few examples to spark your imagination and leave it to you to figure out the best way to apply these methods in your situation. We are going to recount a number of stories from the various settings where we have employed TAOI. Some of the applications may seem too big a leap at first, and generally it’s not a good idea, nor is it necessary, to replace existing processes until you have some experience.

Meetings

The Art of Insight can be applied in all sorts of meetings in the normal course of business. What you should look to do is

• Use TAOI and a Fresh Thought Hunt to plan how you might use the method in advance of a meeting and incorporate it into your design

• Use TAOI spontaneously, either throughout the entire meeting or intermittently

Staff Meetings

Here is one manager’s description of the difference in his monthly staff meetings after applying TAOI:

We have about five people in the room and another five on a conference line for this five-hour meeting that starts at lunch and runs until the end of the day. In the past, we would march through the agenda according to our rules for good meeting management. We’d grind away at each topic according to schedule and arrive exhausted at the end. Incredibly, we were accustomed to wasting huge amounts of time in our meetings.

Now we manage this meeting much more effectively. When I recognize the meeting is off track or we’re spinning in a circle or feeling bad, I stop it. Sometimes I call a break, or other times we just move on to something else and come back to the sticky issue later. In fact, I find myself adjusting the agenda to make sure the stuff I think is going to be a bit of a grind goes toward the end. That allows us to do as much as we can when we’re fresh and stop when we realize we need to stop. We see a huge increase in productivity from this shift. The ability to refocus on other important things when you know you’re getting nowhere on a particular subject has been very valuable.

We have many successful examples of this style of meeting. One head of a research and development function who was known for her hard-driving style found herself once again aggressively driving a two-day meeting of twenty or so of her assembled global leaders. It was getting nowhere, and at about two thirty in the afternoon, much to everyone’s astonishment, she called a halt to the meeting for the day, telling people that they were still “in” her meeting and had to follow her instructions. They should go on a break for the rest of the day (not go back to their desks or e-mail, etc.) and enjoy each other’s company. They should talk informally about the important business and technical issues they had identified and generate new perspectives and insights and return the next day prepared to share them.

You know where this is going. They started the next morning with people sharing their realizations. Enormous progress was made, and numerous participants reported that it was the single best meeting in their careers with the company.

The Offsite Planning Session

Here’s a situation that was completely driven by insight—an annual planning meeting. Our colleague Joel Yanowitz was asked to facilitate a small firm’s annual planning retreat. As is common in these situations, he had some preparatory meetings with the executive team and interviews with a few other members of the eighteen people who would be present. Based on these meetings, and with the president’s consent, Joel began the three-day offsite with a simple question:

Well, you all know how these things go, don’t you? You’ve each got a few issues that you think the company desperately needs to address. Normally, we would fill two or three flip charts with these questions or issues and then somehow prioritize them, assign times, and march ourselves through each of them in sequence, managing ourselves to stay within the time allotted for each section. We would carefully record the follow-up tasks and accountabilities. And then do some sort of critique at the end of the three days. If we are lucky, everyone will report how great the meeting was and how much we got accomplished. Does that sound familiar?

People nodded yes and Joel posed another question: “Are you all excited and really looking forward to this?”

Everyone admitted no. It was hard to be truly excited about three days of slogging through a list of problems and issues with the prospect that success would mean long to-do lists for everyone in the room, each of whom already had a very full plate.

At this point, Joel said, “Let’s try something different.” He described a little bit about fresh thoughts and The Art of Insight and finished with an invitation:

Here’s the process: We take a couple of minutes to see if there are any other issues that need to go up here on our list. Then we look over this list and pick the one that feels most intuitively right and begin there. We’ll take as much time as feels good to spend on that issue. Then we’ll see which issue speaks to us the most next and tackle that one. And so on. And here’s the deal. You’ll be looking for insights and fresh thoughts and trying to stay in a good state of mind. I’ll be a sentinel for the mood within the room, and if it feels like things get thick or we lose a good feeling, I’ll call a break. Let’s try it for an hour or two. It can’t hurt, and you probably will find that you really like it. Want to give it a go?

This was an intrepid group, so they quickly agreed. They worked on the first task and after about an hour felt really good about having had a couple of insights into this first issue. They took a break and then moved on to what they chose as the next most attractive issue, following the same process. By the end of the morning, they were only on the third issue of a list of about twenty, but the insights that emerged led to very different and unexpected actions. They decided to continue the process after lunch, and by the end of the afternoon they had discussed perhaps five of the proposed issues, each time selecting the next issue to focus on based on the intuition in the room. The feeling of progress was so strong that even though they had made “less than normal progress” in terms of an agenda, they broke at about four thirty, had cocktails and dinner, socialized in the evening, and planned to continue in the same mode the next day.

The following morning, people shared any overnight insights that they had, which precipitated an hour-long discussion and a wealth of fresh thoughts. Then they launched into the next issue, continuing in this mode through the rest of the morning and into the early afternoon, when something surprising occurred. The group was working on the tenth issue, and as they brought it to a nice conclusion and then looked to see what was left, they realized that in the course of addressing their first ten issues, all the other issues had either been discussed and resolved or had been rendered irrelevant. They were essentially done by about two thirty on the second day of a three-day meeting! Wisely, they declared success, broke early, and had a great social time together for the rest of that day. They reconvened the next morning (they had paid for the hotel rooms, after all) and covered a few housekeeping tasks, and everyone went home early completely excited.

Of course, not every meeting will turn out like this one, but nevertheless, this example gives you a sense of what can happen with the spontaneous application of The Art of Insight and a well-intentioned group.

Solving Problems, Particularly
Intractable Ones

We have found that The Art of Insight can be particularly helpful when a problem has been around for a long time and has resisted multiple solutions. In many cases, all that needs to be known about the issue is in fact already known within the firm, but the pieces haven’t been assembled properly. The solution would not likely be found in further study or analysis. An insight—a new view of the problem—is what is needed. Of course, this is often true of other problems firms face, so you don’t have to limit the use of TAOI to intransigent issues.

When we help clients use TAOI to solve problems, we aim to forestall the normal tendency to push to a solution or closure. Instead, we want people to discipline themselves to keep looking into the unknown for what they haven’t seen already, allowing fresh thoughts and insights to occur until one of them takes hold and captures their attention and imagination. Each subsequent step along the way is not based on a previous design but is instead guided by fresh thinking in that moment about what would be the right thing to do next.

Here’s what happened with a division of a global food company. After three years of struggle, it was pretty clear that the company’s strategy for entry into Chinese markets and using China for global production was failing. A team of eight was assembled from around the world for a three-day meeting to address the problem. Each member came equipped with his or her own diverse and deep experience but without any preparation other than reading the currently existing analyses and reports.

After being given some background on TAOI, the team reconfirmed their vision for what they wanted their China business to look like and began to explore the current reality and what they had learned. Instead of trying to convince each other of the validity of their personal, previously found conclusions, they limited their conversations to what they thought they knew were facts and fresh thoughts. Each person described what he or she thought the problem was, and—no surprise—each saw it differently to some significant degree. The team began to look for more novel problem descriptions.

After about ninety minutes, they took stock of what they had discussed. What points was there general agreement on? (Recognizing that there is always a risk of “groupthinking” something that in fact isn’t true, these were set aside for the time being.) On which points were there disagreements? Of this group, those that could best be answered through analysis were also set aside for later. The team took a break, and when they returned, they focused their attention on two areas. The first involved the remaining disagreements that they felt would be best addressed through fresh thoughts and insights. What would explain the differences in perception? Could a different lens or perspective resolve the conflict—a different characterization of the problem? The second area involved what they didn’t know that somehow seemed important to know.

As the explorations and discussions deepened, more and different understandings of reality began to emerge. The team had a couple of flip charts filled with new statements of the problem. After a few hours, reality began to settle in. The business needed a product with a certain water content, and each attempt at at-scale manufacturing had failed on quality and total cost of delivery. Then in the next moment, they saw the problem would be easy to fix. The technical problem was substantial, but the engineering representative said that it was solvable if it could be made a priority and his engineers could stop chasing some of the nearly thirty other projects that were on their wish list and the wish lists of their sister divisions. There was a manufacturing issue, but that one had actually been solved when a new plant was started in Indiana a few months earlier. In just a few minutes, the team recognized that the solution was easily within the company’s grasp.

Then a second insight hit. Yes, they had framed the problem, which showed them a solution that was obvious in retrospect. At the same time, it showed them a problem in virtually all their other businesses. They were providing specialty technical support to commodity customers and consequently were unnecessarily overservicing virtually everyone at great cost.

This gave way to concern that the solutions were so simple that the executive board that had sponsored the initiative would not support them. They spent the remainder of the three days looking for holes below the water line—anything that could show a flaw in their reasoning. None were found, and the team took the plan to the board while simultaneously gently socializing it with a few people within the functions of the company who would be responsible for implementation. The board found the solution spectacular in its simplicity and effectiveness, as did the future functional owners. The ground-swell of support led to the creation of a Design-for-Six-Sigma project that ultimately implemented the solution.

How Is Insight Different from Problem Solving?

As Robert Fritz observed in his book Creating, the aim of creating is to bring something into existence, and the object of problem solving is often to drive something—the problem—out of existence.¹ TAOI is essentially a creative act, an act that starts in the unknown and results in something that is known, perhaps in an unimaginably deep way. Problem solving, while ideally precipitating novel and previously unseen solutions, is more like playing with a jigsaw puzzle, where you assemble already-known pieces. You are pleased when all the pieces finally fit. With an insight, however, you are sometimes blown away.

TAOI complements any of the better-known problem-solving methods. An obvious use is during the “divergent” phase that aims to get lots of possible solutions on the table. Less obvious, but perhaps more valuable, is during the “convergent” phase, which often resembles that jigsaw puzzle where the previously identified possibilities are sifted, analyzed, and tested to arrive at the final proposal. It’s here that you can really benefit from the ongoing and deliberate search for fresh thoughts and insights.

The TAOI-oriented session is aimed at having an insight rather than setting up a number of solutions for subsequent analysis. Divergence occurs, but it is not that structured, and convergence occurs when the insight hits. There really isn’t a separate phase.

How The Art of Insight Differs from Brainstorming

In one organization, people were well trained on building on the ideas of others—to the point that this was the norm and, indeed, an overused strategy. This led to wildly fast-paced meetings where numerous but rarely fresh ideas tumbled all over the place. Kay, a relatively senior organization member and the only person who had experience with TAOI, had been listening quietly in a meeting when she finally broke into the conversation. She was about five words into her sentence when she stopped cold. There was a pause, and the room went silent because of the trained respect that people had developed for each other when sharing ideas. Then Kay said, “You know, that’s not going to be a fresh thought.” She said no more and handed her “turn” to whoever was going to jump in next. The room stayed silent for several seconds. Then somebody spoke, starting with, “Well, here is a fresh one.” A couple more fresh thoughts tumbled out after that, with various other people reinforcing, perhaps unconsciously, the difference between them and the already-stated ideas that usually made up their discussions.

When the session is properly staged, a team employing Insight Thinking will behave quite differently than if they were brainstorming. Brainstorms are typically very fast paced without pauses, and Insight Thinking is comparatively slow with many pauses, aims for a reflective mood, and always looks to maintain a good feeling. In brainstorming, no particular censoring of memory thoughts occurs. In Insight Thinking, old thoughts are discouraged. The two modes are different and yet wonderfully complementary, and if you switch back and forth between the two, you will probably find your brainstorming mode getting quieter and more reflective.

Strategy Formulation

There are probably as many strategy methodologies out there as there are strategy consultants. These approaches are generally meant to be scientific and rely heavily on analytics. To overgeneralize a bit, they usually begin by creating a host of strategic options, and then, by applying sophisticated mathematical and analytic procedures, they determine the means, cost, and economic value of the options. Once the optimal strategy is selected, it then becomes a matter of implementing that strategy. Product lines and other assets are sold and acquired. Reorganization occurs, and occasionally attempts at cultural change are made. Once all these steps are successful, the company defends the new strategic high ground for the next several years until the strategy wears thin and must once again be revised through a similar process.

Various assaults on the intellectual soundness of this approach have been made over the past few years, but nevertheless, it remains a prevalent framework and has many opportunities to integrate The Art of Insight. One particularly worthwhile place is where the process includes the establishment of a mission or vision. This sort of undertaking can benefit profoundly from the deep, creative discussions that grow out of fresh thinking.

Here is an example of what can happen when a strategy is based on an insight. Early in 1977, Dick Kovacevich was made head of the New York Banking Division at Citicorp. At the time, the group was losing $100 million a year, despite having one-third of the market. Like any smart executive joining a new organization, Dick engaged his leaders in numerous conversations to find out where the business had gone wrong and how best to correct it. As he probed, he discovered that the market was being defined exclusively as personal checking accounts. Not only was this wrong in his mind, but as defined, Citi’s market share was already so high that the profit problem was virtually unsolvable. Then he had an insight. If the market were defined more broadly to include other financial products and services that consumers routinely purchased, Citi’s share would become 3 percent with enormous possibility for growth. Then he had an even bigger insight. Most of Citi’s customers were already purchasing these products and services some-where—it just wasn’t from Citi!

The new strategy was simple and common sense: get these existing customers to bring to Citi the business they were already giving to others. It was obvious that it could work, and if it did, it would be successful for at least five years. No substantive forecast or studies were performed. Instead, the division members just went out in some of the branches and tried selling current customers additional products. It not only worked immediately, but the division quickly realized that the cost of selling a new product to an existing customer was one-tenth that of selling the same product to a new customer. When Dick was promoted three years later, Citi’s share had grown to 11 percent with annual profits in excess of $100 million.

Reading this story, you might find yourself questioning whether this is an example of a great insight or it is just an example of a good leader coming in with some common sense. After all, this is the sort of thing that good banks do. But this is exactly the point. After the insight, it just looks like common sense! If this strategy was so obvious, then why hadn’t it already happened in Citi’s previous one hundred years of successful retail banking? In the late 1970s, the strategy was revolutionary. In fact, even today’s banks across the world still struggle to do it well.

The story doesn’t end there. In 1986, Dick joined Norwest Bank, ultimately becoming its CEO. At the time, Norwest was a small regional bank on the brink of failure, experiencing fierce competition from the big national banks that benefited from size and cost advantages. Norwest was struggling with how to differentiate itself in a way that would allow it to thrive. Based on his experience at Citi, Dick had complete confidence in what he termed integrated cross-selling.

Dick observed to us, “Once you have the insight, it’s really all in the execution. But make no mistake, that’s a lot of work.” In his first ninety days at Norwest, Dick, with other members of his executive team, visited practically all of Norwest’s 273 branches, holding town-hall-style meetings to educate everyone about integrated cross-selling. During the course of these meetings, the team had another insight. Norwest should be able to provide large bank products and services to small bank customers and do it more personally than any of the national banks. They could “out-local the nationals and out-national the locals.”

Using “out-local the nationals” and integrated cross-selling, Norwest flourished and, over the years, purchased and merged with other banks, including Wachovia and Wells Fargo, whose name it retained. What started as a small regional agricultural bank worth less than $1 billion, now has a market value of $190 billion, making it, with the exception of two banks partially owned by the Chinese government, the most valuable financial institution in the entire world. Over the past twenty-five years, the insight-based retail banking strategy has remained essentially unchanged and has been applied to commercial banking and other financial services.

TAOI is often used as part of a group process (like the China project). Other times executives have largely developed the strategy themselves out of conversations with colleagues. One executive, Terry Ann, was dealing with the recognition that her company’s current strategy was not scalable:

About a year ago I started developing a new strategic plan in my old style—writing a lot of notes and such. However, a few months ago I decided to just sit back and see what happens. I had a lot of conversations with other staff members about what we really wanted to do and what made us special. Over a short period of time the new plan became clear to me, probably because I haven’t been actively doing all that overthinking and overanalyzing I used to do in my attempts to “figure it all out.” Instead, it just came together on its own accord.

These stories point to some of the key differences between an insight strategy and a strategy derived from analysis. In the former, you start with the idea and then do only those analytics necessary to ensure its validity and catch any fatal flaws. There is no “boiling the ocean” of all the various alternatives. In the case of Norwest, no significant strategy studies have ever been done in the retail banking group. This means far less work, and it means that the formation of strategy is completed quickly, often in as little as three months. Typically, many different people within the organization participate in the formation of a strategy and they often begin acting immediately on their insights. As a consequence, instead of being a second distinct phase, implementation is well underway with momentum building by the time the strategy is formally adopted. In the cases we are familiar with, when insight-based strategies have been used to effect organizational change, the results have never been wrenching, and “cultural change programs” have never been necessary. Norwest never put itself or any of its successors through a forced march to become something different.

We have no way of knowing for sure whether piles of analytics will lead to a better strategy, but when TAOI is employed, participants report that the results are actionable and swiftly implemented.

A multibillion-dollar business probably shouldn’t abandon its existing process in favor of searching for “the one game-changing insight.” However, TAOI absolutely is something worth testing with one particular product or business unit, as a complement to an existing analytic strategy process, or as a part of a midcourse review of an existing strategy.

If you decide to proceed in this direction, start by having a series of conversations that follow the same format and guidelines we have described earlier. Get your people together and ask questions that take them deeper into their current reality and the unknown, and utilize the many other strategy questions that have been developed by academics and practitioners over the years. Ask them for fresh thoughts on the strategic situation and for their opinions on what makes your organization great. As you have likely noticed by now, the specifics are far less important than the spirit and feeling that accompany this process. Keep talking and searching until an insight hits.

Coaching a Colleague

The Art of Insight can be both exciting and rich when used at work with one other individual. Imagine for a moment that a colleague has come to you for help on a problem. It could be about a technical issue, career guidance, or planning for the next year. The request for help may be deliberate, or it might arise in the normal course of a conversation about something completely different. Let’s say you are a good problem solver and the appearance of a problem is like a bucket of raw meat thrown at a lion. You’re on it in a heartbeat—looking forward to the physical and psychological pleasure that you will experience when the problem is solved. This time, try something different. Don’t try to solve the problem for your colleague. Don’t offer advice. Drop immediately into Insight Listening and begin coaching her to generate fresh thoughts and unseen but relevant questions as you learned in the Coaching for Fresh Thoughts and Insights exercise.

Keep your mental finger on the feeling of the conversation—stay lighthearted and open. Steer away from premature resolution and help your colleague generate a raft of fresh thoughts. It’s likely that she will find an insight or her own solution to the problem. As one manager, Doug, explained,

When I put this into practice, I’m able to operate from a place where I realize that people have everything they need inherently in them. I’m able to just be with them and hear what they have to say. If I am present and quiet enough to allow it, more often than not they will have the insights and discover the solutions that they need to move forward.

This approach allows people to discover what they already know without my expecting that they will follow me and accept all my ideas. I feel like I have stepped out of a judgmental mind and have become more of an observer.

Another manager, Dave, described it this way:

As far as insight is concerned, understanding my state of mind is the first thing I notice when I interact with others. In general, I find I’m a lot more calm and centered. I pay much more attention to the conversation I’m in, which lets me appreciate both the way it’s evolving and the individual statements made. As a result, I also sense in others a greater awareness of the content and meaning of the conversation. I’m simply having different, and better, interactions with people.

Personality Conflict

One particularly nice place to use The Art of Insight is where you find yourself in some sort of persistent conflict with a peer, a subordinate, or even your boss. See if you can engage the other person in looking for some fresh thinking into what the root of the difficulty is. He may not bite on this offer, in which case you can still unilaterally take some of the actions we share below. But for the sake of our illustration, assume that he takes you up on this proposal.

Go on a Fresh Thought Hunt together. Encourage yourself and the other person to look for fresh thoughts. Listen as deeply as you can and, above all, maintain a good feeling. You may not talk 50 percent of the time, but as the conversation progresses, your rapport will deepen. The most important point is to enjoy a good feeling together. The more deeply you listen, the more deeply the other person will experience a connection with you. Even if you do not crack the code on the first meeting, you will feel far better about each other. Your working relationship will improve dramatically. And over time, you will find your conflict abating.

Pete, a senior vice president, found himself constantly arguing with his boss, Charlie (not your author), on nearly everything. Both were disturbed by how difficult their relationship had become given that they had previously been close colleagues. As part of the firm’s strategy review process, both were exposed in some depth to The Art of Insight and, in particular, the importance of maintaining a good feeling.

We returned a few months after the strategy review, and as part of our check-in with Pete, we asked him how it was going with Charlie. “Just fine,” he said, looking somewhat puzzled that we asked. “Glad to hear that,” we responded, “given the problems you guys seemed to be having.” Pete was silent for a moment and then said, “I had completely forgotten. We’re having a great time together these days. We listen really carefully to each other and are really aware when the feeling of our conversations goes south. The few times it does, we just table the issue and come back to it later. I can’t think of a time that we’ve had an emotional argument in months.”

Leading and Facilitating TAOI
Discussions

Bringing these new ideas into an organization is best done by the person leading a project or meeting since all teams look to their leader and will roll with almost anything if they see the leader is comfortable with it and thinks it’s important. However, you need to be careful about one preexisting condition. If one person on a team is aggressively negative about the idea of using TAOI, the process will probably be difficult if not impossible. Generally, all team members must be at least open-minded about employing this approach, and hopefully you and at least one or two folks will be genuinely enthusiastic.

When using Insight Thinking with a team, you should begin by developing a common language around insight. Start by discussing how to recognize the difference between a fresh thought and a memory thought, and then propose the concept of an Insight State of Mind. Describe your understanding of Insight Thinking and share with your team the importance of their catching on to their own thinking patterns.

Setting the Ground Rules

Once the team members have settled in to the idea of paying attention to their thoughts and they begin to see the value of maintaining an Insight State of Mind, have the group discuss a topic while employing Insight Thinking.

Here are some ground rules that we have found very effective:

1. Propose a topic, question, or point of concern. To start, all participants should sit quietly and, as best they can, listen with nothing on their minds. Thoughts are going to arise, but if they are memory thoughts, they should be dropped without giving them voice. You may well experience a long pause at this point. This is a good thing.

2. If a member of the group has a fresh thought relevant to the discussion, that person should share it out loud as soon as convenient while being aware of, but not disrupting, the good feeling of the conversation.

When you run a meeting with these criteria, the pace will slow, and people will become more reflective. A generative and open space will be created, spawning crisp new ideas. Occasionally, running a meeting like this can be somewhat awkward, particularly if some people are left in the dark about what is going on. However, if your team members are well briefed and understand the objective, you shouldn’t encounter any problems. If the atmosphere in the room feels free and productive, then you’re in good shape.

If things get uncomfortable, however, then some group management may be necessary. The first step is to recognize and announce that the good feeling has been lost. This is pretty easy to do when you are an outside consultant with nothing invested in the content of the conversation. It’s more difficult when you are in the thick of matters, but with a modest bit of awareness and practice, it can be learned.

If the loss of the good-feeling state is caught early on, generally only one person needs to mention this before people realize what has happened and then shift back to a good state of mind. On the other hand, if the loss has gone too far or gone on too long, this simple intervention might not be enough. The best step to take at this point is to call a mandatory break. It may well be resisted since the overwhelming inclination in these cases is to power through. A fifteen-minute break is, nevertheless, exactly what is needed. Think of it as a penalty flag that anyone in the group can throw that “stops the game,” creating the space and possibility for a break in the thinking and mood. One advantage of working with a group of people familiar with and committed to Insight Thinking is that the more members there are, the more likely someone will catch the loss of mood and throw a flag.

Team members using these ground rules will quickly realize that everything they hear is fresh at least for someone else. In some cases, a new idea may be fresh for every individual in the room, but even if it’s new for only a fraction of the group, it will encourage more fresh thoughts for these team members to build on, which can in turn be shared again. The value in laying these ground rules is that the meeting will shed its usual staleness for a more productive and stimulating discussion, where rehashing old thinking is simply not the norm. The tone and feeling of the group will become fresh, and a new energy will permeate the room. Meetings like these entrain people to reach for freshness, get more comfortable with new concepts, and grow less attached to the old ones. Pauses in conversation become more common, and people are allowed to complete their thoughts without interruption. Instead of a person’s idea getting hijacked by someone else and steered purposefully in a new direction toward the other person’s agenda, the idea has a chance to be consummated in its entirety. It is often remarkable how sure we can be about where an idea may be leading, only to discover that it flows in an entirely different direction. This experience is rich and garners surprise and curiosity. These results are all born from sharing only fresh ideas and listening with nothing on your mind.

You Can Practice TAOI Even for a Few Minutes
at a Time

We often run entire meetings using TAOI, but you can carve out just five minutes from a meeting being run in your typical style to shake things up with some Insight Thinking. Particularly if a good number of the team are experienced with Insight Thinking, a five-minute “practice session” will often take the meeting in a new direction, both in terms of the content being discussed and the manner in which it is being discussed.

Take a silent pause for sixty seconds (long enough for a few settling breaths). Then invite people to resume talking when they have a fresh thought. Have a “required” five-second pause between the time one person finishes speaking and the moment the next person starts. This prevents people from getting into a cycle of reacting to whatever the last person said and allows a little time for their thoughts to settle and to notice if something fresh emerges.

Our colleague Joel has been known to encourage people to look out the window whenever they feel like it (assuming there are windows and the view is somewhat pleasant) and let their minds drift a bit with the aim of coming back into the room with some fresh perspective.

Stop for a moment and contrast the setting described above with a typical meeting where the thinking is closed and stagnant and people spend their time restating things that are either obvious or have already been said. You’re far less likely to find something new or unusual when you’re operating out of memory. Although you have a different set of facts than each person in the room, it’s not the content that precipitates an insight. Occasionally, a new piece of data will trigger a new idea, but much more reliably, a state of mind is what sparks an insight because we are finally noticing something different in the available facts. The continuous repetition of content that has already been stated may be an efficient way to win an argument, but it is not an efficient way to prompt an insight.

The Breaks Can Be More Important Than
the Meeting

It’s common for meetings to get stuck, and when they do, the most common response is to ignore it and redouble the pressure to have a breakthrough. Instead, as we suggested before, send people on a break when the good feeling is lost. Don’t try to recover a lost feeling when under pressure and when thinking is of low quality. Don’t fall victim to “just a few minutes more and we can push through.” Call a break, and make the break long. Let people go on walks with the assignment to look for fresh thoughts. Or let them simply think about nothing and absorb what they have heard.

Someone will probably come back with an insight that cracks the impasse or problem wide open. Sometimes people with opposing views meet up on their (metaphorical or actual) walks and sort everything out. Even if this doesn’t happen, begin the next session by having people report any fresh thoughts they had while on the break, no matter how seemingly inconsequential. Anything fresh can spark an insight on the part of another listener.

For people not familiar with fresh thoughts, or when the group is mixed, Joel has people go on a five-to-ten-minute “sensory walk” by themselves in silence to free up fresh thoughts. Their assignment is to put their entire attention on their senses and notice what they see, hear, smell, and feel. They may become aware of small sounds in the distance or feel the cracks in the sidewalk through their shoes or the hair on their arms being blown by the wind.

They will return with fresh thoughts or a fresh perspective, even if you have not invited them to do so, and the feeling in the room after one of these walks always changes, sometimes quite dramatically.

If You Are the Only One in a Meeting Familiar with
The Art of Insight

If you have yet to enroll your team in Insight Thinking, or if you are the only person familiar with this subject, you may face some pretty tough sledding. Even the most well-intentioned people will revert to their habitual styles. Ideally, you should find an internal or external colleague who is skilled at facilitating meetings. A collaboration between two skilled people can usually be quite effective. The simple process is this: You and your facilitator partner should first develop some mastery of The Art of Insight. If you have some honest conversations with each other, you will know when you are ready for “prime time” with your team. Then bring the facilitator in to help run the meeting with you.

Here are a few items for you (or the two of you) to keep in mind:

• Maintain a good state of mind. Perhaps the most important point to remember is to maintain your equanimity. By keeping composed and staying conscious of the quality of your state of mind, you will be better equipped to help yourself and others think more effectively. Follow the guidelines for working with a team, even if no one else does. Your equanimity will do a few things:

• It will make you more able to hear insights of your own that you can then share.

• It will help you hear and realize the insights of others, which might otherwise be lost in the conversation.

• It will not contribute to more pressured thinking within the group.

• In some cases, it might look unusual enough that others will ask what you are doing, which you can then use as an opening to explain Insight Thinking.

• Use your intuition. Your instincts are powerful and usually on the mark, so go with your gut if it feels right in the moment.

• Don’t muscle. These concepts should flow naturally and shouldn’t feel like work. If you are trying to “do something” to the room, people will surely notice—and not in a good way.

• Lead by example. Illustrate Insight Thinking through your actions and by maintaining a quality state of mind. If you notice that you just interrupted someone to pull her line of thinking toward your own, then you aren’t leading very well!

• Ask high-quality focus questions. Guide the conversation toward generating good ideas by asking great questions about the subject of the day.

• Label (out loud) what you are doing when you are doing it. Say, for example, “Here’s a fresh thought,” or “I just had a small insight.” Like Kay, when you catch yourself about to repeat a memory thought, pause (it’s always good to illustrate pausing) and say, “Oh, that’s a memory thought someone has already said.”

Have faith! Yes, running a meeting like this for the first time is a bit of a leap, so make that first step small. For your part, assume people are capable of generating good insights. If you create the right conditions, a good outcome will occur. You can’t “script” the meeting as tightly as perhaps you normally do, so it may feel uncomfortable at first.

If you are the designated meeting leader, consider these thoughts from Jim, one of the in-house facilitators we work with:

I think you have to feel comfortable knowing that people have the answers within themselves. All the knowledge the group needs is in the room. The facilitator helps participants look differently at their information and perspectives so they can piece together everything and be confident they can develop effective actions themselves. When group members see they don’t really need a lot of external input, that they have all the relevant information, that they just need to give themselves permission to explore and allow the options to bubble up, they’re able to recognize their own value, which empowers them.

When I act as facilitator, I also recognize that the way one speaks to a group and settles a room helps people connect with their own innate intelligence. If you absorb the spirit of the room and connect yourself with the undercurrents, you can trust your instincts to come up with something that can unlock the conversation. In my examples, the wisdom of the group surfaced when I followed my own wisdom. If you have an insight or unique way of thinking about the topic under discussion, you may discover a reservoir of strength you can’t categorize, but you just go with it.

I might also describe this as the ability to get very, very present. You’re not caught up with wondering, “Is this going to work? What are they going to think about me?” You just get really quiet. When you see something that you know is gold, you go with it. You don’t have to map it out five blocks or three miles in advance. In the moment, you see what’s required, you know it will work, and you just follow your nose. I wouldn’t say it’s a random act, but it’s not a staged operation, either.

Whether you are the leader or the facilitator, you are going to find using these methods extremely rewarding. Have faith in your capacity, and remember to maintain a good state of mind. Those around you will follow your lead, so keep your composure, trust your instincts, and don’t try to force your will on the room. If you create the right environment, you can have a creative, efficient meeting every time.

While related, searching for ideas and insights is quite different from problem solving. Insights can certainly solve problems, but insights can also illuminate never-before-seen opportunities. Clearly, we want both. Most businesses focus almost exclusively on problem solving at great cost in time and people. In Western business, we are thoroughly and exclusively trained in analytic methods, and this is limiting us. It results in ideas and strategies that are neither insightful nor inspiring to workers. We could benefit greatly by a complementary focus on insight generation.

When a person or group has an insight, this has multiple benefits. Often, these benefits are achieved faster than when the analytic or problem-solving approach is used. Commitment is typically high, which leads to rapid implementation. Analysis can play an essential role in confirming the validity of the insight, but time and effort are reduced. And of course, insights can often lead to an unusually strong competitive advantage.

The problem-solving route can lead to the selection of the optimal result from an array of known alternatives, but the insight route can lead to something never before conceived. To be sure, without comparing such an insight with the alternatives, there is no assurance that it is the optimal choice, but immediate action on a slightly less-than-optimal path often delivers the better business outcome.

Practicing The Art of Insight is a wonderful experience. It brings out creativity and an innate way of thinking that is both natural and powerful. It positively alters the culture and engagement of organizations and teams. As TAOI is absorbed, people become less stressed. Open space appears on their calendars. Conversations become more relaxed. Relationships improve. People take more initiative and leave work at the end of the day with more energy than when they started.