The Nature of Insight

The great British general Wellington offered this concise and charming description of the nature of insight:

"There is a curious thing that one feels sometimes. When you are considering a subject, suddenly a whole train of reasoning comes before you like a flash of light. You see it all. Yet it takes you perhaps 2 hours to put on paper all that has occurred to your mind in an instant. Every part of the subject, the bearings of all its parts upon each other, and all the consequences are there before you."

This wonderfully captures the working of the mind, wherein whole concepts of incredible complexity are revealed at those pristine moments of clarity.

This flash of light is precisely what innovators search for, the moment when new possibilities become clear. From there, insight leads to ideas, which may eventually become completed innovations, these being new concepts, products, and/or services that add value for an organization and its customers.

Another example of this ultra-compressed nature of human thought is held in the story told by land speed record holder Craig Breedlove. Following an attempt to set the speed record at the Bonneville Salt Flats, he described the sequence of his thoughts as he drove his rocket car along the test run; it took more than 2 hours for him to narrate the decision process that he went through during the 8 second speed run.

Insight is often instanteous; our attempts to communicate its nature necessarily take much longer.

(The Wellington quote comes from historian John Keegan's brilliant study of military leadership entitled "The Mask of Command," a book first published 20 years ago, and still well worth careful study.)