How do you come up with unpopular, unintuitive solutions in your job?

Question

In my field, I've noticed most brilliant solutions are those that challenge a well-established intuition about which things work or how things are. But most times it's hard to find such counter-intuitive ideas because we're already trapped in the mindset that finds these ideas bizarre.A good example is RAF airplanes during WWII: https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2010/09/counterintuitive-world/My question is: how do you find things that people seem to agree upon, and how do you challenge that? If you can also bring up examples, that would be great.

ggm · Accepted Answer

That WWII example is Operations-Research. The key point here is that the 'counter-intuitive' part has solid data science behind it. P.M.S. Blackett was a nobel class scientist. So I guess the key learning is: be formidably smart. It might also need to be said both Blackett and Dyson (I believe) bitterly reflected on their advice being misunderstood.