1. Offsites and scheduled brainstorms are ineffective, as the brain has time to prepare, and it becomes a routine procedure.
2. Analogies are brain’s shortcuts designed to avoid creative process.

The second point is the most interesting. Lazy by nature, human brain prefers to use analogies instead of starting a hardcore creative thinking session. Analogies are fast and convenient, the brain knows how to deal with them, and hence always tries to use them up before coming up with anything truly original.

Fortunately, the networks that govern both perception and imagination can be reprogrammed. By deploying your attention differently, the frontal cortex, which contains rules for decision making, can reconfigure neural networks so that you can see things that you didn’t see before. You need a novel stimulus — either a new piece of information or an unfamiliar environment – to jolt attentional systems awake. The more radical the change, the greater the likelihood of fresh insights.

The article (I haven’t read the book) then lists a few examples of innovative processes that happened outside of the usual environments, thus leading to striking discoveries.

It seems that software engineering, an occupation that is usually connected with creative spark among most observers, is most of the time an exercise of relying on analogies. When you’re in college, you go through data structures and algorithms course, which teaches the generally accepted ways of running a queue or generating a number of permutations from a set of numbers. Later on, in the field, we frequently refer to design patterns, frameworks or best practices to bring previously acquired analogies into the new project we’re working on.

Analogy usage is incentivized – most of the software engineers would expect higher pay for more years of experience, which implies either a better ability to project analogies onto existing project (senior engineers which code faster) or a wider exposure to various projects in the past (senior engineers who have architectural knowledge about a variety of projects).

There’s also the element of sheer luck of being at the right place at the right time that amounts to success – Bill Gates with access to computer programming resources and kits at an early age had a certain advantage over someone in Africa, who perhaps had the same business acumen, but did not have the resources readily accessible to become one of the world’s wealthiest businessmen. There’s an interview with Gladwell on CNN Money:

Bill Gates has this utterly extraordinary series of opportunities. When he’s 13, it’s 1969. He shows up at his private school in Seattle, and they have a computer room with a teletype machine that is hooked up to a mainframe downtown. Anyone who was playing on the teletype machine could do real-time programming. Ninety-nine percent of the universities in America in 1969 did not have that.