Results tagged “problemsolving”

Aza Raskin recounts the story of Henry Kremer and the competition for the first plane powered by human and how Paul MacCready approached it in a much different way than everyone else:

A decade went by. Dozens of teams tried and failed to build an airplane that could meet the requirements. It looked impossible. Another decade threatened to go by before our hero, MacCready, decided to get involved. He looked at the problem, how the existing solutions failed, and how people iterated their airplanes. He came to the startling realization that people were solving the wrong problem. "The problem is," he said, "that we don't understand the problem."

The problem was the problem. Paul realized that what we needed to be solved was not, in fact, human powered flight. That was a red-herring. The problem was the process itself, and along with it the blind pursuit of a goal without a deeper understanding how to tackle deeply difficult challenges. He came up with a new problem that he set out to solve: how can you build a plane that could be rebuilt in hours not months. And he did. He built a plane with Mylar, aluminum tubing, and wire.

I never knew this, but the term "thinking outside the box" came from the puzzle below (which I did years ago). The goal is to connect all nine dots with just 4 straight lines:

Spoiler alert: you have to think outside the box to solve this.

via PysBlog: The Creative Power of Thinking Outside Yourself