Recently, a friend posted 1 + 1 = 1 on Facebook, which caused a flurry of replies to her “silly” post. I replied with a number of different answers to 1+1, as I have always considered the Philosophy of One to be a litmus test of how someone looks at the world. It was fun…

Thinking outside the box is more than just a business cliché. It means approaching problems in new, innovative ways; conceptualizing problems differently; and understanding your position in relation to any particular situation in a way you’d never thought of before. Ironically, its a cliché that means to think of clichéd situations in ways that aren’t…

Don’t depend on answers in uncertain times We live in a world that seems endlessly hungry for answers: preferably quick, unambiguous, definitive, once-and-for-all, simple answers. We want to be told what to do, how to solve our problems, how to live our lives to best effect. At work, bosses grind out the old chestnut, “Don’t bring…

One of the problems with our education system is that it teaches that for most questions there is one correct answer. Examinations with multiple choice questions force the student to try to select the right answer and avoid the wrong ones. So when our students leave school they are steeped in a system that says…

Two prisoners dug a tunnel from their cell 80 feet to escape from prison. Where did they hide the dirt? This is one of the examples used by Roni Horowitz of the consultancy group SIT to show the advantages of a method called Systematic Inventive Thinking (SIT). The answer is that…

Let’s say you are wrestling with a tough issue – maybe at work, at home, with your children or in your social life. You have been stuck for a while and you can’t seem to make a breakthrough. You want to come up with some really creative ideas. What can you do? Here are ten…

A few months ago, I wrote about Solutions for 7 Annoying Modern Day Problems. With modern life comes convenience, but also new problems. Here are 10 more solutions for 10 more annoying problems. 1. Need a Reliable Contractor? Head on over to…

So you’ve checked your clock for the third time in the last ten minutes. It just past two in the morning and you have to get up at seven to get to work. You’ve tried everything to get to sleep but something between life stresses and that fourth cup of coffee you had…

Modern life has been made easier with technology, but for every advancement there is a corresponding increase in complexity that seems to outweigh those benefits. When modern day problems occur, we usually don’t have the time or energy to figure out how to solve them. So here is a reference on how to handle some…

An elegant illustration of demostrasting a complex program solving process: Go to the link below, rollovers with your mouse on different areas of the diagram to see different explanation of the process – Measure, Model, Understand, Predict/Decide/Plan, Communication, and Act. The Art of Complex Problem Solving