I like Gary Klein. He's a weird half-academic, half-business hybrid who approaches the world with a kind of intelligent naiveté. His writing is so unadorned as to sometimes sound a little clumsy, but once you stop expecting eloquence you can appreciate the benefits of his directness.I think his "triple-path" model of how we arrive at insights (i.e. contradiction, connection, and creative desperation) is interesting as a descriptive map, but as a mental model for producing more and better insight, i.e. as an actionable, useful tool, it is of limited value. Klein is not really theorizing, he is cataloguing. This means he is not offering terribly much by way of "how to gain better insights." He would probably admit this.At most, the model invites us to openness:1. The Contradiction Path teaches us to be "open to surprises and willing to take them seriously even if they violate our beliefs about the way things work"2. The Connection Path suggests we need to "be open to experiences and ready to speculate about unfamiliar possibilities."3. The Creative Desperation Path "requires us to critically examine our assumptions to detect any that are tripping us up.”One other thing worth mentioning is his useful definition of insight:"An unexpected shift to a better story." Not bad. He's also good on how insight is inherently disruptive and unsettling, both to private complacency and organizational "perfection":"This shift is a discontinuous discovery; it doesn’t naturally evolve from our previous beliefs. One or more of our core beliefs—the beliefs that anchor our understanding—have to be discarded or radically modified, or an additional anchor has to be added to the mix. We can trace our new story back to the original one, to see how we got to the insight, but we can’t take it the other way. An insight is a leap, an unpredictable leap, to a related but different story. It catches us by surprise because it isn’t the product of conscious, deliberate, deductive, or statistical inferences."We're left not far from where we started: insights are valuable, we all know, but they're also elusive, and not susceptible to process-ification. I just wish Klein hadn't stopped at description, and instead attempted to dive a little more into HOW, how to cultivate insight, feed it, invite it in. More of the generative, speculative thinking he celebrates, swimming out a little further from the safe dock of academic taxonomizing.Insights are not just lucky magic, but they're definitely not analytic deductions. We should all acknowledge that insight can be cultivated, and that we can get better at having insights., while also being skeptical of attempts to create hyper-rational formulas for it. So where does that leave us?If all mystery is just nature that science can't explain yet, then let's push the explanatory boundaries of the current science of insight by attempting bolder theories that can bring new power.To quote Klein himself, science that sticks to the "absolutely true" ends up settling for ideas that "carry little information.” There is a better strategy, where scientists “make the most extreme statements they can defend. This requires moving away from “the safety of the ‘absolutely true’ end point...toward the fuzzy zone in the middle, the ambiguous edge.”