The Right Answer
Peter Senge, a systems thinker and creative thinker on many topics, has said that children enter the educational system as question marks and exit as periods, in the process learning to be selective about where to focus, reflecting the rule of order. And one of the rules of order is to find the right answer.
People tend to see what they are looking for, so if you are asked to identify blue items, you will find them everywhere. Buy a new car and it will seem that everyone is driving one in the same color. We look for right answers and we find what we are looking for, so it is important to learn how to set and reset your mental valleys because what you look for will determine what you find.
An example from Von Oech:
An English teacher puts a small chalk dot on the blackboard and asks her junior class what it is. After a few seconds, someone correctly answers " a chalk dot," then there is silence. The teacher tells the class that the same exercise earlier in the day from kindergartners generated much more imaginative answers: a birds eye, the top of an acorn, the center of a flower, a pebble, a bug, a star, a grain of sand . . . . the older students had learned how to find the right answer and lost the curiousity and imagination to look for more than one. Yet in our chaotic and complex world of healthcare, there is seldom one right answer.
More Creativity Exercises
Take a look at another of Von Oech's visual tests and select the one firgure that is different from all the others.
Did you choose B? You're right, the only figure with only straight lines.
Did you choose C? Right again, uniquely asymmetrial.
What about A with no points? Or D with both straight and curved lines? Or E, with a projection of non-Euclidean into Euclidian space.
In this example, all the answers are right depending on your perspective.
The answers you get depend on the questions you ask. Reframing -- a technique presented in the LRC toolkit -- helps you to think more effectively, to consider different points of view, collect a diversity of ideas and enrich our options with ideas and inputs we might not think about right first.
Why settle for the easy answer when their might be a better one?
Oh, and the answers to the roman numeral 9 challenge -- add one line to change IX to 6?
Put a horizonal line through the center of the figure, turn it upside down and use a paper to cover the bottom half. OR
Put an "S" in front of the IX OR
Add the numeral '6' after the IX
Rember that there is seldom a "right" answer and there are many solutions to every challenge. . .
