Chapter 3¹

Insight

There is nothing so terrible as activity without insight.

—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Most modern organizations say they are committed to continuous improvement (CI) or continuous quality improvement (CQI) because of their great importance to the organizations and to their customers. But, as we discussed in Chapter 2, CQI is not sufficient for the long-term survival of the company and the long-term satisfaction of their customers. Breakthrough improvements are needed in order for organizations to be market leaders or close followers. Radical breakthrough improvements that are new to the market—innovations—are the means by which market leaders establish and maintain their leadership. Competitors must follow the leaders by making radical improvements that are innovations to their organizations but not to the market. The processes by which radical breakthrough improvements are made are different from those by which continuous incremental quality improvements are made.

Many agree with this contention, but then go on to say that innovation involves an essentially random process of combining ideas. One would think that the existence of “serial innovators,” both individuals such as Steve Jobs and Twyla Tharp, and organizations like 3M and Google, would be enough to refute this idea. But you will find those who contend that the fertility of serial innovators is a matter of the quantity of ideas they consider.² We disagree. Meaningful innovation requires producing items that have significant quality, and, as we discussed in Chapter 1,quality is a more complex term that it appears. We believe that in order to foster innovation a better understanding both of quality itself and of insight, the process that brings quality to light, is needed.

In this chapter we define what we mean by insight and discuss ways in which individuals and organizations might become more insightful.

Plato, the Divided Line, and Insight

Plato not only invented the term quality, as discussed in Chapter 1, but also invented the concept of insight as the grasp our minds have on genuine quality. We can learn something profoundly useful about quality and about insight by studying Plato’s dialogues, specifically the Republic. The explicit topic of the Republic is justice, but it covers a lot of ground, and in the dialogue there are many famous ideas and images presented. One of those famous images, the divided line, is particularly significant for thinking about the concept of quality. In the Republic, Socrates says: “…what gives truth to the things known and the power to know to the knower is the form of the good. And though it is the cause of knowledge and truth, it is also an object of knowledge.”³

Socrates introduces the image of a divided line (Figure 3.1) to clarify this assertion. The line is divided, first into two sections and then each of those parts is further divided into two sections. So the line has four sections in all, and each section, as it turns out, will represent jointly a form of awareness and the sorts of things that the form of awareness has as its objects. These forms of awareness are arranged in a hierarchy from weakest to strongest according to how real and unchanging are their objects. First, at the bottom of the hierarchy are images—representations of concrete things—and “imaging” as the corresponding form of awareness. Next are the concrete things themselves, with perceptual belief as the corresponding form of awareness. The third segment of the line is where a form of awareness that can be called understanding is located, and the objects of understanding are “hypotheses.” What this means becomes clearer when Socrates discusses how geometers do not draw conclusions about the particular squares and diagonal lines that they can draw, but rather about the “square itself” and the “diagonal itself.” So the third section of the line contains patterns of operation which are formulated as general principles. The principles can be applied to understand particular concrete things, but the principles are not limited by being only about those particular things. Finally, in the fourth and highest section of the line, the mind is alive with a form of awareness that can be called insight. This form of awareness uses the “hypotheses” of the geometers as “stepping stones to take off from, enabling it to reach the unhypothetical first principle of everything.” But having reached this unhypothetical first principle, it is important to note that the mind then returns to consider the geometers’ principles.⁴

Figure 3.1. Plato’s divided line.

Source: Sower and Fair (2005). Adapted with permission from Quality ­Management Journal ©2005 American Society for Quality. No further ­distribution allowed without permission.

To illustrate what Plato means by these forms of awareness we will use forensic science as an example. In the first, and lowest, stage of awareness, imaging, there is a woman learning forensic science who becomes familiar with forensic science through popular books and television shows. She is at the level of representations. But even if she memorizes reams of information from those images, such knowledge is not as complete as that which the woman has who ascends to the second stage, perceptual belief, the stage in which she has hands-on, personal forensic science experience both in the field and in the laboratory. There the woman sees for herself how things work. But if her experiences are to become more meaningful as knowledge, this in turn must lead to stage three. In stage three, which we call understanding, the woman is not content simply to accumulate observations from the field and the laboratory. She wants to understand the patterns that she observes, and this means that she will have to spend a great deal of time and effort learning and applying the relevant concepts and theories. This is the part of the line where the developing forensic scientist meets the “hypotheses” that Plato wrote about. But what if the woman’s attempts to know forensic science stop at this point? Then she is a highly trained, perhaps very capable, technician—not a genuine forensic scientist. What is lacking? In a phrase, forensic science insight—insight which enables her to identify and conceive valuable new “hypotheses” that are worth being researched. Those who possess forensic science insight are capable of creativity and innovation in the field of forensic science, but those without insight are limited to repeating and applying what others have created. (For a similar treatment of the divided line in relation to creativity see the article by Donald Hatcher.⁵) To speak in Plato’s language, acquaintance with the good itself, as it is manifested through fruitful insight, is necessary in order to have fully genuine knowledge.

This same hierarchy of: (a) familiarity with representations, (b) personal experience, (c) theoretical understandings, and (d) creative insight can be identified in a number of fields. From this perspective one can understand why it can be misleading to talk about the awareness of the form of the good, that is, the grasp one has of genuine quality, as something “transcendent.” That term can suggest that the good in itself exists somehow detached, separated from the things of one’s experience. It does seem true in Plato’s view that genuine quality, the good in itself, cannot be confined to or exhausted by the inevitably partial, limited understandings that ­people have codified in their textbooks and manuals. Thus, the good in itself does, in that sense, transcend all specific definitions. But, at the same time, the good in itself is inherent in all of the truly valuable theoretical understandings, in authentic personal experiences, and in genuinely accurate representations. One can see what Plato means when he says that it gives to knowers the power to know.

Plato’s hierarchy provides a philosophical basis for understanding the various approaches to defining quality. Understanding Plato’s hierarchy leads to the unavoidable realization that radical improvements, breakthroughs, ­radical innovations, and paradigm shifts only derive from insight—the highest level of Plato’s hierarchy—which is most closely related to transcendent ­quality. Far from being an impractical approach to defining quality and of interest only to philosophers, the transcendent approach is the most practical approach when breakthroughs in quality are important.

Consider the case of consumer products. Many customers begin at the level of images of products—whether the images are from TV advertising, glossy photographs in magazines, or descriptions from other people, and most customers are rather naïve about the technology involved in the products they purchase and use every day. When they have personal experience with a product or service, they know quality when they experience it, for instance as relative ease of use, but they have little understanding of how that ease of use is accomplished. Design professionals, engineers, and scientists who use information from the voice of the customer-that is customers’ responses to products and services-and who then translate that information in accordance with the general principles of their disciplines into ­specific product and service-based attributes are often operating at the understanding level. However, when scientists, engineers, and designers use creativity combined with detailed knowledge of their disciplines and the ­fundamental needs of the customer to create entirely new ­products, they are at the insight level. An example of this would be where ­customers describe their need for greater ease of operation for the ­personal computer (images-level). Insightful researchers use creativity to get beyond the keyboard/DOS programming paradigm (which lead to the DOS shell—understanding-level) to the mouse/graphical user interface paradigm (insight-level).

The description of Plato’s hierarchy presented the four forms of awareness sequentially, but Tim Brown, CEO and President of the influential and innovative design firm IDEO, cautions that the continuum of innovation is best thought of as a system of overlapping spaces rather than a sequence of orderly steps. We can think of them as inspiration, the problem or opportunity that motivates the search for solutions; ideation, the process of generating, developing, and testing ideas; and implementation, the path that leads from the project room to the market.⁶

Of course we hasten to add insight as the precursor of ideation, and we view ideation as the process that tries to clothe the reality revealed by insight in the relatively tangible garb of things such as words, diagrams, maps, models, and prototypes. For those who are interested, a very useful set of suggestions that deal with this process can be found in Designing for Growth: A Design Thinking Tool Kit for Managers by Jeanne Liedtka and Tim Ogilvie.

Data is not information, information is not knowledge, knowledge is not understanding, understanding is not wisdom (insight).

—Clifford Stoll

Insight Defined

One way to consider thinking about insight is illustrated by the following comment by Alan Aderem, an internationally recognized immunologist, who, in commenting on the difficulty of developing effective vaccines against diseases such as HIV, said

Based on limited knowledge of the immune system and of the biology of a pathogen, investigators made educated guesses at vaccine formulations that might work…But all too often lack of insight into the needed immune response leads to disappointment, with a vaccine candidate recognized as ineffective…⁷

In this context, insight means identifying all of the factors and their interrelationships that affect “immunological responses that must occur if a vaccine is to induce a strong protective reaction.”⁸

We define insight, then, as the ability to see reality clearly enough to come up with new ideas that are worth testing.

Becoming an Insightful Individual

So, how does one develop insight at the individual and organizational levels? The insightful organization will be discussed in Chapter 4. Here we will discuss the insightful individual. The physicist Alan Lightman describes his experience of insight as follows:

I woke up about 5 a.m. and couldn’t sleep. I felt terribly excited. Something strange was happening in my mind. I was thinking about my research problem, and I was seeing deeply into it. I was seeing it in ways I never had before. The physical sensation was that my head was lifting off my shoulders. I felt weightless. And I had absolutely no sense of myself.⁹

Insight perhaps need not be quite this dramatic, but the sense of seeing deeply into the problem or issue is why “insight” seems an appropriate term for this kind of cognitive experience. But can the capacity for insight be developed? Our research has revealed six activities that develop insight.

1. Developing a capacity for insight through associating with leaders in the field of interest
2. Acquiring the necessary expertise
3. Having a passionate motivation to “see deeply” into a subject
4. Seeking out diverse experiences—including those that do not seem directly related to anything you are studying
5. Being willing to test your ideas (and to let them fail)
6. Letting information linger in memory, in your conscious and sub-conscious mind so that new, fruitful, unexpected connections can be made.

Let us elaborate these points.

(1) It is not an accident that Socrates had a group of friends and followers that included Plato. Socrates himself described his role as serving as a “midwife” assisting in the birth of “the truly beautiful” in his friends. For most of us, this is not so remote from our experience. If we think about some of the most important experiences we have had, experiences that were occasioned and shaped by interacting with someone we respected and admired greatly, experiences that showed us how to be better people, better thinkers, better creators, better leaders, then we know that the experience was not about specific bits of information or specific techniques or skills. All of those things may be present, but what was conveyed was something at once more profound, more abstract, and yet more real—a way of being, seeing, and living—a way of conducting ourselves in a particular area of our lives and a way of seeing more deeply the aspect of reality that engaged both of us. While there are self-taught geniuses, the lesson is clear. If you wish to become a more insightful person in a given area, then you should arrange to spend time with persons who are themselves insightful leaders in the particular field. It need not be a formal relationship such as an internship or an apprenticeship, but a casual afternoon encounter is also unlikely to be it. In a sense it requires a kind of living with that person—or persons since there is no express need to limit ­oneself to a single person only. And it will very likely take time—time that results in that person sharing their vision, sharing how they approach the most important challenges to be dealt with in their area. This is part of the explanation of why one can construct genealogies of eminent researchers and artists, and, when you do, often those genealogies reveal their relationship with eminent forebears. There is of course no guarantee, but if you wish to be the best, then work with the best whenever possible.

(2) Then there is the necessity of having the relevant expertise. Twyla Tharp, the American choreographer who has created over 135 dances, and is the winner of a Tony, two Emmys, and the 2004 National Medal of the Arts for her accomplishments, so succinctly puts it: “Before you can think out of the box, you have to start with a box.”¹⁰ The point is obvious, but essential. You cannot hope to have insight into ideas in a particular area, ideas that are worth putting to the test until you truly have reached the level of genuine understanding of that area. Moreover, it seems there are no shortcuts. The psychological literature on the study of the acquisition of expertise in many different areas typically reports the need for 10,000 hours of involvement and practice as a prerequisite for acquiring expert level skill.¹¹

(3) It is very hard, perhaps even humanly impossible, to acquire that level of expertise without the necessary motivation. Without the passion to understand, that is without a drive to understand deeply and broadly a specific aspect of reality, who would spend the often long and, occasionally, fruitless hours to acquire the mantle of an expert? One thing that is obvious is that we differ in our passions; Darwin, for example, wrote a detailed and comprehensive treatise on barnacles in the time between writing in his notebooks, recording his dawning sense of how life evolved and producing his major work, the Origin of Species.¹² This passion for understanding barnacles is unlikely to be shared by the readers of this book, but we can each recognize in ourselves what we desire to truly understand. This suggests a lesson for assembling a team that is to engage problems and solve them creatively, a team such as that which devised the Mars rover. According to Donna Shirley,¹³ former manager of the Mars Exploration ­Program at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, “Diversity!” is the watchword since the banding together of a group of individuals, each passionate about a particular area, can create valuable synergies. Obviously, from an organizational and ­management perspective this diversity may pose challenges for managing such a team.

(4) For the person who wishes to enhance the possibility of experiencing insight, diversity of experiences is also recommended. Here is an example from the life of one of the most prolific and revolutionary artists of the 20th century, Pablo Picasso:

In May or June 1907, Picasso experienced a “revelation” while viewing African art at the ethnographic museum at Palais du Trocadéro. Picasso’s discovery of African art influenced the style of his painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (begun in May 1907 and reworked in July of that year), especially in the treatment of the two figures on the right side of the composition.¹⁴

The seeking out of diverse experiences is also noteworthy in the life and career of Steve Jobs, the paragon of late 20th and early 21st century innovation. Here is one paean of tribute from the Fort Wayne Sentinel:

Jobs believed innovation was a mix of technology and the liberal arts. “We’re not just a tech company. It’s the marriage of that plus the humanities and the liberal arts that distinguishes Apple,” he once said.¹⁵ The diversity of the experiences when received with genuine openness reveals doors through what otherwise is the confining maze of custom and habitual ways of thinking.

What then if insight occurs? Insight may come with a force of a revelation, as it did to Picasso viewing African art at the Palais du Trocadéro, but it still needs to be articulated and then tested. Here is where a kind of courage or better, self-confidence, is necessary. It is a fact that many seemingly bright ideas lose their luster when subjected to rigorous testing. The Nobel prize-winning neurophysiologist J.C. Eccles tells how early in his career in New Zealand, when one of his hypotheses was refuted by the results of experiment, he felt he was a failure as a scientist. He credits the extraordinarily influential philosopher of science Karl Popper with helping him to see that every refutation was really an advance.¹⁶ When a beautiful theory is killed by an ugly fact, then we know it is time to think again, time to get creative.

(5) But it takes a certain steadiness of nerve to endure the testing and possible failure of one’s brain children. One can see a clear example of this steadiness of nerve by visiting the phoenixcommotion.com website, a website dedicated to the work of an incredibly insightful and creative builder, Dan Phillips. On the website watch Dan’s TED talk and visit his discussion of “Disasters” under the Information heading to get a sense of what the willingness to make mistakes looks like.¹⁷ Be aware that in the literature on creativity, this willingness to fail is sometimes confounded with an inclination to take risks, and Robinson and Stern rightly criticize this confusion when they say “the assertion that failure and risk taking go hand-in-hand with creativity is not only false, but quite harmful in a corporate context.”¹⁸ Inveterate gamblers who are quite willing to take sizeable risks do not often go down in history as great innovators.

The willingness to put one’s idea to the test is often most easily displayed when the idea is tested “privately” before going public. This, first of all, means tested in the mind of the innovator who turns the idea over in his/her mind looking for weak points or points that need further development. As Twyla Tharp puts it: “The best failures are those you commit in the confines of your room, alone, with no strangers watching.”¹⁹ Socrates could respond with challenges to the unexamined ideas of his Athenian contemporaries precisely because he had spent many, many years challenging his own ideas. Second, many artists, writers, scientists, and inventors will try out a new idea or new creation before a selected audience. One of Plato’s most appealing dialogues, the Symposium, presents Socrates at a drinking party (the meaning of the term “symposium”) with a number of his friends each of whom, including Socrates, tells a story about the nature of love. The point is that Socrates placed a high value on friends who were involved as he was in the pursuit of a true vision of the form of the Good. He could try out his ideas with such friends and get their feedback—not the same as their agreement or their praise. Similarly, writers and scientists will often circulate “pre-prints” of their work among colleagues whose honest opinion they respect. Without such a circle of colleagues who are passionately committed to the same general endeavor, it is harder to tell whether your bright idea is one that will take wing or one that will drop embarrassingly to the ground. So a part of your life as an insightful innovator will be spent interacting with those others whose work you respect and who are willing to be honest in their assessment of your ideas.

(6) Finally, there is memory. When you are fortunate enough to glimpse a portion of reality revealed by a particular insight, you try to hold the experience, elusive as it may be, in your memory. Rather than rush immediately to formulate, to concretize, to instantiate the vision of reality available through the insight, you can attempt to live with it a little longer, appreciating and holding on to the experience. This may be especially useful when dealing with failure. Failures can be the result of an effort at translation that is too quick or too partial a translation of the insight into formulas, texts, or products. If you can, to some degree, hold the insight in memory, then it is possible to return to it, with a chance of drawing fresh inspiration from it. In the words of William Byers: “Reality is not a data bank, nor can it be reduced to a finite set of laws or a deductive axiomatic system. Any system invariably misses something. Words, symbols, and systems are all incomplete. ... The essence of what is missed is something that is not at all abstract or complex. It is the process of abstracting, the representation of reality by language and mathematical symbols, which misses something.”²⁰

Plato and a Parallel between the Individual and the Organization

In addition to the divided line, one of Plato’s other famous literary devices in the Republic is to suggest that the proper ordering of the parts of an individual’s soul is an image of the proper ordering of the parts of the community. So the soul of an individual is in proper order when insightful reason is in charge of the other two parts of the soul—the spirited, emotional part and the needy, desiring part. We all know intimately what it is like for a strong emotion or a serious temptation to lead us to act in conflict with our better judgment, so to that extent Plato is simply reminding us of what we already know. But Plato gives little guidance about how to establish and maintain this insightful reason being in charge. So let’s do something Plato was in no position to do and take the results of some of the best work on what makes an organization healthy, that is, able to perform well over the long run and able to adapt successfully to a changing environment, and see if we can find parallels within the individual. Our guides in this are McKinsey & Co.’s Scott Keller and Colin Price. Their book, Beyond Performance ²¹ contains a distillation of their thinking and research about measuring and building organizational health which they understand as a blend of nine elements:

1. Direction
2. Leadership
3. Culture and climate
4. Accountability
5. Coordination and Control
6. Capabilities
7. Motivation
8. External orientation
9. Innovation and Learning

We propose a similar list for an insightful organization in Chapter 4, but for now we will use their “elements” to inspire a set of the essential characteristics in an insightful individual.

Motivation underlies everything else. While the advice to “follow your bliss” is often unhelpful, without a powerful drive to understand and create in a specific area, little is likely to be produced. We know what people mean when they describe someone as “living and breathing” the work they are deeply engaged with. A challenge for management of an insightful organization is how to keep the fire of enthusiasm from sputtering out, and we will address that in a later chapter. So the insightful individual will be a person who is passionate about the work they do, someone who is hounded by a restless curiosity and, as a result, someone who will not rest content with the status quo.

No matter how enthusiastic or passionate one may be, passion will prove fruitless if it lacks Direction. We have all known people who are energized and enthusiastic, but seem to want to ride off in all different directions at the same time. Direction and focus are necessary, and they may not always come easily especially since seeing one’s way through to a worthwhile insight may take considerable patience. The ability to maintain one’s direction, to focus on a particular aspect of reality may look like stubbornness at times, but without it even very able people may not come to have the insights they otherwise would.

Direction is closely tied with Leadership, which, to carry out Plato’s image of the well-ordered soul, means that there is a kind of discipline present which fights against all of the distractions which we are prey to. Creative writers understand that there are always other things to do, many of them worthwhile in themselves, rather than staring at a blank white page or computer screen. To fight this tendency to fritter time away, they often have recourse to habits, for example, a set time to start writing and a set number of pages per day. Parallels for other creative people are easy to find, and their discipline often seems to others to be a kind of monomania. But without strenuous discipline the chances of producing ideas worth testing declines precipitously.

The parallel in the individual with Culture and Climate in the organization is, we suggest, Identity. Is the work of creating new ideas, new hypothesis, new art, new products, or new services deeply a part of who you are? Of course, at the beginning of a career, this identity may be somewhat fragile, needing to be consolidated by actual achievements. This is obviously a place where friends, colleagues, mentors, and managers can play a most helpful role. When Socrates claimed to be a “midwife” helping others to give birth to conceptions of the beautiful and the good, he was obviously successful with many of his companions—with Plato as the most notable of the many he inspired.

Capabilities are, of course, relevant, and the person who would be a serial innovator cannot be shy about acquiring the ones that are needed. It is often not comfortable to be in the role of the novice, and many people flee that role once they feel they have learned enough to make their way in the world. But remember Picasso stopping to look at the exhibition of African art. He was still open to learning a new way of seeing and a new way of imagining.

Keller and Price describe Coordination and Control as “the ability to evaluate organizational performance and risk, and to address issues and opportunities as they arise.”²² In the individual this would correspond to self-knowledge based on a thorough-going and honest assessment of one’s performance, including one’s willingness to take the risks that are involved in creating something new. This is closely tied to Accountability, which, in the individual, largely means taking responsibility, honestly owning both one’s successes and one’s failures.

External orientation for the organization in Keller and Price refers to what one would expect—engagement with customers, suppliers, and other stakeholders.²³ In the case of the individual what this implies is the falsehood of the picture of the innovator as the stereotypical loner, living in a garret. When knowledge workers express what keeps them going and gives them enthusiasm for their work, the overwhelming majority cite how much it means to them to be part of a “team of quality people.” Insight is indeed the work of a solitary mind catching sight of an aspect of reality that inspires the formulation of a new idea or the creation of a new product, but insightful people need very strongly to interact with others on a regular basis who are as motivated and enthusiastic as they are. Without such contact, insights can be lost to an inner monologue alternating between crippling self-doubt and heedless over confidence. Loners are too apt to lose sight of the reality that inspired them. It is not an accident that Plato, in order to continue what he had begun with Socrates founded the Academy. This was the first institution that we are aware of that brought together like-minded people to explore important issues, always in the spirit of offering their insights not as divine words inscribed in stone, but rather as the results of human, all-too-human thinking.

The result of discipline, of focused enthusiasm, of working to acquire capabilities, of honestly assessing oneself, of identifying with the quest, of interacting with like-minded colleagues will be Innovation and Learning. The example of Plato’s Academy and the great universities that are its successor institutions assures us that this constellation of characteristics can be taught and can be learned. But the teaching and the learning required are not simple, and the main teacher must be oneself. It is up to each of us to determine how distractible we are, how honest we are with ourselves, how fruitfully we interact with colleagues, how patient we are at laying the groundwork capabilities we need, and so on. The challenge is ours to take up if we but choose it.

In Keller and Price’s²⁴ view, to achieve and advance the health of an organization requires its leadership to deal with five “frames” or basic questions to be answered:

1. Aspire: Where Do We Want to Go?
2. Assess: How Ready Are We to Go There?
3. Architect: What Do We Need to Do to Get There?
4. Act: How Do We Manage the Journey?
5. Advance: How Do We Keep Moving Forward?

There are obvious parallels to the five A’s in questions that individuals must ask of themselves. Also, it is obvious that these questions are to be asked recurrently since there is every reason to assume that individuals, like organizations, face an environment that is subject to change, often change that is unpredictable. We won’t dwell on these questions, but there is one point that Keller and Price bring up with regard to the third A, “Architect,” that strikes us as especially important when applied to the nurture of insightful individuals. Keller and Price counsel that a healthy organization will have a “balanced portfolio of initiatives”²⁵ which will vary along the two dimensions of familiarity and time frame. The more novel an innovation is and the longer the time frame it takes, presumably the riskier it is, and for the health of the organization it should be balanced by a number of initiatives whose better known chance of success and whose nearer time frame make them less risky.

We believe that a similar idea applies to insightful individuals. Striving to be insightful does not mean that every insight has the same degree of value or the same degree of novelty. To continue to be productive is to realize that not every play will win a Tony, not every novel will be a best-seller, and not every innovative product will take the nation by storm. The key, as Voltaire warned, is not to allow the perfect to be the enemy of the good. More modest innovations and creations help to keep the creative process moving forward, and they increase the chance of coming up with a truly breakthrough, paradigm-changing ­innovation.

Conclusion

Quality guru Dr. W. Edwards Deming frequently used the term instant pudding which he attributed to James Bakken of Ford Motor Co. Instant pudding refers to an obstacle to achieving quality created by the supposition that quality and productivity improvement are achieved quickly through an affirmation of faith rather than through sufficient effort and education.²⁶ Unfortunately, this is still largely true for quality and also for insight. There is no quick and easy way for an individual or an organization to become insightful. To do so requires, as Deming said, effort and education. But it helps significantly if the organization itself operates in such a way as to encourage the individuals within it in their quest for insight, and that is the subject of our next chapter.