19 Quotes by Gary Klein

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.

Intuition is the use of patterns they’ve already learned, whereas insight is the discovery of new patterns.

Curiosities provoke people to investigate further, just as coincidences do. The initial “What’s going on here?” reaction doesn’t contain the insight, but it starts the person on the road to gaining the insight.

On November 9, 1989, while CIA experts on Soviet and East German politics were briefing President George H. W. Bush on why the Berlin Wall was not likely to come down any time soon, a National Security Council staff member politely entered the Oval Office and urged the president to turn on his television set – to see both East and West Germans battering away at the Wall.

To quote Mark Twain, “You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.

Insights change our desires; the new stories shift our goals, leading us to give up some ambitions and pursue others.

Martin Chalfie is a perfect example of the experience most people have of “connecting the dots” and solving a problem by being exposed to more ideas. Like Chalfie, we get a new piece of information that combines with other information we already have, and, presto, we make a discovery.

We can increase insights by exposing ourselves to lots of different ideas that might help us form new connections.

I still observe executives exhibiting the same lack of courage or knowledge that undercut previous waves of innovation. They declare that they want more innovation but then ask, ‘Who else is doing it?’ They claim to seek new ideas but shoot down every one brought to them.