Gaining Insights

This article is part of our Mentor-Coach Reading List series. Join the mailing list to receive this and more.

Curious about gaining insight, idea flow and management effectiveness? Use the right questions, see what others don’t, develop new ways of thinking, learn from indigenous thinking and find better ways to address challenges.

Happy reading!

Here is more information about the Series 10 selection of books.

Seeing What Others Don't: The Remarkable Ways We Gain Insights (Public Affairs, 2013) by Gary A Klein. Insights can change the world, but we also need insights into the everyday things that frustrate and confuse us, so we can more effectively solve problems, make decisions and get things done. A keen observer of people in their natural settings, cognitive psychologist Gary Klein uses a range of fascinating real-life stories to illuminate the nature of insight. He demonstrates how insight can be positively encouraged through employing five key strategies: noticing connections, coincidences and curiosities, investigating contradictions, and creating breakthrough solutions through the force of desperation.

Questions Are the Answer: A Breakthrough Approach to Your Most Vexing Problems at Work and in Life (Harper Business, 2018) by Hal Gregersen. Have you ever completed an audit of the questions you ask? What about an audit of the questions more effective or smarter or more creative people ask? What did you notice? What are the patterns? Talk to creative problem-solvers and they will often tell you, the key to their success is asking a different question. Great questions dissolve barriers to creative thinking and channel the pursuit of solutions into new, accelerated pathways. How do we arrive at them? Based on research including over two hundred interviews with creative thinkers, the book looks at the conditions that give rise to catalytic questions and the breakthroughs that emerge.

A New Way to Think: Your Guide to Superior Management Effectiveness (Harvard Business Review Press, May 2022) by Roger L Martin. This book covers the entire breadth of the management landscape—illuminating the true nature of competition, explaining how company success revolves around customers, revealing how strategy and execution are really the same thing. Almost every executive has a "model" that guides their strategy and activities. But these automatic models mean that when one doesn't work, the typical response is to apply it again—with more effort. Instead, how do you adopt a new way to think. How do you decide where to play and how to win? What is the key to shaping and changing corporate culture? How can you design a successful, sustainable innovation process?

Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World (HarperOne; Illustrated edition, 2021) by Tyson Yunkaporta. As an indigenous person, a member of the Apalech Clan in Australia’s far north Queensland, Yunkaporta looks at global systems from a unique perspective, one tied to the natural and spiritual world. In considering how contemporary life diverges from the pattern of creation, he raises important questions. How does this affect us? How can we do things differently?

Wild Problems: A Guide to the Decisions That Define Us (Portfolio, 2022) by Russ Roberts. This book draws on the experience of great artists, writers, and scientists of the past who found creative ways to navigate life’s biggest questions. Roberts lays out strategies for reducing the fear and the loss of control that inevitably come when a wild problem requires a leap in the dark. Ultimately, he asks us to see ourselves and our lives less as a problem to be solved than a mystery to be experienced. There's no right decision waiting to be uncovered by an app or rational analysis. Reality is harder than that and, perhaps, a little more interesting.

Ideaflow: The Only Business Metric That Matters (Portfolio, 2022) by Jeremy Utley and Perry Klebahn of Stanford’s renowned Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (aka the “d.school”) They offer a proven strategy for coming up with great ideas by yourself or with your team, and quickly determining which are worthy. Drawing upon their combined decades of experience leading Stanford’s premier Launchpad accelerator and advising some of the world’s most innovative organizations, like Microsoft, Michelin, Keller Williams Realty, and Hyatt, they show how to overcome dangerous thinking traps, find inspiration in unexpected places and fill your innovation pipeline.