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I recently downloaded a great little ebook from Nigel Collin’s website. It’s a collection of 21 articles from Colin’s Weekly Bits -The Early Years.

 One of the first articles suggests setting up an Idea Board in a common space either at work, or at home. Then you write up a problem and invite others to contribute to the solution. I’m going to give this a try.

Colin makes the point, and I totally agree, that this is a great tool to foster creativity and  collaboration in an organisation. The phenomenon of blogging, the likes of twitter, other online networks, and commenting in general on the “net” have set the expectation that it’s quite ok to anonymously or publicly contribute. Of course it helps if you have something of value to say.

So perhaps the time is good for this very simple and low tech idea to produce some really creative outcomes.

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Have you ever needed a quick and tangible way to illustrate that there may be more than one solution to a problem? This might just be the example you need.

Start with three squares of paper. The Problem: each square of paper needs to be divided into 4 parts. The goal is for each part to be equal. So, after you have folded the paper each section of the paper will be the same size, same shape, and same volume as the other 3 parts.

The illustration above shows 3 solutions, each following the rules but each having a very different outcome. One is a square, another a triangle, the third a rectangle.

This excercise is useful for two reasons. First, it helps an individual or a group physically experience an abstract concept; the concept being that there can be more than one acceptable solution to a problem.

Secondly, This example has a very good problem statement so it’s a great way to set up people’s thinking about defining problems before they tackle solutions.

I’ll cover problem statements in a the next post.

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