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!
Continue reading ‘“Dad you won’t believe what happened to me at school today?” A tale of father, son and SIT’
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Despite the innovative, inventive image I am accredited with (for no substantial reason), the mobile phone in my possession until two weeks ago was of one of the very first generations, and it certainly fulfilled my basic communications needs. However, during my last family trip to Ein Tamir (a water-filled spring tunnel in Nahal Kziv) I accidentally left my 
phone in my pocket and as I emerged from the water, soaked through, I found that the instrument had ceased to function. About an hour later, at home, I deconstructed the device and, using my daughter’s hair dryer (”utilization of existing resources”, or in SIT lingo – implementing the rule of Task Unification) I succeeded in making the phone functional again… with the exception of the display screen that could not be revived.
While my wife and daughter (clearly post-modern women as made obvious by their choice of mobile phones) began pressuring me to get rid of the device and replace it with one of a more advanced generation, I kept considering what could possibly be done with a screen-less yet functional mobile phone. The idea that flashed through my mind, spiced with a bit of black humor, was “Why not sell it to a blind person?”
But now a little more seriously… Any SIT New Product Development (NPD) workshop addressing mobile phones would inevitably, in a structured and systematic manner (by applying the Subtraction tool), reach the potential product: a mobile telephone for the blind. The end product would have no display screen (the subtracted component), but would have supporting functions appropriate specifically for a blind user. Continue reading ‘Do we really need inventive thinking tools?’
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Mind bogglers are problems in which solutions are simple and straightforward, but for some reason or other run counter to human intuition.
Today I present to you with two classic mind bogglers. Let’s see what we can learn from them.
The first one is a classic and I’m sure many of you actually know it:
Three travelers go into a hotel and are charged $30 for a room. They each contribute $10. That evening the hotel manager realizes that the men were overcharged. They should have got a group discount and paid $25. So he sends a bellhop up to the room to return $5. The three travelers however cannot equally split the $5, so they give the bellhop $2 as a tip and keep $3 which they split among themselves - $1 each.
Now each traveler has paid $9, for a total of $27. The bellhop has2$. So $29 is accounted for.
Where has the 30th dollar gone?
Continue reading ‘How do you put a giraffe in a refrigerator?’
Posted in Problem Solving categories |
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Many people would say that a problem is “a gap between a desired situation and the existing one”.
I don’t agree with this definition.
We would like life expectancy to be around 150 years (and come to think of it, why not even older?) The fact is that it currently isn’t 150 years, and yet we don’t really (at least not directly) label it as a problem.
So a better (and still not complete) definition of a problem would be, “a gap between a desired situation and an existing one that we have reason to believe we can eliminate”.
This is interesting: some people would regard a certain situation as a problem because they believe there may be a solution, while others wouldn’t see any problem because they can’t even envision a way to a solution.
Continue reading ‘What’s a problem?’
Posted in Problem Solving categories |
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(Dedicated to my friend Gili, one of the few who truly understand…)
Friday morning, 6:45. I am just about to leave for my weekly cycling. I push the ‘on’ button on my computer to check e-mail. The computer starts up, but a couple of seconds later, instead of making the normal sounds of the operating system booting, it shuts down. My senses sharpen, adrenaline’s pumping. Like a wild animal sensing a threat, I enter troubleshooting mode.
Wearing my thinking cap, equipped with some experience and healthy logic, I apply rule number 1: “Perhaps the problem is not really a problem – confirm.” Naturally, I try to turn the computer on again. The same thing happens: I press the button, the computer starts running and 2-3 seconds after it shuts down.
Continue reading ‘The better you understand the problem, The better the solution’
Posted in Problem Solving categories |
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A man walks into a store. He selects a hat priced at $7 and gives the salesman a $10 bill. There is no change in the till, so
the salesman takes the bill over to the neighbor to break it. He comes back, gives the buyer the hat and $3 change. The next day the neighbor comes in and tells the salesman that the $10 bill he broke is counterfeit. The salesman takes a look at the bill and sees it is indeed a fake. He apologizes and gives the neighbor a new, genuine $10 bill. The question is: how much has the salesman lost in this triple transaction (assuming, for simplicity’s sake, that the price of the hat was equal to its cost)?
Continue reading ‘State analysis (sometimes, the problem is too easy to be easily solved)’
Posted in Problem Solving categories |
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In this post I’d like to discuss an intersting “Mental Block” we all suffer from.
Let’s begin with a simple puzzle:
One of the king’s servants presents him with a bottle and says, “I have in this bottle a magic substance that can dissolve any other substance”. How did the king know immediately that his servant was lying?
The answer is very simple:
If it can dissolve anything, how come it doesn’t dissolve the bottle?!
This is a simple puzzle, and yet many of us need to think a while before we come up with the answer. Why is that?
Continue reading ‘Spot your blind spot’
Posted in Fixednesses categories |
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About a month ago, I gave a workshop in a Systems Engineering course at a large hi-tech company. The topic was:
creativity in problem solving. I started the class with an exercise. I presented a tender issued by the Ministry of Transport for the development of a portable instrument for measuring drivers’ response time. A strong correlation has been found between slow response time and presence of alcohol/drugs in the blood system. The instrument would be used when a police officer pulls over a driver suspected of driving under the influence of alcohol or drugs.
Continue reading ‘Simple but not simpler’
Posted in Problem Solving categories |
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