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There’s an episode of the sitcom Frasier in which the patronising psychiatrist hero tries to prompt his ex-police officer dad to crack a 20-year-old murder case.
By sneakily rearranging crime-scene photos to support his own crackpot idea of the culprit (a performing chimpanzee), Frasier accidentally sparks a sudden insight that reveals the real killer. Eureka!
In this fictitious example, we see an illustration of how a new perspective can lead to revelatory insights. In the right circumstances, a good idea can strike from nowhere with the force of a rhino charging a safari jeep.
Baillie Gifford investors, who pride themselves on cognitive diversity and free-ranging curiosity, are always looking to boost the value of how they think about problems.
What unexpected connections can help form better insights? How do we break down the barriers blocking new ideas?
In pursuit of finding great growth companies, we believe a differentiated view challenges the status quo. That’s why the firm has built a network of more than 100 academic and independent research relationships globally. While not all will lead to investable ideas, generating a distinctive perspective makes the effort worthwhile. We can’t simply do what others do and expect different results.
In his book Seeing What Others Don’t: The Remarkable Ways We Gain Insights (2013), psychologist Gary Klein identified the paths that let people notice what others miss. This is an important concept as our investors seek the exceptional companies that the rest of the market has potentially overlooked. Based on his research into decision-making and on stories of people who have made remarkable discoveries, Dr Klein emphasises that insights don’t occur randomly; they tend to follow certain patterns.
Klein investigated how people achieve sudden breakthroughs – those leaps in understanding that solve problems or uncover significant patterns. He began by analysing a tall stack of newspaper clippings and case studies he collected over time, each describing a ‘lightbulb moment’.
The incidents ranged from small problems, such as police officers identifying a stolen vehicle because the driver was flicking ash in a brand-new car – something a real owner would never do – to much larger issues, such as the early recognition of AIDS by connecting patterns in apparently unrelated cases.
Although the stories were diverse, the insights shared common features. Klein grouped them into a few clusters:
- Contradictions: someone spots an inconsistency between what is expected and what is observed. A doctor confronted by symptoms that don’t fit the usual diagnosis, for instance, may be driven to consider rare diseases.
- Connections: someone perceives a link between things that previously seemed unrelated. US molecular biologist Martin Chalfie, after hearing a talk about jellyfish that glow because of a particular protein, realised the protein could make cells visible, bridging marine biology and molecular genetics to create a revolutionary technique for tracking living cells.
- Creative desperation: forced by a dead end or crisis, someone devises an entirely new and unexpected solution by jettisoning faulty assumptions. A favourite example from the book is a firefighter trapped by a forest blaze who suddenly realises that setting a small fire will burn off the fuel around him and create a survivable space – literally fighting fire with fire.
These paths often overlap; in the more than 100 cases Klein studied, a single insight could fit one or more of the pathways. His point is that insight is rarely linear; it can spring from recognising contradictions, forging novel connections or responding to urgent circumstances.
Klein’s model of discovery helps explain how insights emerge, but there are several ways that individuals can make them more likely, two of which are:
- Curiosity: Cultivate an inquisitive mindset and be ready to ask questions. Curiosity leads you to probe discrepancies and to accumulate experiences that increase the chances of making unexpected connections.
- Intellectual humility: Hold convictions lightly and stay open to new information. By refusing to anchor on existing beliefs, you allow faulty ideas to be replaced by those that lead to breakthroughs. Scrutinise the evidence – right down to how the data was gathered and under what conditions – before taking anything for granted.
What good is an insight if your environment crushes it instantly?
At the organisation level, teams will be more insight-productive if walls that inhibit the movement of ideas are removed. Fear of errors can be fatal. As Gary Klein notes, mistakes are visible and measurable. Everyone can point to the mistake, whereas a missed insight, stopped in its tracks, is invisible – its lost value is unknowable. It’s much easier to hide a missed opportunity than a mistake.
The instinct for self-preservation can snuff out ideas that diverge from the norm before they reach decision-makers. Managers: your job is to let insights flourish.
Klein recounts a senior US military officer who bypassed layers of hierarchy to speak directly with officers several ranks below him, ensuring fresh ideas could surface. If good ideas can make their way upward in the military, they should certainly do so in an investment organisation.
At a time when market pundits are screaming at TV cameras with absolute conviction, we at Baillie Gifford understand that the future is precisely unknowable. Human progress is driven by entrepreneurs and visionary leaders, not by those shifting stocks minute-by-minute. Like Klein, we believe that curiosity and humility are core to generating different views and ideas as we explore various companies. Finance isn’t as complicated as the external world thinks. It can be taught.
Curiosity, on the other hand, isn’t a quality that can be learned. This is why Baillie Gifford seeks specific traits within the people we hire for the investment team, not specific degrees. A medical doctor or a mechanical engineer is perfectly capable of learning the tasks required to write a research report. Finding those who have an inquisitive disposition is our true task.
As an investment firm, we also know that mistakes will happen. It’s not reasonable to expect a perfect track record, so we don’t. We are reaching for those companies that are growing and have the potential to shape industries and markets, if not the world. It is inevitable that we will get some of these wrong. If we are not making mistakes, we’re not reaching high enough for those transformative companies.
While we may never, like Frasier’s father, be jolted into solving a murder, when we understand what sparks insight – and learn to cultivate it – we open the door wider to discovering truly exceptional growth companies.
Risk factors
The views expressed should not be considered as advice or a recommendation to buy, sell or hold a particular investment. They reflect opinion and should not be taken as statements of fact nor should any reliance be placed on them when making investment decisions.
This communication was produced and approved in October 2025 and has not been updated subsequently. It represents views held at the time of writing and may not reflect current thinking.
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