I have questions...do you have answers?

Hypnopompics from 10 April 2026

Sometimes I wake up too early and start wondering about things. It’s one of my favorite times, because it’s often when my best ideas strike. That hypnopompic state—the threshold between sleep and waking—is when my brain seems most willing to make unexpected connections and follow threads wherever they go.

I figured some of these may be of use to others, so I publish them when they strike.

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I was on the train to New York City yesterday, heading down to Columbia for my monthly in-person classes for my doctoral program. “School mornings,” as I call them and as yesterday was, are typically pretty active for my brain, often because I’ve spent much of the past week doing the readings for my classes or finishing up projects. All those new inputs and open loops wake me up early, as they try to find their place in the patterns of my brain.

For context, this week I read a paper (Ohlsson, 1992) that introduced what’s now known as representational change theory. And it is SO INTERESTING.

• Two types of problem-solving (insight vs. analytical), which are…get this…mutually exclusive. 🤯

• Three things that have to happen for insight to occur:

  • Elaboration (getting access to new information)

  • Constraint relaxation (releasing an assumption that something must or can’t be something known, something known as functional fixedness)

  • Re-encoding (re-organizing how the information and assumptions “fit together”)

While my previous “Hypnopompics” post (which is what I’ve decided to name these early-morning thoughts) was the product of a morning conversation with Claude AI, this one was all the notes I took in my Kindle Scribe in a (vain) attempt to capture them somewhere so maybe I could go back to sleep.

But then, on the train, I thought: why not ask you?

If you have thoughts, answers, or more questions about any of these, please share!

• Does starting the rationale-mapping process (which is what my ITBA process is all about), or starting any problem-solving process, with an open-ended question (“how” or “why”) activate constraint relaxation?

  • Is that also why appreciative inquiry (and its focus on question framing, not problem-framing) is effective?

  • Is the prime-factor-finding part of rationale mapping what “chunking” is doing?

• Is the rarity of true “insight” discoveries or paradigm shifts a product of functional fixedness?

  • Is that an inherent issue or risk in a purely inductive approach to research?

  • Is this why strategic thinking (as opposed to strategic planning or implementation) must be a divergent process?

• Is elaboration an explanation for why Julia Sloan saw so many strategic thinkers “cross-pollinating” concepts between their strategic questions at work and their totally unrelated avocations, like ballooning?

  • Does seeing how another field/area/practice/profession solves an apparently similar problem redirect enough attention to “break” fixedness?

  • Is elaboration similar to Piaget’s assimilation or accommodation? Or yes? Who has made that connection, if anyone?

• Piaget and Dewey were both before the “paradigm wars,” so what are they? Positivists? Post-positivists? What did they think they were? Did we apply “constructivist” after the fact?

  • To what extent does it complicate Kuhn’s take on incommensurability between disciplines?

• What would happen if “incommensurable” traditions shared the same ancestor? What would be the result? How would that be resolved? Could it be?

• Does transcendental reasoning automatically relax constraints, because it avoids dividends on particular or available or known solutions and onto properties necessary to the solution, instead?

• Is Halgren’s “transformative insight” redundant, or is Halgren somehow applying a separate scale to that? Does she tie to Hoggan’s (2016) metatheory? How?

• Does the if/then (conditional) formatting trigger the problem-solving condition studied by representational change theory? If so, why doesn’t it constrain the answers as appreciative inquiry says it should?

• There’s something about the “within range” (or whatever he calls it) from Ohlsson (1992)… Does it explain or inform why 17-point strategic plans so rarely get adopted or implemented successfully? Is it because people (literally) can’t “take it all in”?

  • How does that relate to what I think my ITBA/core case framework does? To Bruner? To the “given-new” contract?

• Side note: synonyms in the “real” world are not synonyms in academia—e.g., examine vs. investigate; explain vs. inform

• What are the implications of returning to the original (?) implication of the word “realize” —> to make real, or true?

  • Realization —> process of making things real?

  • Also: interesting tension between “real” and “true” — what’s the difference? Why? Real = general?

• Observation: one of the most common words people use in practice to refer to the aha moments I study (subject to my own confirmation bias and reticular activator system): “click.”

  • What might “click” suggest about the metaphor underneath, per Lakoff and Johnson (2003)?

• American Studies (and -Studies approaches in general): do they help people explore “semantic dark matter”?

And then it was time to walk the dogs. ;)