Is your life missing those “aha!” moments of brilliant insight? What hidden force might unlock your most creative breakthroughs?
In his book Seeing What Others Don’t, Gary Klein explores how our most innovative solutions often emerge through creative desperation—when impossible situations force us to abandon conventional thinking. Breakthrough thinking frequently happens when we’re backed into a corner.
Read on to explore this fascinating path to innovation, from human problem-solving to the surprising evolutionary journey of a plant.
Creative Desperation
Sometimes we find breakthrough insights only when we’re backed into a corner. Klein explains that this is the “creative desperation” path to insight. We go down this path when the pressure of an impossible situation forces us to abandon our usual thinking patterns and search for a novel way to solve the problem.
An example of the creative desperation path to insight is the Apollo 13 crisis, when NASA engineers had to figure out how to filter carbon dioxide in the Lunar Module using only the limited materials available to the astronauts on the spacecraft. Their insight—creating a makeshift filter using plastic bags, duct tape, and a hose from a spacesuit—came from the desperate need to solve an otherwise impossible problem.
Klein has the following tips to leverage the creative desperation path to insight:
- Embrace difficult challenges.
- When you’re stuck, question your core assumptions.
- Consider solutions that initially seem impossible.
- Use constraints as creative fuel.
| Desperate Times Call for … Carnivorous Plants? While Klein discusses creative desperation in human problem-solving, examining how evolution solves seemingly impossible challenges offers insights into the nature of innovation itself. The Venus flytrap’s evolution from a simple sundew plant demonstrates that the fundamental patterns Klein identifies in human breakthrough thinking—embracing constraints, questioning assumptions, and repurposing existing tools—mirror nature’s own problem-solving processes. Embracing difficult challenges: Rather than dying out in nutrient-poor soil, the Venus flytrap’s ancestors “embraced” the challenge by evolving new capabilities. They did this not by developing entirely new genes, but by repurposing existing ones in creative ways—for instance, adapting root genes to absorb nutrients through leaves instead. This mirrors how human innovators often solve problems by finding new uses for existing tools rather than inventing new ones. Using constraints as fuel: The very limitations that threatened the plant’s survival—poor soil, lack of nutrients—became the driving force behind its most distinctive features. By breaking one of nature’s most fundamental assumptions—that plants don’t eat animals—the Venus flytrap turned its constraints into advantages. Its inefficient photosynthesis due to modified leaves actually pushed it to become better at catching prey, just as human breakthroughs often come when we’re forced to work within seemingly impossible constraints. This parallel between evolutionary and human innovation suggests that Klein’s insights about creative desperation reflect something fundamental about how problems get solved, whether by conscious minds or natural selection. The creative desperation path might be less about desperate individuals having brilliant ideas, and more about understanding how constraints inevitably drive systems to find innovative solutions through repurposing and recombination. |
