Blog Summary: Slow Hunches, Curiosity, and Innovative Ideas

 

This blog is a summary of a blog published on Psychology Today with the name Slow Hunches, Curiosity, and Innovative Ideas: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/learning-work/202002/slow-hunches-curiosity-and-innovative-ideas

To start off, the blog beautifully sums up what a Slow Hunch really means: To be following a slow hunch is to be at the fuzzy edge of our current knowledge. It is to be actively putting vague intuitions into words and building a conceptual map at the edges of understanding.

Slow Hunches basically mean being at the edge of a scientific discovery. The definition came about in a book by the name, Where Good Ideas Come From. In this brilliant book Johnson shares similarities and differences of innovative ideas that develop over long periods of time with one-off ideas.

He says:

“Most hunches that turn into important innovations unfold over much longer time frames. They start with a vague, hard-to-describe sense that there’s an interesting solution to a problem that hasn’t yet been proposed, and they linger in the shadows of the mind, sometimes for decades, assembling new connections and gaining strength... But that long incubation period is also their strength, because true insights require you to think something that no one has thought before in quite the same way” (Johnson, 2010).

As Hunches take several years to form and develop, they are tested out and gather support, or are simply discarded. In this way, only the strongest ideas survive. Coming up with a slow hunch is not exactly a Eureka moment which was experienced by Archimedes in a bath tub. A slow hunch is just simply a realization that something interesting and amusing is happening, which may or may not snowball into something important in the future.

A very important point to consider is that slow hunches do not revolutionize any particular field. They do however change the way we work. This is the reason why we must not reject vague notions that our understanding is incomplete.

How do slow hunches work exactly? There are three ways in which a slow hunch works:

The incubation period helps the slow hunch gain network. The idea spreads to other people and more value is added to it in the process. Secondly, the incubation period helps the slow hunch to forget about a dominant approach, which may not be the best solution. There are chances that the person who has come up with the idea gets caught up with his own notions and see that the idea is great solution to an entirely different problem. Third, the incubation period helps in seeing the problem in a completely different light.