#19: Thinking Outside the Locks
Overview: |
After viewing examples of divergent thinking, participants will work on riddles that help increase “outside-the-box” thinking. |
Objective: |
To provide participants with a structure for thinking in a non-linear fashion. |
Supplies: |
• Transparency #19-1 |
Time: |
20 minutes |
Advance |
Download Transparency #19-1. Make copies of the worksheet. Arrange seating, if possible, so table groups of five or six can work together. |
Participants/ |
This exercise accommodates any number of participants. It can be used at any time during the instructional day, for it begins with humor and then proceeds to the challenges that demand divergent thinking. If used as an introductory exercise, you can stress how both divergent and convergent thinking are required for the kinds of problems participants will face in relation to the training they are now receiving. |
Introduction to Concept:
Unimaginative thinkers put a lock on their thinking by taking everything literally. They trap themselves inside the confines of typical, traditional thinking and hesitate to go beyond the known or the obvious. By contrast, those who are mental escape artists unlock the “mindcuffs” that shackle our imaginations the way handcuffs shackle our wrists.
To learn more about divergent thinking, you need only study the responses of children. Asked, for example, how one could get to heaven, most adults would answer in the same way: “By doing good deeds.” Not so, children. Their responses, clearly, are not confined to the box labeled “Convergent Thinking.” [Show Transparency #19-1.]
Procedure:
1. After showing the transparency, explain that one way to promote creative thinking is to answer and analyze riddles.
2. Divide the class into groups of five or six and distribute the worksheet.
3. After ten minutes or so, ask a volunteer to share his or her group’s answers. (Supply the actual answer, if their answers differ. Note that participants’ answers may be even better than the actual answers.) The riddle answers are:
1) A lot of customers
2) March 4th
3) It is matchless
4) I would take the words right out of his mouth
5) About 25 seconds
6) Honesty
7) A hot, cross bunny
8) Wrinkles
9) With hare spray
10) Tie a knot in his tail
11) Someone who laughs his head off
12) By playing the flute while surrounded by six cobras, one of which is deaf
4. Take the team through the process of reaching creative responses, using the riddles as a source of explanation. The first step is to discard the obvious, if it even comes into your mind. So, in #1, “If a farmer sold 500 bushels of corn for a dollar a bushel, what would he or she get?” The obvious answer is $500. The divergent answer, the more creative one, does not get to the “correct” answer, which is based on a mathematical calculation. Instead, the divergent answer is based upon the reality of the situation: If you could buy a bushel of corn for a mere dollar, you would probably tell all your friends to visit that farmer!
In other cases, the answer depends on a double entendre or double meaning. For example, March 4 (Question #2) is a date, but it is also a command to proceed (“March forth”). Double entendres are also plays on words. Such is the case with #3, which asks what makes an empty match box superior to all others. It is “matchless,” of course.
Other divergent answers depend on a familiarity with common phrases. We find this in the fourth question about the dog eating a book: “I would take the words right out of his mouth.” Others, like the one about the elephant, depend on your ability to imagine and deal with absurdity.
Understanding what constitutes creative thought helps us to create it in future circumstances.
1. To encourage further divergent thinking, have participants prepare a long list of popular titles or phrases, such as the hit song, “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” or Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. Then ask participants to put creative twists on phrases that business people could use in their advertisements. For example, the first title could be used by a bank seeking more women customers: “Girls Just Wanna Have Funds.” A sports equipment enterprise might call the business “The Merchant of Tennis.”
2. Divide the class into pairs. Hand each an ordinary object—pencil, staple, paper clip, pipe cleaner, facial tissue, etc. Allocate five minutes and have the teams think of as many uses as possible for the object they have received.
Workplace Connections:
1. Encourage participants to encourage their managers to build in at least five minutes a week for collective brainstorming about work-related problems.
2. Promote the use of “what-could-we-use-this-for” thinking on surpluses that abound in the workplace. For example, “Other than potpourri and sachet bags, how would we re-use the flowers that cover secretaries’ desks during Secretaries’ Week?”
Questions for Further Consideration:
1. The refusal to “adapt or die” is widely regarded as a prescription for organizational suicide. If you headed your organization, what would you do to discourage employees from clinging to the old when they should be embracing the new?
2. How do idea-pioneers fight for the survival of their ideas?
3. If you were to select a benchmarking partner, one whom you feel could teach you about innovative practices, what company or organization would you choose?
4. Idea-encouragers tell us to seek challenges if we want to be simultaneously critical and creative in our thinking. What in your immediate environment can be improved?
How do you get to heaven?
You go to hell and turn right.
On a trampoline.
By getting the bad spanked out of you.
You fly. It takes three days to get there . . . nonstop.
First you turn into a spirit. From there, it’s easy.
You give God a hug. But he’s invisible so you fall right through him and land in heaven.
Somebody drives you there in a big black limousine.
Be good and be buried.
Directions: As a group, try to figure out non-obvious answers to these riddles.
1. If a farmer sold 500 bushels of corn for a dollar a bushel, what would he or she get?
Answer: 
2. What day of the year is a command to move forward?
Answer:
3. Why is an empty match box superior to all others?
Answer:
4. What would you do if you found a dog eating your book?
Answer:
5. What’s the difference between kissing your sister and kissing your sweetheart?
Answer:
6. What is the biggest handicap in gold?
Answer:
7. What do you get when you pour hot water down a rabbit hole?
Answer:
8. What headlines do people like least?
Answer:
9. What is the best way to keep a rabbit in its place?
Answer:
10. How do you keep an elephant from going through the eye of a needle?
Answer:
11. What goes “ha-ha-ha-plop”?
Answer:
12. How do you play Russian roulette in India?