Choosing a Good Puzzling Situation Copy
“Insanity is doing the same things over and over and hoping for a different result.” Albert Einstein
Since I first started my consultancy, Einstein’s quote has been at the core of everything I do. It is also the central theme for Thinking In & Out of the Box. For us to want to think out of the box, we will need to have something that is driving us a little insane. An area we want different results, but where we are not sure what to change.
I have found the In & Out of the Box Experience to be at its most effective when participants have a topic to focus on for which they are not currently able to get satisfactory results. We refer to these as “puzzling situations,” and they usually come in two forms.
- An issue, problem or a challenge which we are unable to overcome.
- An opportunity, goal or objective which we are unable to achieve.
Our image for a puzzling situation has three components. First we use a target to represent the desire to achieve a goal. This is the solution to overcoming a challenging issue or achieving an energizing opportunity. The heart in the middle of the heart represents our personal connection to the end result. This image is made out of puzzle pieces, with some of them missing, representing that we are still uncertain of how to achieve the goal.
Starting with a good focus area is an important first step. If the box represents the boundaries of our thinking, it is good to explore the impact of the box in an arena where those boundaries are not serving us.
For example, in the nine dot puzzle, you are only allowed four lines to connect all the dots. That becomes a puzzling situation pretty quick and requires us to think out of the box. If on the other hand, you were given the same puzzle, but allowed five lines, it wouldn’t be much of a puzzle, and would not require much creative thinking to solve it.
There is no limit to the scope of issues that can be addressed with the box. Basically, any area in your life or business that you are not satisfied with your current results is probably a good one.
To make it easy, we just fill in the blank on this sentence:
How does the box effect my/our ability to _______________?
Some of the more common topics raised in the recent past have been:
At the organizational level: How does the box effect our ability to…
- achieve our financial targets?
- lead a more innovative culture?
- to become market leaders?
- explore new revenue generating sources?
- implement a new company wide initiative?
- improve our sales effectiveness?
At the individual level: How does my box effect my ability to…
- find work life balance?
- move from top performing employee to top performing manager?
- improve my relationship with my family?
- be a better mentor for my key employees?
- get the job I want?
The most important thing is to have a topic that is important to the person putting the box on their head. In the early days of learning about how to use the box I was hired by an HR Director to use the box around the topic of, “How does the box impact our ability to live out of the company Vision, Mission and Values?” What I found was that no on in the training (other than the HR Director) really cared about that topic. As such, when we went through the following exercises, people didn’t really have much connection to the exercises.
So what about you? What puzzling situation are you facing?
By clarifying an example now, you may benefit more from the rest of the book by mentally inserting this topic into the various exercises we describe.
With our focus area defined and agreed, we can start the process of creating the box, a physical task that leads to many insights.