Creative Thinking - Ring Toy
"Imagination is the beginning of creation."
--- George Bernard Shaw
In the class of Principles of Management, we were given a Ring Toy puzzle to solve as a part of creative thinking exercise. At first we had no clue as to what was being expected of us and what is to be solved and how? We had no idea of the problem itself. We were just presented with the jumbled up Ring Toy and asked to do something out of it. We played with it for sometime, juggled with it in some way or the other in order to unravel the mystery hidden inside the Ring Toy.
The Ring Toy consisted of a wooden piece, two wooden circular pieces, two wooden square pieces, two balls on either side of the wooden piece. The space between the wooden piece was wide enough to let the circular and square pieces to pass through. Apart from that the balls and wooden pieces were entangled through the rope in such a way that the whole thing was appearing like a confused mess.
We applied various permutations and combinations and tried every bit and finally were able to untangle the square and rings apart. We used following steps to solve this riddle.
- Push the ring up above the slit in the toy.
- Hold the ring and take one of the hanging wooden blocks and pass it through the slit onto the other side of the toy.
- Pull the block which pushed onto the other side down, the ball for the same would be near the slit.
- Pull the ring down below the ball.
- Hold the ring up and pass it through the slit from the direction opposite to the side having the ball. The ring can be removed from the other side.
At this point I could only remember one very famous saying by Mr Winston Churchill :
"No idea is so outlandish that it should not be considered with a searching but at the same time steady eye".
What can we make out of this activity with regards the Management Concepts
A manager more often than not is encountered with such problems in his professional life which are so convoluted that far from solving it for a solution, he needs to understand the problem first or maybe problems. He is often caught up in such situations where he is unsure of what to do, how to do, and where to proceed at the first place. There would be times when such problems would be thrown up at him and he would be expected to give the solution. He needs to apply his past experiences, his present situation and context and creativity in knowing the problem at hand. He needs to be a lateral thinker and not just go by the books.
Once the problem or rather problems are evident, he has to find the solution systematically, dealing with the problems one by one. Even if he is not able to proceed and finds himself in a difficult situation where he is not able to understand the problem, he needs to go in some direction at least doing something to take him to the problem at hand.
One must not give up easily, keep on trying, apply one's prior experience, be creative, understand present context and go ahead with the problem at hand.
My Experience
Although I was not a manager in my company, I would like to cite an example how I can relate myself with the case at hand.
I was working with TCS as a Business Analyst, I was involved with the business analysis process with the Citigroup client. It was a banking application which we were working upon. We would sometimes get calls/mails from the client for some business requirements to be implemented into the application. Client had no clear idea of what he exactly wants. Most often than not we were forced to take decisions on our own and try to interpret what functionality clients actually wants or requires as a part of his business. Sometimes we were right, sometimes wrong, but yes we had to apply our past knowledge and creativity to understand as to what business requirements client actually want us to implement. One part of the problem solving was to understand the problem at first before even having to find the solution for that problem.
Ankit Tyagi
roll number - 224
IM-19 section A
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