This chapter addresses how cognitive flexibility enables an individual to respond adaptively to new situations and respond appropriately to any situation. Interrupting automaticity avoids being trapped in mindsets that foreclose generating new options; avoiding reductive bias reduces the tendency to oversimplify and turn dynamic processes into fixed objects and make complex interactions linear; avoiding functional fixedness reduces the tendency to apply the same solution to different situations; and cognitive connectivity opens up to new approaches in which mental models can be transformed, schemata reorganized, and cognitive bridges built between previous expertise and new situations. This kind of cognitive flexibility enables individuals to respond and adapt to the new situation into which they are moving. This is discussed in light of the retrospective interviews with twenty-four elite performers in three domains (business, sports, and music) who successfully and repeatedly transitioned to higher positions within their field.

Research on creative problem solving has shown that the generation of new ideas and solutions can be impeded by existing ideas and solutions. This phenomenon, known as mental fixation, has been observed in many problem-solving contexts, including the remote associates test (RAT). In the RAT, participants are presented with three cue words and are asked to come up with a fourth word related to each of the cue words. The task can be made more difficult by exposing participants to unhelpful associates that cause mental fixation before they attempt to generate the fourth word. The current chapter reviews research on the mechanisms by which people overcome the effects of mental fixation, focusing on research using the RAT, and on the potential roles of forgetting and inhibition. The results suggest that, at least under certain conditions, the ability to forget, inhibit retrieval, or stop a response can help people overcome mental fixation and thus lead to the experience of creative insight.