One of your boastful friends makes a bet with you that he can tell you in no time at all exactly how many leaves there are 
on a tree at any given moment. Of course you agree to the bet - it seems like the quickest way to earn a free meal in your favorite Italian restaurant. As soon as you’ve made the bet, you figure out the catch: how the hell can you prove him wrong?
I’ll give you a few minutes…
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… Did you come up with something?
Let’s face it, in most of our daily tasks we don’t need to be creative. All we need is to retrieve from memory ready-made templates and the problem is gone. 
There are however situations in life or work when the known routines don’t seem to work.
Sometimes we need to do something that simply seems impossible - we need to double the throughput of a production line within two weeks after several years in which all we were trying to do and managed to do was to increase the production by no more than 20 percent. (In one of my consulting projects we did exactly that…).
Often a problem seems very simple, but after several attempts to solve it, it turns out that the routine methods fail.
On yet other occasions, we do have a working solution, but for some reason we are not satisfied with it. We just don’t seem to find a better one.
In all these situations SIT can help us find a simple solution that for some good reason our brain could not produce.
SIT is based on the simple observation that many creative solutions in different domains fall into a relatively small number of distinctive categories. If we know these categories, we can use them to find new solutions.
“Out of the box” solutions, it is claimed, fall into their own boxes.
You probably know the little riddle about the dog, the carrot and the rabbit that need to be transported to the other side of the river. The problem is that their owner can take only one of them on each trip across the river (it was a very big carrot! 
)
When the dog and rabbit are left unattended, the dog devours the rabbit. And when the carrot and the rabbit are left unattended, the rabbit eats the carrot.
How can the rabbit, the dog and the carrot be transferred safely to the bank on the other side of the river?
If you haven’t heard this one, take a few moments to try solving it before you read on.
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The solution is to take the rabbit on the first trip, go back and take the carrot. Then take the rabbit BACK to the original bank, leave it there and take the dog. On the last trip, the rabbit is taken to the other bank and the owner can continue his journey with all three.
A story based on a true case
Itai, head of the final quality control process, made sure that the testing system was properly adjusted. He checked the temperature guage of the huge cooling cell in which the unit had been tested overnight, and nodded to himself satisfactorily - everything was ready for the final testing procedure, the last stage before shipping the product to the customer.
It took only a few seconds for Itai to realize that something was wrong. The rotating sound of the pistons didn’t sound quite right. Instead of a rythmic ticking, he could hear a screeching sound every now and then. Even before he had the chance to decide what to do about it, the system came to a screeching halt and the words “FAIL” flickered in bold red letters across the test screen.
An hour later a similar malfunction occurred in another system… Pandora’s box had been opened!
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When I started writing for this blog one of my goals was to show that SIT principles are universal and can actually be found everywhere - in brilliant solutions to problems of all kinds, in stories, movies, scientific theories and in…
… jokes.
Humor and creativity go hand in hand, so it stands to reason that we’ll find SIT principles in jokes (the good ones, at least).
Many people believe that analyzing jokes actually kills them, so if you’re one of those, I’m about to kill one for you…
I’d like to thank Don Young for sending in this story a few years back.
So here it is:
A wealthy man decided to go on a safari in Africa. He takes his faithful pet dog along for company. One day the dog starts chasing butterflies, and before long he discovers that he’s lost. So, wandering about he notices a leopard heading rapidly in his direction with the obvious intention of having lunch.
Continue reading ‘Killing a joke softly with SIT (with apologies to Shirley Bassey)’
It’s a sad but true fact that battles and wars stretch man’s creativity to the limit.
The Nazi steel industry needed about 8 tons of water to produce one ton of steel.
Most of the water was taken from three artificial lakes that were created by massive dams. The allies knew that by demolishing these dams they could create a bottleneck in the Nazis’ war machine.
But the dams were massive structures (one was 40 meters wide at the base, 8 at the top, and 50 meters high). A 30-ton bomb would be needed to create significant damage to the dams.
Unless…
Continue reading ‘Creative thinking in times of war: a part of Military Basic Training?!’
The following story shows how Inventive Thinking can help us to negotiate and get out of tricky situations.
A few years ago I took a ride to an SIT workshop with one of my colleagues (he was driving). On the way, we stopped to drop off his computer that needed fixing. We parked near the entrance of the shop and started marching towards the entrance.
“I wouldn’t park there if I were you,” said the doorman, “you’re likely to get parked in”. We were in a hurry, so we answered, ‘It’ll be OK,’ even though we had a nagging suspicion that it wouldn’t be. Anyway, when we came out of the building, our suspicions were confirmed - a truck had parked us in, and the driver was very busy unloading.
Those of you who have kids in school have experienced the following phenomena. You want your kids to tell you about their day when they come home from school, but they have completely different intentions. When you ask how their day was, they usually say, ‘It was OK’ and go back to staring at the TV.
I, too, have been faced with this situation. I’ve often felt frustrated that I don’t share a big enough part of my son’s experiences throughout his day. One day, while we were eating a meal at Macdonald’s and my son was trying to put the toy together that he got from the kids meal, I decided to try my luck again and ask how his day at school had been. As predicted, I got the usual, ‘It was OK’ answer.
But this time I was determined not to give up. I’m often asked if SIT can be used to solve day-to-day problems or family issues, and my reply is always a confident yes. Here was an opportunity for me to put my money where my mouth is!
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