Welcome to TAOI Online Learning. This page serves two purposes.

1. Book owners looking for the exercises

For those of you who have already purchased The Art of Insight, you will find the video illustrations referenced in the book here:

1. Listening (10 minutes)
2. Fresh Thought Hunt (20 minutes)
3. Coaching Fresh Thought (30 minutes)
4. Trio Exercise (45 minutes)

2. The short course on the fundamentals of The Art of Insight

Those of you interested in the introductory online course can begin with this video introduction:

This course takes about 105 minutes to complete. This online program includes individual preparation and four exercises: 1) listening, 2) fresh thought hunt, 3) coaching fresh thought, and 4) insight trio.

While you can do this course by yourself, our experience is that it that learning The Art of Insight methods with at least one or two others is vastly superior. You should find a friend or two to get the expected results. The first three exercises are designed for you to do with a partner. They take about an hour and can be done in one sitting or separately. You can do them in person, on the phone or by video conference such as Skype. The fourth exercise is designed for a trio and takes about 45 minutes. It should be done after you have completed the first three and it works fine on the phone or with Skype.

Syllabus and Instructions

Step 1. Preparation (15 minutes)

Listen to the audio summary of The Art of Insight.

Download The Art of Insight Exercise Reference Manual (ERM) PDF here.

Step 2. Listening with Nothing on Your Mind (10 minutes)

Step 3. Fresh Thought Hunt (20 minutes)

Step 4. Coaching for Fresh Thoughts and Insights (30 minutes)

Step 5. Insight Trio Exercise (45 minutes)

Step 6. Post course

Practice as much as you want with these methods. You will get better and

you will become much more familiar with their insight state of mind.

Please let us know how you like TAOI Online Learning. To find our more about more advanced training programs, visit our website below.

Thank you,

Charles Kiefer and Malcolm Constable

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AUTHOR BIOS

Charles Kiefer

In 1975, Charles Kiefer had an insight that changed the course of his life. Earlier, he had left MIT with degrees in physics and management and had expected to have an exciting career as a management consultant helping high-technology organizations innovate. At the moment of that insight, however, he realized the nature and power of thought and how we create our experience of life. Over the course of the next year, dominoes of insights fell, one of which was the importance and function of vision, both to individuals and to teams and entire organizations. As these insights took hold in his daily life, he became increasingly ill-matched temperamentally to the needs of his employer and was invited to leave.

His first act as a necessity entrepreneur was to start Innovation Associates with a colleague to continue innovation consulting, but every day he was drawn more into improving the quality of people's thinking and specifically employing vision. Initially, this took the form of developing a program to build high-performing teams. Then, it became apparent that a new vision-based model of leadership was needed. Peter Senge joined him at Innovation Associates, and together they wrote the first published article on the use of vision in organizations. Charlie, Peter, and others at Innovation Associates pressed on, ultimately developing a suite of consulting and training offerings that supported what Peter named a Learning Organization in his management best seller The Fifth Discipline . In 1995, they sold the firm to global consulting firm Arthur D. Little.

With vision and organizational learning assumed to be safely in ADL's hands, Charlie turned his attention to insight. When ADL went bankrupt in 2002, he and Robin Charbit formed Charlie's next company, Insight Management Partners, to pioneer the use of insight in large organizations. In 2008, Charlie rekindled a friendship with Len Schlesinger, who had just become president of Babson College, and together they began to explore and develop an understanding of how entrepreneurs think and therefore act. They, with Paul B. Brown, have written two books on this subject: Action Trumps Everythingand Just Start . In 2010, Charlie restarted Innovation Associates as a base for his continued work in insight and entrepreneurial thinking.

He lives with his wife in Sudbury, Massachusetts.

Malcolm Constable

After his junior year at Tufts University, Malcolm Constable spent his summer as an intern at Charlie and Robin's then newly minted Insight Management Partners (a consulting firm helping executives of large corporations access high-quality thinking). His compensation was the same insight training that the company was offering its C-suite clients. One sunny afternoon in August, he was participating in a Fresh Thought Hunt around what sort of career he might pursue after college when he had a profound insight that freed him from the narrow way that he had been defining himself. In an instant, a world of opportunities opened in front of him because he no longer viewed his future as being determined by any one decision. This experience allowed him to make a series of life choices that he never would have considered before, but it also made obvious the incredible power of insights. If any question had been left in his mind about whether this "insight stuff" was for real, it was now gone. For the next ten years, regardless of where Malcolm was or what he was doing, his abiding interest in insights helped him stay vigilant about his state of mind, his listening, and particularly his approach to making important decisions.

After graduating from Tufts in 2003 with a degree in English, Malcolm moved to Moscow, where he worked for a consulting firm specializing in oil and gas. After two years in Russia, he returned to Boston to work for Resolve Technology, a commercial real estate consulting firm. In 2007, Charlie floated the idea of Malcolm's returning to Insight Management Partners to work full time. The company was enjoying success helping its clients achieve a significant increase in the frequency and reliability of their strategic insights. Malcolm waited almost two hours before calling back to accept. While working with Charlie, he helped develop a two-day workshop called Insight Golf, which he spun off into a separate company, teaching The Art of Insight to corporate teams using the medium of golf.

Today Malcolm works at a real estate private equity firm, but he still believes deeply in the importance of insights in shaping our world. He lives in Boston and enjoys travel, soccer, golf, and squash.